EXPOSING THE 'MYTH' OF RACIAL PROFILING

It is former senator Eugene McCarthy's axiom: Anything said three times in
Washington becomes a fact. So it now is a fact, universally attested and
detested, that racial profiling is a widespread police tactic. Everyone
says so, especially since the disturbances in Cincinnati set off a riot of
television chatter, many of the chatterers having no direct knowledge of
that city, or of policing.

Even George W. Bush has made an obligatory genuflection at the altar of the
conventional wisdom -- "Racial profiling is wrong and we will end it in
America" -- and Attorney General John Ashcroft is encouraging the rapidly
increasing trend of states requiring police to record racial data on
traffic stops and searches. So who is Heather Mac Donald to cast decisive
doubt on the prevalence, even the existence, of racial profiling?

She is the indispensable journalist. If you question that characterization,
you have not read her just-published collection of essays, "The Burden of
Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society." Read it after
you read her latest dissection of such an idea, "The Myth of Racial
Profiling," in City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute.

Mac Donald distinguishes, as anti-racial profiling crusaders rarely do,
between "hard" and "soft" profiling. The latter uses race as one factor
among others in estimating criminal suspiciousness. As when, Mac Donald
says, police have intelligence that in the Northeast drug-shipping corridor
many traffickers are Jamaicans favoring Nissan Pathfinders.

Charges of racial profiling usually arise from data about traffic stops,
data that supposedly vindicate complaints that minorities are victimized
merely because they are "driving while black." But data about
"disproportionate" stops of minority drivers are worthless without
additional information that would be necessary to substantiate the charge
that "too many" minority drivers are being stopped, searched and arrested.

Most anti-profilers concede that most stops arise from an actual traffic
violation (e.g., the Pathfinder is speeding or has visible illegal defects,
such as nonfunctioning lights). So, Mac Donald writes, it is pertinent to
know whether disproportionate numbers of minorities drive recklessly or
drive defective vehicles, or whether they drive at times when, or in places
where, police are, for good law enforcement reasons, particularly
attentive. And the validity of the data purporting to document
"disproportion" depends on comparisons of the amount of driving done by
different racial groups, so that stops per man-mile, rather than just stops
per person, could be compared. Do minorities commit more of the kinds of
traffic violations that most attract police attention? Data (about
intoxication, and involvement in injury and fatality accidents) suggest so.

Mac Donald says that of course there is "soft" profiling in the sense that
some vehicles are stopped because, in addition to some infraction, the
driver and the kind of vehicle and the direction and the number and type of
occupants fit the profile of a drug courier. Yet anti-profilers insist, as
does Sen. Robert Torricelli from the corridor state of New Jersey, that
there is no evidence "that certain ethnic or racial groups
disproportionately commit crimes. They do not."

But of course they do. And once a traffic stop is made, any subsequent
search of the vehicle is apt to be triggered by behavioral cues
(nervousness, conflicting stories) on the part of the vehicle's occupants,
cues having nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

In 1999, during hysteria about profiling, then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman
fired New Jersey's state police superintendent because he uttered a truism
often confirmed by the Drug Enforcement Administration -- that minority
groups dominate cocaine and marijuana trafficking. Mac Donald reports that
New Jersey's state police "no longer distribute a typical felony offender
profile to their officers" because such profiles might contribute to what
the state's attorney general calls "inappropriate stereotypes" about
criminals. Here "inappropriate" is a synonym not for "inaccurate" but for
"inconvenient."

It is an awkward fact, but it is a fact even though there may not be three
Washingtonians rash enough to utter it: Felons are not evenly distributed
across society's demographic groups. Many individuals and groups specialize
in hurling accusations of racism, and police become vulnerable to such
accusations when they concentrate their efforts where crime is.

If that accusation begins to control policing, public safety will suffer --
especially the safety of minorities in violent and drug-infested
neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods, where the primary complaint against the
police usually is that they are too few in number and too tentative against
predators, are not the neighborhoods where anti-profiling crusaders are apt
to live.