How to save minority lives through "racial profiling"

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered." - Tom Stoppard

***

Saving minority lives

"The New York Police De partment recently released its stop-and-frisk data from 2009, triggering the usual denunciations from anti- cop activists and pundits -- none of whom understand policing or, apparently, the reality of New York crime.

These advocates purport to defend the interests of the city's black and Hispanic residents. If their agenda were realized, however, the result would be thousands more minority lives lost to violence and a return to the anarchy that once engulfed many minority neighborhoods...

NYPD critics ignore the crime decline and focus instead on the alleged racial disparities in police stops: Blacks were 55 percent of all stop subjects, though they are 24 percent of the city's population. Whites were 10 percent of all stops, and 35 percent of the population. Therefore, argue such lawsuit factories as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the department is illegally profiling minorities on the basis of their race. (The center is suing the NYPD over its stop policy.)

This argument suppresses the most important factor in determining what police do: fight crime. It is victims' experience of crime that drives police deployment and tactics. And those victims are found overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods, preyed upon by local residents.

According to police reports filed by victims of violent crime, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 -- and 80 percent of all shootings. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies...

Given the enormous disparities in crime and victimization rates, the police can't fight crime without generating disparate stop rates...

The biggest returns were in New York's minority neighborhoods -- because that is where crime was and still is the highest.

Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79 percent of the 78 percent decline in homicide victims since 1990. Over 10,000 black and Hispanic males are alive today who would have been dead had homicide rates remained at early '90s levels...

GO to any police-community meeting in Harlem or Bed ford-Stuyvesant and you'll hear residents asking: Please send more cops; please keep the dealers off the corner; please crack down on neighborhood disorder.

Ironically, police can't respond to these heartfelt demands for public safety without generating "disproportionate" stop data that can be used against the NYPD...

[There is] an identical ratio of stops of whites, blacks and Hispanics result in arrests and recovered weapons -- suggesting that the police are using the same degree of reasonable suspicion in making a stop...

The city's homicide rate is two-fifths that of Chicago -- whose police department generally eschews proactive stop and frisks. New York juveniles under the age of 17 -- nearly all black and Hispanics -- are killed at one-quarter the rate of those in the Windy City"


Hyper-sensitivity to racism hurts minorities (in this case, it literally kills them).

Interestingly, from the chart you can see that blacks are under-represented compared to the share of crimes they're responsible for, so if anything the police are racial profiling Whites and Hispanics.

Of course, some might use social labelling theory to claim that the records show that blacks commit more crimes because we stereotype them as commiting more crimes (someone has tried to do the same to me with regard to the gender gap in crime), but empircal evidence shows that this is nonsense.