[THERE] has been a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.
(Barack H. Obama, Transcript, Press Conference, July 22, 2009)
One of the finest -- and most painful -- columns ever published in the Chronicle was "'Driving while black' still gets you stopped,"September 14, 1998, by James T. Campbell.
Over the years, I've forgotten how many times I've been stopped by police but never the experiences or the feelings of anger, frustration and despair. It really is a "black thang," and I can't imagine that any white person could relate.
Mr. Campbell is an honest man and careful writer, and what he has to say about this issue cannot be ignored. Read the column.
Still, and without any disrespect to him or to others who have been treated unfairly, "stopped disproportionately" depends entirely on what "disproportionately" means. Disproportionate to what?
Heather Mac Donald -- author of Are Cops Racist -- argues that the common practice of measuring the proportion of traffic stops to black or Hispanic population is wrong.
The studies that purport to prove the existence of racial profiling are junk science that wouldn't earn their authors an F in a freshman statistics course. Their biggest flaw? They ignore the most important factor in policing: crime. You can't determine whether policy are stopping or arresting "too many" members of any given racial group unless you take into account the crime rates among different groups. No profiling study to date does that.
(John Hawkins, "10 Questions With Heather Mac Donald," Right Wing News, _____)
Do you discount Ms. Mac Donald's statement because it appeared in Right Wing News? I could have found a source much less likely to raise liberal hackles, but I chose RWN to expose readers, deliberately, to the possibility that they practice ideological profiling. Regardless of the venue, Ms. Mac Donald is either right or she's wrong. Which is it?
She's right, of course.
If X percent of Group Y is stopped for speeding through an intersection, what's the proper population for measuring disproportion? The percentage of Group Y in the state, region, city, or neighborhood? The percentage driving through the intersection? Or something else?
The correct answer is "something else" -- namely the percentage of Group Y motorists who sped through the intersection.
If 15 percent of Group Y are speeders and 15 percent of the tickets go to Group Y, that's "proportionate." Anything else -- higher or lower -- is "disproportionate."
So Mr. Obama's "fact" is, charitably, not clear. My guess is that if he were pressed to explain the basis of proportionality, he would choose an inappropriate measure. This is one of those "facts" that everybody knows but nobody can quite prove.
* * *
Ms. Mac Donald recently wrote more about this issue at nationalreview.com. ("Promoting Racial Paranoia," July 24, 2009)
Let's acknowledge up front that [Harvard Professor Louis Gates] endured a bizarre and humiliating experience. Being escorted out of your home in handcuffs for what you perceive as no offense at all would feel like a grotesque invasion of privacy, due process, and property rights. Gates's anger is therefore understandable. But just because an incident is -- from one's subjective perspective -- unjustified does not make it racial. Gates was almost certainly not arrested because he was black, but quite possibly because he committed "contempt of cop," an extralegal offense that can greatly affect the outcome of officer-civilian interactions.
Gates, however, sees race and racism in every aspect of this unfortunate episode, thus exemplifying the racial paranoia that can make policy work so difficult.
As for the president's declaration, "That's just a fact," Ms. Mac Donald replies: "This statement has many possible meanings, all of them untrue."
Obama's prime-time recylcing of advocate-generated myths about policing will only make inner-city neighborhoods more dangerous for many of their law-abiding residents. . . . [And the] blow to police morale from Obama's gratuitous remarks is enormous."
Worse, Obama has only increased the racial paranoia that Gates put it so vividly on display.
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