The Racial Profiling Hustle


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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)


We are within our rights to use judgment and common sense when considering a proposed remedy for racial injustice, to question its effectiveness, to ask if it does more harm than good. And we are also entitled to greet the proposals of the race hustlers who posture as civil rights leaders with the appropriate blend of impatience, exasperation, and horselaugh.

The brouhaha over “racial profiling” is a perfect example. Those who stood tall and refused to patronize African-Americans who made a fuss over this alleged example of bigotry by white police officers are looking good these days. And those politicians who bit their lower lips and scolded the local police for their “racial insensitivity” should be looking for a place to hide. Christine Todd Whitman, for example. In 1999, when governor of New Jersey, Whitman declared her state troopers guilty of racial profiling, based on the results of a study indicating that black drivers were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike and their cars searched for drugs at a higher percentage than their percentage of the population of the state.

And why isn’t that finding an indication of racism? Because it was based on a shockingly superficial reading of the data. We know that now. Facts have surfaced, and they are confirming what common sense told most of us when we first heard this topic discussed. We knew that there are some racist cops. But we also knew that the overwhelming majority of white cops are not driving around our interstates looking for blacks to stop and frisk. Being black wasn’t enough to get you stopped. Black women in flowery hats weren’t being stopped on their way home from choir practice. Black grandfathers with a fishing pole sticking out the window of their pickup trucks weren’t stopped on their way to the river. Black soldiers in uniform driving on the highways around Fort Bragg weren’t being stopped.

Something else created the so-called profile, something that made the police officer suspicious, something that his street smarts told him was out of kilter. The police reacted to the same kind of hunch that would lead them to stop tattooed men with close cropped hair if they were looking for escaped convicts; long-haired men in leather jackets if they were looking for motorcycle gang amphetamine dealers; heavy-set men in cashmere coats if they were looking for mob enforcers; men with brogues in Irish bars if they were looking for IRA terrorists on the run.

In the case of the blacks stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, the age of the driver, the time of day, the type of vehicle, the way the driver was dressed – and, ahem, ahem, the speed of the vehicle – counted for more than the race of the driver. In an article in the spring issue of City Journal, Heather MacDonald reports on a new study of what happened on the New Jersey Turnpike, one made by the New Jersey attorney general, at the request of New Jersey’s state troopers.

And the study confirmed the earlier finding of Christine Todd Whitman’s attorney general. Blacks, while only 16% of the drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike, accounted for 25% of the total of drivers stopped and searched in the 65-mile-per-hour zones of the Turnpike.

But here’s the rub: Through the use of strategically placed cameras, the new study found that black drivers speed twice as much on the Turnpike as white drivers, and speed at reckless levels at even higher rates. In other words, blacks are stopped less often than their speeding pattern would predict! The New Jersey state troopers were not stopping blacks. They were stopping reckless drivers. The earlier study had ignored a crucial datum: It proceeded as if blacks and whites drove in an identical manner, and that there was no reason for blacks to be stopped on the Turnpike more than whites, other than a racist disposition on the part of the arresting officer.

Matthew Zingraff, a criminologist at North Carolina State University, explains the reason for this oversight. He had proposed a similar inquiry into the speeding patterns of black and white drivers in North Carolina. “Everybody was terrified,” says Zingraff. “Good statisticians were throwing up their hands and saying, ‘This is one battle you’ll never win. I don’t want to be called a racist’.”

Look: No doubt there are some racist cops. They should be rooted out and dealt within the manner that their behavior merits. But, at least in the much-discussed New Jersey case, the evidence does not support the conclusion that there is widespread racial profiling. The charge was a con job, supported by nervous white politicians fearful of appearing politically incorrect.

We have to get to the point where a serious discussion of these issues can proceed without such charges being tossed about without supporting evidence. Perhaps the white and black experience in the United States is different enough to account for why the races react differently to a controversy like this. That could be. It is a fit subject for discussion. But it is unfair of blacks to assume that racism shapes a white American’s disagreement with them on the merits of the case. In fact, it could be a racist assumption.

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