Racial Profiling, pt. II

The following is a shortened version of my original post...

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-=[ Racial Profiling: Racist & Ineffective ]=-

...Police deployment these days is determined almost strictly by rates of relative violence/crime in each police district. The rate of violence is not some subjective quotient created by a racist cop, but is determined by counting citizens reporting that they were shot, stabbed, beat up and otherwise assaulted, this is combined with citizen reports of burglary, robbery, theft, etc. You see, your racist conspiracy theory is illogical when you know that police resources are deployed based on crime as reported by citizens and not some racist plot to destroy minorities. That is logical.

 -- Bubba

 

The above quote was part of a response to my first post on racial profiling sent in by someone who chose to remain anonymous. I refuse to call anyone “anonymous” so I called him “Bubba.” Mostly because his is a typical “Bubba” response. No amount of solid evidence would disabuse him from his untenable position. Last I heard from him, Bubba insisted I have “chip on my shoulder.” Yeah, you know how us Latino/as get all too emotional and lose whatever little reasoning we possess.

::insert eye roll here::

Through the use of empirical studies I demonstrated in my original post that racial profiling is wrong and racist. Today I will show that it is also ineffective.

Racial conservatives -- both black and white -- maintain that racial profiling isn’t racist. They argue, like Bubba, that racial profiling is justified since we all know you black muthafuckas and slimy-assed Latino/as commit all of the crime. As Heather Mac Donald of the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, puts it, “Judging by arrest rates, minorities are overly represented among drug traffickers.” Black conservative, Randall Kennedy agrees. He goes so far as to say that arrest rates present a “sad reality” and justifies racial profiling on those grounds. Well, if this is true, scientific examinations of racial profiling should yield results that back up the claims of racial conservatives. In other words, if minorities are the ones committing the most crime, a rigorous examination of the practice of racial profiling should bear that out.

It don’t...

Until very recently, there was no data that gave us any insight into hit rates -- the rates at which police actually find contraband or other evidence of crime when they perform stops and searches. Therefore, when confronted with remarks made by the likes of Bubba, we had little to say in response. In other words, we had to take the word of law enforcement agencies and racial conservatives that racial profiling was justified. However, evidence from a broad range of contexts now allow for a statistical analysis of racial profiling. And the results of this analysis will come as a surprise to many: racial profiling, aside from being immoral, unconstitutional, and racist is neither an efficient nor an effective tool for fighting crime -- bitches.

Driving While Black

Statistics from stops and searches by Maryland State Police during 1995 and 1996 provided some of the first comprehensive data on hit rates. In terms of stops, the data, which came from the police themselves, showed that the state police stopped and searched African Americans disproportionately. Although they made only 17 percent of all drivers, blacks made up more than 70 percent of all those searched. The data were compiled from more than eleven hundred searches. Given the official conservative rationale that what they had been doing was merely sound policing -- not racism -- the hit rates should clearly have borne out the wisdom of the state police approach. Wrong! The hit rates showed something different: the hit rate at which police found drugs, guns, or other evidence of crime in these searches were almost exactly the same for blacks and whites.

Troopers found evidence on African Americans they searched 28.4 percent of the time; they found evidence on whites 28.8 percent of the time *. The researcher found no statistical significance in the difference between the numbers for blacks and whites, given the number of stops and searches included in the data. If in fact there was any difference between blacks and whites, the data showed clearly that racial profiling were not uncovering it. What the data did show was a flaw in the basic assumption underlying racial profiling.

But I -- and many of my darker-skinned brethren -- coulda told you that, Bubba!

Recent statistics from New Jersey provide even more information on hit rates. After a controversial state attorney general report, the New Jersey State Police began to record data for all its traffic stops and searches. Data from 2000 concerning the southern end of the turnpike, the area were complaints on profiling first originated, show that blacks and Latino/as remain 70 percent of those searched. And the hit rates absolutely contradict the idea that racial profiling is just good law enforcement. Troopers found evidence in the searches of whites 25 percent of the time; they found evidence in searches of blacks 13 percent of the time, and in searches of Latino/as just 5 percent of the time. Whites were almost twice as likely to be found with contraband as blacks, and five times as likely as Latino/as -- clearly indicating that racial conservatives and people like Bubba are fuckin full of shit.

Data from North Carolina tells a similar story. In 1999, North Carolina became the first state to pass legislation making it mandatory for some police agencies to report basic data on all traffic stops and searches. A researcher, conducting an analysis required by law, found that African American male drivers were 68 percent more likely than white male drivers to be searched by the good ole boys (Bubbas?) in the North Carolina Highway Patrol. They found contraband on blacks in 26 percent of the searches; for whites, the hit rate was 33 percent.

Walking While Black

Even more telling were hit rates from the New York Attorney general’s study of stops and frisks in New York City, issued in 1999. The context of this study is somewhat different because the data concern stops and searches of pedestrians. However the practice, using race to focus police suspicion -- is basically the same. In addition, the data here is plentiful: 175,000 recorded encounters between officers and citizens over fifteen months. The study tracked hit rates by analyzing the percentage of stops and frisks that ended in an arrest. The data are even more damning than the numbers from Maryland and New Jersey. The attorney general found that police arrested 12.6 percent of the whites they stopped, only 11.5 percent of the Latino/as, and only 10.5 percent of the blacks. This is exactly the opposite of what Bubba would predict. When New York City police officers utilized racial profiling intensively, they found what they wanted less often on blacks and Latino/as than they did on whites.

Those who champion racial profiling claim they believe it is “sound policing” based on hard science. I believe they support such practices because they want to justify racist practices. They are comfortable with such practices because, for the most part, it doesn’t affect them. They are not the ones being taken handcuffed from their homes, or being humiliated while driving or even walking down the street. They condone such acts because for the most part they just don’t give a good goddamn -- until it happens to them...

 -- Eddie