More Racial Profiling Pseudo-Science

By Nicholas Stix
October 29, 2008
VDARE

Tenured antiversity activists who scream “racism!” at the drop of a pair of handcuffs can produce new “studies” “proving” that police are racially profiling blacks in their sleep. Their formula is to take the percentages of police stops/searches/arrests of blacks, and show that they exceed the percentage of blacks officially residing in the jurisdiction in question. Ta-da! And the numbers will always work, for the simple reason that blacks commit crimes vastly disproportionate to their percentage of virtually any jurisdiction’s population.

Legitimate social science would compare police stops, etc., not to the general population, but to the population of criminal suspects. But Leftwing activists refuse to compare those numbers, or even to speak of blacks as committing more crimes as opposed to being“arrested” more often than other groups - as if cops routinely got descriptions of an attacker as “a pasty-faced white guy,” and instead radioed in,“The suspect is a black male.”

Such “studies,” which make a mockery of social science, share the assumptions of Disparate Impact Theory, which is at the heart of all multicultural pseudo-science.

According to Disparate Impact Theory “researchers”

• if blacks do better than whites in a given index, it is either non-essential, or proof of black superiority
• Any index in which blacks do worse than whites is, ipso facto, proof of white racism; and
• Since only a racist would question the research, the researchers needn’t waste their breath responding to critics.

Racial profiling fiction also assumes that hordes of white criminals wreak havoc with impunity, while racist police focus all of their energies on terrorizing innocent black and Hispanic males.

A logically consistent application of “disparate impact” would require abolishing all laws.

The Southern California ACLU paid Ian Ayres to concoct a report showing that the LAPD racially profiles innocent blacks; Ayres was happy to oblige them. (Law student Jonathan Borowsky appears to have done the work.) Ayres [Email him] is “William K. Townsend Professor” at Yale Law School. Among his mala fides, he’s a plagiarist, which has not harmed his career, and indeed qualifies him to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Abstract: We find prima facie evidence that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched, and over-arrested.

The findings of racial disparity are supported by ancillary analyses of investigative outcomes and officer race. We find that frisks and searches are systematically less productive when conducted on blacks and Hispanics than when conducted on whites.

It is implausible that higher frisk and search rates are justified by higher minority criminality, when these frisks and searches are substantially less likely to uncover weapons, drugs or other types of contraband. We also find that the black arrest disparity was 9 percentage points lower when the stopping officer was black than when the stopping officer was not black. Similarly, the Hispanic arrest disparity was 7 percentage points lower when the stopping officer was Hispanic than when the stopping officer was a non-Hispanic white. [A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department, by Ian Ayres and Jonathan Borowsky, ACLU, October 2008]

Given the much higher proportion of crime committed by blacks and Hispanics, a lack of disparities in stops, etc., would be a red flag.

Ayres is arguing, among other things, that officers should ignore descriptions of black or Hispanic suspects, and instead racially target whites who fit no such description, and stop, frisk, search and arrest them. I realize that sounds insane and is exactly the sort of viciously racist profiling that Ayres and his comrades fantasize is routinely carried out against blacks and Hispanics. But racial profiling pseudo-science is insane and racist.

My own research and observations have led me to conclude that white policemen have long gone out of their way to avoid confrontations with blacks; the practice is called “de-policing.”

The truth should be the easiest defense against such propaganda. But in the world of multiculturally coerced public opinion, truth = death.

In New Jersey, the ACLU and the State Conference of Racist Black Preachers, or whatever the civil rights group is called, have for years insisted that state troopers racially profile black drivers. Back in 1999, State Police Superintendent Col. Carl Williams tried responding to the charges with the truth, breaking down the groups trafficking in drugs on New Jersey’s turnpikes by drug and race or ethnicity. Liberal Republican Gov. Christie Whitman fired Williams the next day.

As for black and Hispanic officers stopping fewer drivers from their respective groups, that could indicate ethnic favoritism on their part.

The LAPD has a history of problems with such officers. During the late 1980s, the department hired cadres of racist black and Hispanic sociopaths who wreaked mayhem, causing the worst scandal in the LAPD’s history - Rampart. But Ayres and his comrades had no interest in honestly telling the Rampart story.

LAPD officer and undercover journalist “Jack Dunphy” lays out the issues facing LAPD Chief William Bratton.

[Though] Bratton was critical of the Ayres report, he has as yet failed to disclose the 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…

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa [who flunked the California bar exam all four times he took it, and thus cannot practice law] was once president of the L.A. chapter of the ACLU, and the rest of the city government is composed almost entirely of like-minded liberals. They are far too committed to politically correct ideals to disclose the cold and persistent facts that LAPD cops, indeed cops all over the country, know all too well….

[“Racial Profiling: The Myth that Never Dies,” by Jack Dunphy, National Review, October 27, 2008.]