Is the LAPD Guilty of Racial Profiling?

By Nicholas Stix

The Southern California ACLU has just released its report, authored by Ian “I am not a plagiarist” Ayres and Jonathan Borowsky, A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Over at TalkLeft, TChris accepts the “report’s” pre-determined “conclusions” at face value:

Despite the absence of empirical evidence that black or Hispanic drivers are more likely to violate traffic laws than white drivers, the LAPD refuses to acknowledge that the statistics reveal an underlying problem of racial profiling.

I don’t know about the figures for L.A., or about Hispanic drivers in general, but I do know that nationally, black drivers commit speeding at much higher rates than whites, particularly at very high speeds. But limiting the discussion of traffic stops of black and Hispanic drivers to those groups’ rates of traffic violations is specious, to begin with. Many traffic stops are due either to a description of a car whose driver was involved in a crime, or which is coming from the direction of a crime that was just committed, or due to suspicion of drug activity.

Over at National Review Online, policeman “Jack Dunphy” has some thoughts on what is wrong with Ayres’ “study,” as does yours truly over at VDARE.com, in “More Racial Profiling Pseudo-Science.