Avon Snarksdale takes a break from running the Snarksdale Organization to offer an important observation about my response to Charles Krauthammer's don't-touch-my-junk-but-racial-profiling-is-cool column:
It should be pointed out that for plenty of people of color in the nation's inner cities, these kind of uncomfortable, vaguely legal searches — with the stated intent of finding people carrying guns and drugs — are essentially de rigueur. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are going about their days, who are patted down because they match some vague description of some suspect. In one four-block section of Brownsville, Brooklyn, the NYPD made 52,000 stops over a four-year period, which averaged out to about one stop for every resident in the area each year. And it’s no more efficient than the profiling Adam decries: for all that scrutiny and all those stops over four years, the police in Brownsville recovered just 25 guns, and less than 1 percent of all those people who were stopped — and questioned and patted down and humiliated as they went about their lives — were ever arrested. (All of the personal info taken during the stops, however, was entered into a citywide database.)
There's a perverse kind of cycle at work here: if you give extra police scrutiny to certain kinds of people, you reify in the minds of a jittery public the idea that those people are in need of special attention, and so those people's implicit criminalization is always, always justified.
Citywide, blacks and Latinos made up 90 percent of these stops despite the fact that white people were slightly more likely to be carrying drugs. While the folks at Reason have always been principled, universalist anti-junk touchers, libertarian arguments in the hands of conservatives have since F.A. Hayek's time been deployed in the service of an existing cultural hegemony. As long as the junk touching is confined to Brownsville or in airports to young "Muslim-looking" males, everything is Kosher.
