Heather MacDonald explains that a concept conservatives have supported for years of doesn’t actually exist:
The late 1990s also saw the rise of the bogus “racial profiling” concept, in which police departments were deemed racist if their stop and arrest rates didn’t match population benchmarks. That primitive analytical framework, initially promoted by the ACLU, ignores the wildly disparate racial crime rates and the inevitable effect of those crime rates on police activity. The Justice Department under Deputy Attorney General Holder gave a significant push to its evolution, and the momentum of DOJ-sponsored “racial profiling” conferences and DOJ-funded research continued through the early years of the Bush administration.
MacDonald’s argument is that black people commit more crimes, so there’s nothing odd about cops stopping black folks more often or maybe shooting one or two in the back. This is a circular argument, black people are profiled, so they’re more likely to be arrested, so they commit a disproportionate amount of crimes, which in turn justifies profiling them.
But of course crime rates are dependent on reported crimes, and one of the advantages of class (and in these circumstances, this advantage is highly correlated with race) is that your privacy is rarely disturbed because you’re somewhat immune to probable cause. Class creates privileged spaces that cops think twice about breaching.
In a recent New Yorker profile, Van Jones talked about how his experience at Yale inspired him to work on issues regarding police brutality:
While he was living in New Haven, Jones saw a lot of things that disturbed him. One was the video of the Rodney King beating, which took place during his second semester. Another was crime. “I was seeing kids at Yale do drugs and talk about it openly, and have nothing happen to them or, if anything, get sent to rehab,” he said. “And then I was seeing kids three blocks away, in the housing projects, doing the same drugs, in smaller amounts, go to prison.” Upon graduating, Jones moved to San Francisco and set up the Bay Area PoliceWatch, a hot line for complaints of police misconduct. It was soon receiving fifteen calls a day.
I had a similarly eye-opening experience in college. The amount of drugs that move through private colleges is absolutely staggering, because there is little supervision, punishment is minimal, and consumers are well heeled. And of course, these crimes are never “reported” because no one ever gets arrested for anything. They might as well not have happened. At which point the entire war on drugs begins to feel like “misconduct.”
What we do know is that, for example, white teens use cocaine at four times the rate that black teens, but they aren’t as likely to be profiled. They enter rehab, not jail. So the crimes they commit in the trafficking of cocaine simply aren’t reported, so there’s little data MacDonald can point to in order to justify profiling white people. Not that she would if she had it. Then again, police don’t always give up this kind of information willingly (unless they can cook it first). In New York City, the people who investigate these vicious crimes hide the racial data they collect on shootings and “random” stop and searches. They do however, provide the breeds of which dogs they shoot.
Moreover, despite MacDonald’s anecdote about the Clinton DoJ and the LAPD, violent crime rates (which are inversely correlated with economic growth) plummeted during the Clinton Administration, so whatever differences you have with their approach (and I have plenty) there isn’t much to support her argument that measures taken to prevent racial profiling harmed law enforcement’s ability to fight crime.
But of course the point of MacDonald’s piece, “Profiling Eric Holder” is to wring her hands at the possibility that Holder might actually enforce laws on the books regarding racial profiling, thus handicapping police. Being that he worked for the Clinton Administration. And that he’s black and all.
— A. Serwer
