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Affirmative action at work
From the NY Daily News
The NYPD conducted more than 500,000 stop-and-frisks last year, with blacks five times more likely to be searched than whites, according to statistics released yesterday.
Blacks accounted for 52% of the 508,540 individuals stopped and checked last year, according to data released by the City Council's Public Safety Committee.
That percentage has changed little in nearly a decade - it was 50% in 2000 and 52% in 1998.
But the total number of frisks soared from the 97,296 conducted in 2002.
Among the top reasons cops gave for stopping an individual were that the suspect was in a high crime area or had made "furtive movements," according to the statistics.
Hispanics accounted for 29% of the searches last year and whites 10%, the data showed.
Asians, American Indians and individuals whose race was not indicated made up the rest.
The half-million searches resulted in 21,269 arrests. Black suspects accounted for 51% of those charged, Hispanics 30% and whites 12%.
Critics long have argued the NYPD engages in racial profiling by concentrating on blacks and Hispanics for stop-and-frisks.
Police brass have countered that cops stop suspects based on crime victims' descriptions.
The City Council requires the NYPD to provide regular reports on the stop-and-frisks. The NYPD released last year's records to the Council yesterday but still has to provide part of 2003's as well as those for 2004 and 2005.
It seems to me that the story here is that the NYPD is demanding that five times as many people "assume the position" as they were compared to four years previous. The article cleverly avoids pointing this out, just as it cleverly skirts the issue of whether the number of arrests is five times what it was in 2002. Of course, that would lead to uncomfortable questions about whether crime was increasing in NYC under Bloomberg's watch, or whether the increase was in the number of people being harrassed.
Emphasizing race in this story only appeals to the worst prejudices of both extremes, and obscures what may be a genuine issue.
It also begs the question whether the coppers are expected to stop-and-frisk whites, just to even up the numbers, or more absurdly, whether the percentage of blacks confronted needs to be in direct proportion to the percentage of blacks living and working in each precinct.
On the one hand, you have dolts who want to stop the police from doing any work. And on the other, you have an entirely different set of dolts who apparently believe every last damn person on the planet should be suspected of something wrong.