Since this thread has pretty much turned into a thread about "racial profiling" anyway:
The controversy over "racial profiling" originated in data regarding traffic stops and airport searches that disproportionately affect blacks and ethnic minorities.
In his book, [David Harris, the University of Toledo law professor who provided much of the intellectual heft behind the war on racial profiling] traces profiling back to Operation Pipeline, the 1986 Drug Enforcement Administration effort to enlist highway police in interdicting illegal drugs as they are transported by distributors on the nation’s highways.
Harris’s argument that Operation Pipeline resulted in unfair racial profiling by highway patrollers in New Jersey, Maryland, and elsewhere is predicated on studies that falsely assume there are no ethnic differences in driving behavior, and that all ethnicities violate traffic laws at the same high rate. It is also based on the assertion that drug violations are roughly equal across groups.
But a definitive study commissioned by the New Jersey attorney general and designed by the Public Service Research Institute of Maryland found that on the New Jersey Turnpike blacks speed twice as much as white drivers--and are actually stopped less than their speeding behavior would predict. (The study was released after Harris’s book had been published.) Elsewhere, Harris conflates statistics on drug use among racial groups (roughly equal) with statistics on drug distribution (as far as we can tell, not close to equal). It is drug distributors that highway patrol officers are seeking out, not drug users.
Several of the studies used by profiling opponents to indict police show nearly equal "hit" rates between whites and blacks despite the fact that blacks were searched at higher rates. (Hit rates are the rates at which searches result in the discovery of contraband.) In Maryland, "73 percent of those stopped and searched on a section of Interstate 95 were black, yet state police reported that equal percentages of the whites and blacks who were searched had drugs or other contraband," groused the New York Times. "Studies have shown that being black substantially raises the odds of a person being stopped and searched by the police--even though blacks who are stopped are no more likely than whites to be carrying drugs," complained the New Republic last year.
What these statistically misleading statements overlook is that if the hit rates are about equal, there is no discrimination. It appears the police are focusing on legitimately suspicious behavior, and not simply picking on people by ethnicity.
The war on racial profiling has obscured two important facts: Racial profiling does not exist where the ACLU has persuaded everyone it does, such as on the nation’s highways and streets. And it does not exist where it should, in the nation’s airports and airlines.
Unfortunately, the facts have yet to catch up with the myths promoted by opponents of criminal profiling. Many Americans--including many of our leaders in politics and law enforcement--continue to treat profiling as illegitimate, as if it were disproved and discredited. That is the product of a political campaign, not of scholarly research. And it is a policy which eaves innocent Americans far more exposed to danger than they ought to be.
