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Jewish World Review March 10, 1999 /22 Adar 5759

Walter Williams

Walter Williams
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Racial profiling

(http://www.jewishworldreview.com) NEW JERSEY GOV. CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN fired Col. Carl Williams, her state police superintendent, after he told reporters that minority groups were more likely to be involved in drug trafficking. Williams was already under fire by black ministers and civil-rights groups accusing the State Police of racial profiling, a practice of targeting minority drivers for traffic stops and searches in the war against drug trafficking.

Whitman said she fired Williams because his comments "are inconsistent with our efforts to enhance public confidence in the State Police." Let's look at racial profiling.

If God were a state trooper, He wouldn't be involved with the imperfection and indignity of racial profiling --- not because He's good but because He knows all. God would know who is a drug trafficker and who's not.

Mere mortals like us don't know everything. Unlike God, we face a world of costly and incomplete information, and that means we have to do a lot of guessing and playing hunches.

Part of that strategy requires the use of indicators that have varying degrees of reliability. Physical characteristics, including race, are among those indicators that can tell us things. Thus, we can benefit from learning to employ cheap-to-observe characteristics as proxies for more-costly-to-observe characteristics. Race is a cheap-to-observe characteristic that, while imperfect, is nonetheless sometimes useful.

I've hailed taxis in downtown Washington, D.C., at night, only to watch the driver pass me up and pick up a white passenger down the street. As often as not, the driver was black. Was the driver a racist? Or was he using my skin color as a proxy for an undesirable destination such as a high-crime neighborhood or as a proxy for the probability of being robbed?

He was racially profiling me, but he was wrong in my case.

It is never pleasant to be a victim of racial profiling, but whom should I blame: the taxi driver who's not God and is simply doing what he can to protect himself? Or should I blame black thugs who prey on taxi drivers, making them leery about picking up black customers at night?

My physician practices racial profiling. Even though my PSA is 2.3, he is very aggressive about the slightest change. He's also aggressive about treating my mildly elevated blood pressure. He doesn't know anything certain about my individual risk of prostate cancer and hypertension-related diseases. Not being God, he uses the medical evidence about blacks in general to make guesses about me. Should I take a cue from Whitman and fire him for making assumptions about me based upon my race?

What about racial assumptions the New Jersey State Police may make?

According to the 1997 FBI Uniform Crime Report, 63 percent of the 65,624 drug arrests were minorities (50 percent blacks and 13 percent Hispanics).

Since blacks are only 13 percent of the total population, it means law enforcement officials can assign a higher probability that a drug trafficker is a black more so than other racial groups. In terms of arresting drug traffickers, doing disproportionate traffic stops on blacks will have a higher payoff than traffic stops on say Japanese, Orthodox Jews or 75-year-olds.

Statistics about the grossly disproportionate number of blacks involved in drug trafficking is no comfort to the law-abiding black who is stopped and searched. It's humiliating and demeaning, not to mention inconvenient. But with whom should we be angry: police officers or those who've made black synonymous with crime?

Of course, an alternative is not to stop cars at all.


Up

03/03/99: Equality before the law
02/24/99: Population control nonsense
02/17/99: Congressional contempt
02/11/99:Blooming fur tyrants
02/05/99:More money, better education?
01/27/99:Absurdity, brazenness and hypocrisy reigns
01/20/99:Economics 101
01/13/99:A wrongful celebration
01/06/99: Economics of predation
12/30/98: Things I wonder about
12/23/98: Unseen crime costs
12/21/98: How to become rich
12/09/98: Advancing national decadence
12/02/98: The Civil War wasn't about slavery
11/24/98:What's happened to us?
11/20/98:Tragedy in black neighborhoods
11/11/98:Family debasement
I11/04/98: Is it them or us?
10/28/98: Where are the poor?
10/21/98: The budget surplus hoax
10/15/98: Where union power lies
10/08/98: Race and sex in the military
9/29/98: Can Clinton run the economy?
9/25/98: Liberals and the constitution
9/17/98: Clinton and future presidents
9/11/98: Donate or sell organs
9/03/98: Common Sense vs. Experts
8/26/98: Mother Nature's unfairness
8/24/98: The pretense of superiority
8/13/98: Yours or mine?
8/05/98: I do my job well, so that means I can....
7/29/98: Education production

©1999, Creators Syndicate