Racial Profiling: The Myth that Never Dies
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Jack Dunphy, National Review Online, Oct. 27, 2008
More than seven years ago, Heather Mac Donald wrote “The Myth of Racial Profiling“ for the Manhattan Institute’s quarterly, City Journal. “The anti-profiling crusade,” Mac Donald wrote, “thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime.” This ignorance persists, and last week saw the arrival of yet another shining example of it. But, unlike the bleating from such charlatans as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, this latest bit of ignorance comes cloaked in the legitimizing finery of Ivy League science.
Last Monday, the ACLU of Southern California released a report titled “A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department,” by Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, and Jonathan Borowsky, formerly a research assistant at Yale Law School and currently a student at Harvard Law School. The study examined data collected during pedestrian and vehicle stops made by LAPD officers from July 2003 to June 2004. “We find prima facie evidence,” write Ayres and Borowsky, “that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.” Among their more detailed conclusions are these:
* Per 10,000 residents, the black stop rate is 3,400 stops higher than the white stop rate, and the Hispanic stop rate is almost 360 stops higher.
* Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 127% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 43% more likely to be frisked.
* Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 76% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 16% more likely to be searched.
* Relative to stopped whites, stopped blacks are 29% more likely and stopped Hispanics are 32% more likely to be arrested.
Damning stuff, says the ACLU, which commissioned the study. In an accompanying letter to the Los Angeles police commission, ACLU staff attorney Peter Bibring writes that “Prof. Ayres’s report ends debate about the existence of the problem and validates the experience in communities of color of police interactions attributable to ‘driving while black’ or ‘driving while brown.’”
Rubbish.
{snip}
David Klinger is an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, and the author of Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force. He is himself a former police officer, having served with the LAPD and the Redmond, Wash. police department. But he is no shill for cops: he has testified as an expert witness both for and against police officers in civil cases arising from use-of-force incidents.
Klinger expressed a number of reservations on the Ayres report, beginning with its reliance on population figures in calculating what it labels as excessive stops, searches, and arrests of blacks and Hispanics in Los Angeles. In an e-mail to me, Klinger wrote that Ayres’s use of the racial and/or ethnic composition of a given area as expressed in census data is not sound. The key question is not who lives in a given area, says Klinger, but rather who is actually present in the area and interacting with the police.
For example, the Ayres report identifies two LAPD patrol divisions (out of eighteen) where the “stop rate” for blacks actually exceeded the number of blacks living in those areas. These disparities are easily explained, yet the report makes only a passing effort at doing so. “Residents can be stopped more than once,” write Ayres and Borowsky, “and non-residents who travel into a division can also be stopped.”
{snip}
The biggest problem with the Ayres report, says Klinger, is that it presents no ethnic- or race-based crime information, i.e. the amount of crime actually committed by blacks and Hispanics. “Ayres admits this is a liability,” said Klinger in his e-mail to me, “but downplays it and uses ‘indirect benchmarks’ (last paragraph of page 27) to try to overcome this problem. I find this practice quite wanting.” Klinger went on to say that Ayres and Borowsky were “speaking beyond the data” in that they did not include in their analysis a critical variable that even they admit must be taken into account in order to draw valid conclusions.
Though LAPD Chief William Bratton was critical of the Ayres report, he has as yet failed to disclose the information Klinger found lacking, information that is readily available and would surely refute the report’s bottom line, to wit, that blacks in Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, commit crimes at a far greater rate than do whites, and are therefore subjected to a greater level of attention from police officers on patrol. If one accepts the murder rate as a benchmark for measuring violent crime, the racial disparities are indeed striking. In 2007, the LAPD investigated 394 murders. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Los Angeles is 9.6 percent black, yet of those 394 murder victims, 134, or 34 percent, were black. And of the 354 identified murder suspects, 129 (36 percent) were black. The number of Hispanic murder victims and suspects roughly mirror the overall Hispanic population in Los Angeles. Hispanics make up 49 percent of the city’s population, and last year 54 percent of its murder victims and 55 percent of its murder suspects were also Hispanic. (Whites are about 29 percent of L.A.’s population, but in 2007 they made up just 8 percent of its murder victims and 7 percent of its known murder suspects. The nationwide murder figures reflect a similar racial disparity, as revealed here.)
{snip}
(Posted on October 29, 2008)
Comments
Wasn’t there a TV show called ‘the profiler’? It’s all good, and even becomes entertainment, as long as it’s profiling whites.
Posted by at 6:23 PM on October 29
Here is MacDoanlds article:
The Myth of Racial Profiling
Heather Mac Donald
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_the_myth.html
Here am article from the New York Times which reports on the study which shows black are more likely to be stopped by the police because black are more likely be found speeding:
Study Suggests Racial Gap In Speeding In New Jersey
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E0DF1138F932A15750C0A9649C8B63
“The study involved photographing tens of thousands of drivers on the turnpike last spring while clocking speed with a radar gun. It found that black drivers sped much more than other drivers, according to three people who have reviewed the unreleased report. The racial gap was far wider than officials had expected and, in the politically charged controversies over profiling, the data could be used by defenders of the state police to argue that one reason black drivers are stopped more often than whites is that they are more likely to speed.”
Note how the racial gap in speeding was “far wider than officials expected”.
The fact is blacks are more likely to be found speeding and this fact flies in the face of what black apologist and black excuse makers want us to believe.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 7:59 PM on October 29
““The anti-profiling crusade,” Mac Donald wrote, “thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime.””
Exactly. Let’s say your a cop. Who is more likely to be a criminal, who’s more likely to be carrying an illegal firearm, be in a gang, be dealing drugs, a little old white/asian lady or a young black/hispanic male???? It’s a cop’s job to fight crime and young black/hispanic males cause far more crime then old white/asian ladies. Cops have every right to be more suspicious of young black/latino males.
Posted by kc at 9:24 PM on October 29
This is a shocking example of police profiling. Just because blacks commit crimes at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined is no reason to stop and arrest them, even if they’re actually caught in the act of committing a crime.
Police should stop and detain only roughly 15% of blacks actually caught in the commission of a crime. And of course if they’re caught in the act of committing a crime against a white or Hispanic they should not be apprehended at all.
Anything less than the full implementation of such a policy would be unjust.
Posted by JT at 9:32 PM on October 29
David Klinger is an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, and the author of Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force. He is himself a former police officer, having served with the LAPD and the Redmond, Wash. police department.
I read that book, after one of its controversial theses was profiled here in the local St. Louis MSM. The occasion was that a young black thug murdered a rookie black cop no more than a few years older than himself on the north side. The book’s thesis was that the cops that join a police department with young, starry-eyed arrogance that they want to “make a difference” (as Officer Norvelle Brown was) are far more likely to be murdered in the line of duty than the stereotypical “bad a**es” on the force. The reason is obvious — black thugs interpret the cop that “wants to make a difference” as weak and thus a target.
I commented on this book more than a year ago:
http://countenance.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/youthful-arrogance/
Posted by Question Diversity at 9:41 PM on October 29
So-called “racial profiling” is a critical component of the mythology of modern black America. It is the universal explanation for why blacks are involved - in one way or the other - with the police at such disproportionate rates compared to whites, etc. It is the one and only way they can “explain” this high level of interplay, without having to concede the truth - which is simply that black behavior, or rather misbehavior actually explains it all.
Posted by HH at 10:46 PM on October 29
Perhaps if the “Blacks” would behave themselves the cops could put their time to better use, like catching all of the mythical “White racists” who keep prowling the streets of Los Angeles looking for “Blacks”.
Ronald
Posted by Ronald at 10:46 PM on October 29
Males are far more ruthlessly profiled by law enforcement around the worldj, for good reason. No one raises a stink about it because males don’t form a group beyond the hypothetical, no one “champions” them, and there’s no money in it.
Posted by Svigor at 12:02 AM on October 30
I have often wondered how many times the police officer knows the ethnicity of the driver before they pull them over. I don’t know about other people but I personally cannot judge possible race of the driver based on driving patterns, colour of the vehicle, quality of the vehicle, etc.
To say that police target minorities seems to be a stretch of the imagination as they target bad drivers. Sometimes they will target types of cars, for example police here are statistically less likely to pull over someone in a Mercedes-Benz than say a Honda Civic Hatchback because people who are driving a Honda Civic are younger and less experienced and thus more likely to be the cause of a road accident, where as the Mercedes-Benz driver is most likely to be older and more experienced and less likely to be the cause of an accident.
By targeting a certain thing that is perfectly PC they may be inadvertently targeting a minority of drivers, possibly an ethnic minority.
Posted by A. Windaus at 2:24 AM on October 30
“the one and only way they can “explain” this high level of interplay (racial profiling), without having to concede the truth - which is simply that black behavior, or rather misbehavior actually explains it all.”
‘Misbehavior’ does not entirely explain ‘high level interaction’ with police, being that whites who commit crimes are more likely to actually be caught.
Posted by at 3:52 AM on October 30
If Blacks are many times more likely to commit or be guilty of criminal acts, why shouldn’t we have racial profiling as a viable police tool? If a White lady were mugged by a young Black punk for her handbag… DESCRIBED the perp to the police… are the police really supposed to check one White, one Hispanic, one Asiatic… for each Black they stop to interrogate? Blacks, in their constant effort to find racism lurking under every rock, in every nook and cranny, are turning political correctness into the Theater of the Absurd. Not, mind you, they collectively have enough intelligence to grasp that.
Posted by Fed Up at 8:07 AM on October 30
“that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.”
Perhaps “over responsible for crime” should have been included?
Posted by Skip at 8:08 AM on October 30
What we need right now is to again pass around the Color of Crime to all the talk show hosts along with our own written explanation that racial profiling wouldn’tbe necessary if the black community condemned their criminal element more, because, as it is, they don’t criticize the high amount of black crime, they instead complain about the number of black criminals who are in prison, jail, or on parole.
It’s very difficult trying to live beside people of another race without incurring a lot of tension, but it’s absolutely impossible when one side is so stupid they can’t understand even basic, fundemental issues.
Posted by Robert Kelly at 9:57 AM on October 30
The few whites remaining simply don’t commit many crimes. LAUSD non-hispanic whites are only 9% of the public school enrollment now. When there are no whites left here whatsoever in material numbers in a generation or two will it be racist to arrest hispanic and black people when they commit crimes? It’s ridiculous.
Posted by Unemployed WASP at 1:42 PM on October 30
“I have often wondered how many times the police officer knows the ethnicity of the driver before they pull them over. I don’t know about other people but I personally cannot judge possible race of the driver based on driving patterns, colour of the vehicle, quality of the vehicle, etc…
Posted by A. Windaus at 2:24 AM on October 30”
Try this: Drive on a freeway at 2:00 am, then see if you can guess the race of the driver of a car 100 yards ahead of you.
I once stopped a black guy in an orange Porsche 914 for doing 85 mph in a 65 mph zone, and 30 minutes later, here comes the same doofus in the opposite direction, again doing 85 in a 65 zone.
Posted by Officer Friendly at 12:56 AM on October 31
Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be criminals than whites. Prison numbers in every state confirm that fact. Not all people are equal, the less intelligent, do poorly in schools and drop out. They blame society, they blame the gub’mint, anyone but their parents and themselves for having poor role models, and weak examples of personal accountability. They turn their hostility against successful whites, and work the blame game, for not having the same opportunities. Lies. Lazy people want an easy life, and democratic politicians gave them that, in return for their vote. The Have-nots, and the do-nots, are where democratic politicians want them, broke, no hope, and angry. Assuring them to be democratic voters for life. That is how they destroyed Buffalo New York. The city is one big slum now.
Posted by Oscar at 10:50 PM on November 1
Variables not mentioned in the study are, for instance, how often are these stops made at night? At night, it’s obvious that a stop can onlt be made based on how the subject is driving, since it is pretty hard to “profile by color” in the dark.
I know cops in SoCal, they’ve all told me to the effect that “pick a car in south central, any car. There will ALWAYS be dope, or guns, or some other evidence of criminal activity - ALWAYS.
This kind of profiling just lends itself to good police work; catching people breaking the law.
Posted by Superman at 10:14 AM on November 2