A first-person account by Steve Locke, a black college professor, about being stopped and questioned by the police for a crime he didn’t commit, is going viral.
The article has a racial angle, implying that white officers are deliberately singling out blacks just for sport or due to prejudice.
Yes, it sucks being stopped by the police when you know you’re innocent – as anyone black or white can attest. But to cry ‘racism’ without actually looking at the data is the easy way out. I guess it never occurred to the left that the reason why more blacks are stopped than whites is because *gasp* blacks may actually be committing most of the crimes, as Trump and others have alluded.
Most of the controversy over racial profiling centers around New York’s ‘stop and frisk’ practice, which gives police the right to stop, question, and search individuals who are deemed suspicious for criminality.
An excellent article Distorting the Truth About Crime and Race debunks the left’s cries of racism over stop and frisk.
As shown below, although the fact that the number of arrests made for both blacks & Latinos vs. whites is the same, despite blacks being stopped more frequently, may suggest discriminatory racial profiling (due to the high rate of false positives), this is because blacks are more likely to be suspects in a crime.
From the article:
February 11, 2010: “Police officials have said that while a large percentage of the street stops involve blacks, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”
The actual crime rates reveal that blacks are being significantly understopped, compared with their representation in the city’s criminal population, another reason for omitting them from the paper’s reporting.
Here are the crime data that the Times doesn’t want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops).
It’s incontrovertible…the data shows that blacks commit most of the crimes. The left wants stops in proportion to the population, not the rate of crime. According to the left, since whites are 35% of the population, they should be 35% of the stops despite the fact they only commit 5% of all violent crimes. That sounds like bad policy.
Contrary to the Times’s assumption, the fact that an identical proportion of stops of whites and blacks—10 percent—results in an arrest or summons strongly suggests that the police use the identical quantum of reasonable suspicion in stopping whites and blacks. The police stop a greater absolute number of blacks because the overwhelming majority of crime, suspicious behavior, and calls to respond to crime occurs in black neighborhoods.