Racial profiling: "Thinking the issue through"

July 17, 2013 9:11 AM

"Statistics abundantly confirm that African Americans--and particularly young black men--commit a dramatically disproportionate share of street crime in the United States. This is a sociological fact, not a figment of the media's (or the police's) racist imagination. ... Even Jesse Jackson once revealed himself to be an amateur racial profiler. 'There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,' he said in 1993, 'than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.' … He felt relief because he estimated, probably correctly, that he stood a somewhat greater risk of being robbed by a black person than by a white person."

No, this isn't from yesterday's column by Richard Cohen, in which he discusses the Trayvon Martin case and concludes that if police "ignore race, then they are fools." Cohen has been predictably and appropriately criticized ("Effectively he is arguing for a kind of racist public safety tax.") and ridiculed ("there is no one under the age of 65 who has not, at some time, worn a hoodie outside the house.")

Rather, the opening quote is from Randall Kennedy's 1999 article "Suspect Policy," which engages with what Cohen correctly describes as the "painful complexity of the problem." Kennedy acknowledges that eliminating profiling would in some cases lead to a "loss in effective crime control," but only before persuasively arguing that despite its potential benefits, it is wrong.

posted by Mr.Know-it-some (0 comments total)