Talk:Racial profiling controversy
On April 20, 1999, New Jersey's then-attorney general Peter Verniero issued his "Interim Report of the State Police Review Team Regarding Allegations of Racial Profiling." It was a bombshell, whose repercussions haven't stopped yet.
"The problem of disparate treatment [of blacks] is real, not imagined," the report famously declared. [1]
How do we integrate (no pun intended) this into the article text? --Ed Poor Talk 18:14, 10 January 2008 (EST)
Another quote:
- The greatest recent innovation in policing was New York's Compstat, the computer-generated crime analysis that allows police commanders to pinpoint their enforcement efforts, then allows top brass to hold them accountable for results. If robberies are up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the precinct commander will strategically deploy his officers to find the perpetrators. Will all the suspects be black? Quite likely, for so is the neighborhood. Does that mean that the officers are racist? Hardly; they are simply going where the crime is. In most high-crime neighborhoods, race is wholly irrelevant to policing, because nearly all the residents are minorities. [ibid]
Nail in the coffin of liberal hate-mongering:
- However much the racial profilers try to divert attention away from the facts of crime, those facts remain obdurate. Arlington has a 10 percent black population, but robbery victims identify nearly 70 percent of their assailants as black. In 1998, blacks in New York City were 13 times more likely than whites to commit a violent assault, according to victim reports. As long as those numbers remain unchanged, police statistics will also look disproportionate. This is the crime problem that black leaders should be shouting about.
Expansion
We need to expand this article, because there are two or three meanings of "racial profiling".
- Incorporating race in a profile of characteristics for a particular suspect or a group of criminals
- The misuse of race, particularly in such a profile, to discriminate against members of a race; i.e., to target innocent members of a race for harassment
There is also a movement asserting that any use of race in a profile will necessarily be misused.
I recall as early as 1982, activists complaining that police misused race in profiles of vagrants in Manhattan, specifically at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street. The claim was that blacks were being stopped and questioned in disproportionate numbers.
It all hinges on what the proper proportions might be. Should police stop (and question or search) people in proportion to the likelihood that they may be doing something wrong?
If a caller says a Caucasian women in her 20s stole something from a store counter, should the police question Caucasian women in their 20s, or should they stop black and Hispanic women too? How about old white and Asian men?
If most crime in a neighborhood is committed by people of a certain sex or age or skin color, or wearing a certain style of clothing, or speaking a certain language, should police contact focus on those people?
How much of the complaints of "driving while black" come from innocent people, versus complaints from guilty people (or their sympathizers)? How would we measure that?
Or how much of this is a present reaction to the blatant racism of the past? --Ed Poor Talk 14:31, 19 July 2010 (EDT)
