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Profiling “expertise”
In America today, everything is supposed to depend on what experts say, so it’s worth looking at the experts and expertise behind the anti-profiling movement: Better Unsafe Than (Occasionally) Sorry. It turns out that when the anti-profiling case is put in order it really does claim — as we suggested somewhat ironically a few days ago — that there should be racial proportionality in murder arrests as well. Because the anti-profiling case is based on the a priori principle that black and white crime rates must be the same, and any difference anywhere in the criminal justice system must reflect racism. A sidelight from the article: both the New York Times and the
New Republic thought it counted against profiling that blacks were more likely than whites to be stopped, but blacks and
whites who were stopped were equally likely to be carrying drugs. What those figures show, of course, is that while more blacks
were stopped the grounds for stopping them were as good as the grounds for stopping whites. Otherwise, drugs wouldn’t have been found
as often in the case of blacks.
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