What's Right.

Support Your Police

My family recently traveled through a small airport. I breezed through the security checkpoint, but my wife and our 15-month-old baby were pulled over for a more thorough search. As the guard passed the metal detector over the baby's body, another traveler turned to me and said, "I guess they fear that al-Qaeda's recruiting them young these days."

To understand why security screeners are inspecting babies as closely as men, turn to the pages of Heather Mac Donald's new book about racial profiling: Are Cops Racist? newly published by Ivan R. Dee.

A dozen years ago, some 2,000 New Yorkers lost their lives to criminal homicide in a typical year -- the equivalent of a 9/11 every 18 months. By the time he left office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani had reduced that number by nearly two-thirds. Giuliani's anti-crime achievements sparked imitation across the country. And how did the nation's leading newspapers and its governing administration interpret this incredible success? How else but as an outburst of systematic racism?

To listen to the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Times, and other such voices, American police forces were deliberately and unfairly singling out young minority males on the streets and roads. "Racial profiling," they called it. Law-abiding people were being harassed and even arrested for no offense worse than "driving while black."

The accusation, Mac Donald shows, is a hoax -- a hoax made up of two elements, one a complete falsehood, the other a half-truth.

Police in America do not stop motorists or pedestrians for no reason -- they almost always have a cause, usually an infraction of some sort. As Mac Donald shows, these stops actually line up pretty exactly with the proportion of infractions committed by minorities. Blacks and Hispanics are much more likely than whites to drive significantly faster than the speed limit and to drive cars with broken tail-lights and other equipment violations. In fact, she claims, there's no evidence at all to support the proposition that a law-abiding black motorist is more likely to be pulled over than a law-abiding white one.