March 12, 2003
Heather MacDonald Debunks Racial Profiling
By James
Fulford
The Washington Times had an article yesterday
[“Resetting
the profile odometer,” March 12, 2003, by Linda
Seebach] detailing the refutation by the Manhattan
Institute’s
Heather Macdonald of allegations of “profiling” by
New Jersey State police.
Cowardly Republican
Governor Christie Todd Whitman (now a Bush
Administration Cabinetperson) issued a mea culpa
and fired Col. Carl Williams only hours after he pointed
out the
ethnic composition of drug couriers. ["Two
weeks ago, the president of the United States went to
Mexico to
talk to the president of Mexico about drugs,''
said Williams.
"He didn't go to Ireland. He didn't go to England.'']
Racial profiling, however, isn’t necessarily the
explanation for the
“disparate impact” of traffic stops on black
motorists.
The theory behind the
“profiling”
myth is that innocent black motorists are being
stopped simply because they’re black. That makes it
a violation of their civil rights.
Even if they’re found
to have evidence of a crime on their person, or in their
car, this evidence can be
suppressed, based on the Fourth Amendment’s “right
of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures” and the
“Exclusionary rule” which translates the
“right of people to be secure in their persons”
into “The right of the
guilty to be found not guilty.”(My own formulation.)
This exclusionary
rule, by the way, does nothing to protect innocent
people who are searched illegally, and then let go. By
definition, you can only exclude evidence in cases where
the police have found, you know, something. But
that’s why the criminal defense bar is so insistent on
claiming that their clients are victims of
profiling.
However, a survey by
the State of New Jersey on the relationship between race
and speeding produced a very interesting statistic:
black drivers speed twice as much as white drivers!
According to the Washington Times
“The New Jersey attorney general commissioned a
research study designed and carried out by the Public
Service Research Institute in Maryland. The researchers
took photos of nearly 40,000 cars whose speed was
simultaneously measured with a radar gun. A team of
three evaluators looked at the photographs and
identified the race of the driver. (Evaluators had no
information about the speed of the car).
“When researchers combined driver identifications
with the speeding information, Ms. Mac Donald says, they
found ‘black drivers speed twice as much as white
drivers, and speed at reckless levels even more.’"
Heather Macdonald has now written a book about the
whole issue, called
Are Cops Racist? How the War Against the Police
Harms Black Americans.
The point made in the subtitle, that innocent black
people are most likely to be the
victims of black criminals because they
live near them, or with them, and because have
personal and business relationships with them, is a
valid one.
I just wish it weren’t the
only way the argument about the demographics of
crime could be advanced.
After all, a good many victims of crime committed by
blacks are. in fact,
white.
This is the main problem that has made race relations
so difficult over the past thirty years. For example,
“white flight” was not caused by racial
snobbishness, but by a perfectly legitimate fear of
death.
Years ago, when Evelyn Waugh wanted his church to
retain the Latin Mass, he was told that Latin was the
preserve of the “educated few.” He asked if the church
couldn’t find a little charity in its heart “even
for the educated few?”
Perhaps criminologists will someday be able to find
charity in their hearts even for the
white victims of crime.
Web guru note: Heather
Macdonald’s book is a collection of her City Journal
pieces. Thrifty people who don’t mind reading books
on computer will find all of
City Journal available online. Here’s a
selection:
The Racial Profiling
Myth Debunked
Ashcroft’s Racial
Profiling Problem
The Myth of Racial
Profiling
What Really Happened
in Cincinnati
Diallo Truth, Diallo
Falsehood
How To Train Cops
