George Rebane
Over the years the charges of discrimination, racism, and racial profiling have flown thick and fast from our liberal cadres who oppose various policies of law enforcement. And more specifically, the allocation of resources in such enforcement practices is always questioned when it weighs more heavily on one group vs another no matter the reason or particulars behind such allocations. In such attacks from the Left, simplistic quotas rule the day.
A current example of this that will have national implications on our country’s crime rates is how the case of Floyd vs New York, addressing the NYPD’s ‘Stop, question, and frisk’ policy, will be resolved.
NYC’s crime rates have plummeted since the city restored some common sense policing policies returning to the officer on the beat historical prerogatives that every one of my generation understood and accommodated. No one claims that a policeman’s ability to exercise SQF was never abused, but in the large and for generations it was put to effective use across the land. NYC’s recent success has demonstrated that SQF’s politically correct removal from the law enforcement toolkit contributed greatly to increased murder and other crime rates over the last decades.
Today certified racist demagogues like the Rev Al Sharpton are leading the fight to have SQF repealed. His success will cost lives in the black and Hispanic communities, and help restore crime rates to their former levels across the land. But to that sumbich burnishing his public image trumps lowering crime and saving lives every time. And the innumerate sheeple he agitates and herds don’t have a clue.
We read in the 12jun13 WSJ concerning the Floyd ruling that –
The Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyers from the elite law firm of Covington & Burling, however, charge in Floyd that such proactive tactics are discriminatory, since blacks and Hispanics make up the large majority of individuals stopped and questioned by NYPD cops. The claim ignores the reality that the preponderance of crime perpetrators, and victims, in New York are also minorities. Blacks, for example, constituted 78% of shooting suspects and 74% of all shooting victims in 2012, even though they are less than 23% of the city’s population.
Whites, by contrast, committed just over 2% of shootings and were under 3% of shooting victims in 2012, though they are 35% of the populace. Young black men in New York are 36 times more likely to be murdered than young white men—and their assailants are virtually always other black (or Hispanic) males.
Given such a crime imbalance, if the NYPD focuses its resources where people most need protection, the effort will inevitably produce racially disparate enforcement data. Blacks, at 55% of all police-stop subjects in 2012, are actually understopped compared with their 66% representation among violent criminals.
True to the know-nothing form that liberals have adopted in such cases, Rev Sharpton argues that a non-racist SQF policy calls for a quota system based on population proportions. This means that at least three whites should be SQF’d for every two blacks. On the other hand, reason and the Reverend Bayes would argue that you apply his celebrated theorem to compute the probabilities (of being a potential criminal given race) and allocate your resources appropriately in order to save the most lives and maximally reduce crime rates.
Self-serving demagogues are not persuaded by such arguments, but then I may be wrong. If we give him the benefit of doubt and believe that he really does care about the blacks and minorities he attempts lead, then we must conclude that he and his ilk are dumber than 2x4s with painted faces.
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