by Nicole Brusco | Racial profiling ain’t no thang!
“Racial Profiling: Here and Now,” held on April 14, was a discussion about the current state of racial profiling and featured three panelists: Professor Frederick Schauer of Harvard University, Boston City Councilman Felix Arroyo, and King Downing Jr. of the ACLU. This panel, sponsored by UCCPS and Hillel, served no purpose other than to vilify whites and to make the audience feel victimized.
The panelists did not address factual evidence for or against racial profiling, using only anecdotes to support their claims. Schauer spoke about the roots of the controversy and illustrated his arguments with analogies to dog attacks and so-called “canine racism,” saying, “Punish deeds, not breeds!” Arroyo melodramatically cited his son’s experiences as his own knowledge of racial profiling cases, but he did cite one statistic of the percentage of speeding tickets written in Boston. Black and Latino males are issued 68% of tickets, while less than 50% are issued to white females. This statistic is clearly meaningless; it is not correlated to the actual incidences of speeding among different races and contains several variables.
The vital question in this debate is whether or not racial profiling is an effective police practice based on disproportionate minority crime rates or if it is caused by police racism. The panelists denied the existence of higher minority crime rates in order to assert that a higher stop rate is proof of discriminatory policing.
Officers stop citizens based on their past experiences and split-second judgments. In 1998, white males ages 14-24 perpetrated 19.3% of the total crime in the US and comprised 6.1% of the population. In the same year, black males of the same age committed 26.1% of crimes but comprised only 1.1% of the population. If minorities commit more crime, officers have a valid reason for suspecting them more frequently, especially if there are other factors involved. There is a vast difference between an officer stopping a black driver simply because he thinks that all black people deal drugs and an officer stopping the black driver of a car known to be favored by drug dealers.
Many scientifically unsound studies have been used to supposedly prove that officers are racists. These studies ignore factors such as the severity of the offense, the age and gender of the driver, and the number of police on the road at times certain groups are more likely to drive. The ACLU is notorious for simply comparing the percentage of stops per race versus the group’s percentage of the population overall. When other factors are blatantly ignored, the results are nothing but spurious. Another common practice in studies is to define a speeder as someone driving one or more miles per hour over the speed limit. This leads to inaccurate results because police are many times more likely to stop a driver going 75 in a 55 than a driver going 56 in a 55. If this first driver happens to be a minority, the police will be accused of racial profiling.
In 2000, the state of New Jersey decided its police were racists and established strict oversight procedures. In a six-month period, the number of stops on the NJ Turnpike dropped from 220 to 11. In 1988, 7,400 drug charges were filed as a result of Turnpike stops, but there were only 370 such charges in 2000. Once the state had turned against them, the New Jersey police were simply too afraid of being labeled as racists to stop suspects.
During this time, New Jersey commissioned a study of the likelihood of each race to speed. Cameras took pictures and recorded the speeds of 40,000 drivers, which were then classified into racial categories by a panel who did not know which drivers had been speeding. The study revealed that of those speeding, 25% were black, but only 16% of the total drivers on the Turnpike were black. This study debunked racial profiling by proving that different ethnic groups have different crime rates and therefore should be stopped at different rates.
Crime is a socioeconomic problem more common in urban areas, which is where racial minorities are more likely to live. Across the US, there are 3.2 law enforcement officials per 1,000 residents, with 4.4 law enforcement officials per 1,000 residents in large cities. There are more police per capita in urban areas, so it is natural that minorities would have more encounters with the police. When analyzing minority-police relations the variables must all be identified and considered, including geography, wealth, education, and culture before one can look at race as a factor. This level of sophistication is possible, as it is used in studies of educational systems.
In the end, racial profiling is simply hype created by groups like the ACLU and the NAACP, and only increases tension between communities and police. When facts are thrown to the wind, issues like racial profiling degrade to baseless accusations.
Miss Brusco is a sophomore majoring in Russian.
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