LAST WEEK, HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON joined a growing chorus of lawmakers in calling for a federal ban on racial profiling. “Profiling is not an effective law enforcement tool,” said New York’s junior senator. “The vast majority of African Americans and Hispanics who are stopped or searched have committed no crime.” As this movement gathers steam, it’s worth recalling one of the incidents that fueled the debate. In November 1999, Academy Award-winning actor Danny Glover came to New York and found he couldn’t get a taxicab. Angry, he called a press conference the next day to denounce “racial profiling.” Within hours the New York Daily News was inundated with faxes and letters from middle-class blacks complaining of similar problems. Makeup artist Donyale McRae, cousin of the late jazz singer Carmen McRae, said he could not get a taxi while dressed in a tuxedo after attending the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall. “I can hail a cab until I’m blue in the face,” complained a 62-year-old publishing executive. “They will not stop.” Al Sharpton promptly filed a class action against the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Former mayor David Dinkins chided mayor Rudolph Giuliani for not doing his job. The New York Times—acknowledging that most of the drivers are immigrants—concluded: “Racism is perpetuated by cabbies whose attitudes have roots…in colonial rule.” The drivers themselves claimed not to be bigots but admitted to racial profiling. Their defense was that they were justified in making race-based assumptions, because African Americans were more likely to take them into bad neighborhoods, rob them, or beat them for the fare. Giuliani sent undercover officers into the neighborhoods to catch the cabbies in the act, and several drivers—all from the Middle East or East Asia—were arrested. Then another trend began. Within weeks of Glover’s press conference, a string of cab drivers were killed by passengers. Two were murdered in November and December and two more in early 2000. When a 48-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, the father of five, was shot in his cab on February 24, police commissioner Howard Safir announced the formation of a special task force to investigate what the Daily News called the “wave of killings.” Meeting with police in Manhattan, 400 drivers agreed to allow police to stop cabs in traffic at any time to make sure they were not in trouble. Research showed that while only 22 licensed cab drivers, who operate mainly in midtown Manhattan, had been killed over the last decade, 230 livery drivers—who operate in poorer neighborhoods—had been victimized. By March the “profiling police” were forgotten. Instead undercover officers were posing as livery drivers in East New York and the South Bronx. Even so, during two particularly grim weeks in April, four more drivers were murdered. During the first five months of 2000 ten drivers were killed—one more than in all of 1999. Not until the city government spent $7 million helping livery services install bulletproof partitions or security cameras in their cars did the attacks subside. Now, it’s impossible to prove that the crackdown on “racial profiling” by cabbies led to the subsequent crime wave, but the sequence is suggestive. Though infuriating to honest customers, the cabbies’ discrimination is not irrational. And the effort to stamp it out adds to the danger of driving a cab. This is a cautionary tale for those who would outlaw racial profiling by police. Because the evidence suggests, for all that good liberals like Hillary Clinton want to believe otherwise, that racial profiling is an effective law enforcement tool, though it undeniably visits indignity on the innocent. Indeed, racial profiling is a predictable outcome of the stepped-up law enforcement of the 1990s. Violent crime rates have fallen in the last decade as in no other period in American history. In 1991 there were 24,700 murders in America. In 1999 there were 15,530 with a larger population. There are no doubt a number of factors at work, but one obvious one is the new style of law enforcement, pioneered in New York, where police seek to control “disorder” as well as crime. An outgrowth of George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of the importance of public order, this labor intensive policing of the streets is effective, but intrusive. And it is unfortunately law-abiding blacks who often get caught in the crossfire. Those stories about well-dressed corporate lawyers being stopped for walking through their own suburban neighborhoods or “driving while black” are true. A few months ago I discovered a burglar in the living room of our Brooklyn home. After I ushered him out the door, the police arrived and began driving me around the neighborhood looking for the suspect. Halfway down the block, the detective started shouting, “Is that him? Is that him?” He was pointing to my friend and neighbor, a gray-haired 55-year-old black man who is president of our block association. Police officers usually come from working class backgrounds and seem unable to make distinctions between street criminals and middle-class blacks. Instead of using race as one of a number of cues, they over-generalize. Obviously, there is room for improvement. Yet the key questions remain: Are the police justified in paying more attention to blacks as potential criminal suspects? And will a broad-brush campaign against racial profiling undo the progress made against crime over the last ten years? Downplaying this dilemma, liberals simply assert that the perception of black overrepresentation in crime is a result of “racial profiling.” New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer issued a 1999 report concluding that blacks and Hispanics were “disproportionately represented” in 10,000 stop-and-frisks by New York City police. Disproportionate to what he didn’t specify. Blacks constitute 44 percent of the population and were 49 percent of those stopped and frisked. They were also identified by the victims as perpetrators in 60 percent of all street crimes and constituted 55 percent of those arrested. From these numbers, you can more accurately argue that blacks were underrepresented in stop-and-frisks. Writing for the New York Times, David Cole and John Lamberth, two of the leading spokesmen on “racial profiling,” argue that, “even on its own terms, racial profiling doesn’t work.” As proof they note that “73 percent of those stopped and searched on a [Maryland] section of Interstate 95 were black, yet state police reported that equal percentages of the whites and blacks who were searched, statewide, had drugs or other contraband.” Yet these equal arrest percentages are prima facie evidence that the police were doing their jobs fairly. If they were mistaken in their assumptions about black drivers, there should have been a lower percentage of arrests among the blacks searched. In December, former attorney general Janet Reno stopped the first federal execution in almost 30 years when she and former president Bill Clinton became concerned that the killer, drug kingpin Juan Raul Garza, was subject to discrimination because of anti-Hispanic racial profiling. Yet the federal statute under which Garza was tried applies to murders committed by drug dealers, and law enforcement officers up and down the line agree that the drug trade is now controlled by African-American, Caribbean, and Latin American groups. As Heather Mac Donald noted in her seminal work on racial profiling in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal: “The notion that there are lots of heavy-duty white dealers sneaking by undetected contradicts the street experience of just about every narcotics cop you will ever to talk to.” (Garza is scheduled to be executed June 19, but there will probably be another stay as the Justice Department continues its investigation.) Meanwhile the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP want to abolish capital punishment altogether because 43 percent of the people on death row are black. Yet blacks committed 52 pe
rcent of the murders in America over the past quarter century and are arguably underrepresented on death row—for reasons we’ll see in a minute. Discussions of racial profiling almost inevitably are based on an assertion that racial and ethnic groups should be subject to procedures in the criminal justice system based on their representation in the population rather than by the number of crimes they commit. But the justice system is not the House of Representatives. There is no constitutional guarantee of equal representation in the criminal dockets. Blacks are overrepresented for one simple reason—they commit many crimes at multiples above other racial groups. This propensity toward violent crime is probably the nation’s number one social problem. Yet liberals, out of either willful naiveté or chutzpah, choose to pretend it doesn’t exist. Senator Robert Torricelli, for instance, made this claim at the confirmation hearings of attorney general John Ashcroft: “Statistically, it cannot be borne out that certain ethnic or racial groups disproportionately commit crimes. They do not.” It would be interesting to know where he is getting his statistics. Here are some of the ones he apparently is not familiar with. Murder is a common barometer for violent crime because it is nearly always reported. The homicide rate in America in 1999 was 5.7 per 100,000, more than three times the rate of other industrialized countries. The figure has dropped from 9.8 per 100,000 in 1991, and has not been this low since 1966. Yet these national figures mask an extraordinary differential between black and white homicide rates. In 1999, the murder rate for white offenders was 3.5 per 100,000—double that of some European countries. The rate among blacks was 25.5, seven times the white rate. In 1991, the disparity was even greater—5.7 for whites and 50.4 for blacks. The victimization rate is similarly disproportionate. A young black male living in Detroit or the District of Columbia from age 16 to 25 is half as likely to “die in combat” as was a U.S. soldier during World War II. While murder rates among whites have been in a slight but steady decline over the past 20 years, murder rates among blacks have fluctuated wildly. Indeed, the dramatic rise and fall of murder rates over the past 25 years is almost entirely a reflection of black crime rates. The figures for other violent crimes reflect the same pattern. While only 13 percent of the population, blacks commit 46 percent of all robberies and 21 percent of rapes. The victims of rape and armed robbery survive, and reports of the racial identity of the offender are highly reliable. Blacks are arrested for rape and robbery in the same proportions, indicating there is no bias in the system. More than 68 percent of all crimes of violence occur among blacks. The term “among blacks” is very precise. Interracial crimes usually get more press coverage, but that’s because they are less common. More than 85 percent of murders are intraracial. Black-on-black killings are 42 percent of all killings, while white-on-white killings are 46 percent. Only 15 percent of white victims were murdered by blacks, and only 6 percent of black victims were murdered by whites. It has been argued that whites do not have to resort to violence, and that they commit their crimes in a white-collar venue. “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen,” as the old song goes. But this turns out to be untrue as well. Although underrepresented in the white-collar work force, blacks commit more than 30 percent of all fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting and 25 percent of all embezzlements. In New York City recently, a black office worker was found to be robbing banks on his lunch hour. His coworkers had often remarked on his remarkable resemblance to the “Wanted” pictures they had seen posted in neighborhood banks. This pattern is so pervasive that people become inured. Here, for example, is a chronicle of all the murders reported in the Daily News from a period of one week, chosen randomly by throwing a dart at a calendar (early May, as it happens). *A 65-year-old black man was killed in Harlem when he was caught in the crossfire between two drug gangs. *A 42-year-old black man in Brooklyn was stabbed and killed by his black girlfriend. *A 54-year-old black man in the Bronx shot and killed a 37-year-old black vagrant when he found him vandalizing his car. *A 17-year-old Hispanic man was charged with beating to death his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son. *An 11-year-old Hispanic girl was raped and killed in her apartment building by a 43-year-old black ex-convict who lived in the next-door apartment. *A 32-year-old black female livery driver was shot and killed on the job by her Hispanic ex-boyfriend. *A black Brooklyn teenager was fatally stabbed during a street argument. *A white woman and two white men were shot execution-style in her apartment in Manhattan during a drug robbery. The woman, who once had a bit part in Dirty Dancing, had dealt marijuana for years. Two black ex-convicts were identified as the suspected killers. *The fire department discovered the body of a black woman in a vacant lot. *An 80-year-old white woman in Greenwich Village was stabbed to death in her apartment. A few days later, a 28-year-old black female drug addict was arrested. The woman had befriended the drug addict and often let her use her phone. *A newborn black baby was found dead under the boardwalk at Coney Island. The mother was being sought. During the same week, the FBI gunned down a 35-year-old Pakistani fugitive in a midtown hotel. The man was wanted for kidnapping a 17-year-old girl in Las Vegas and subsequently killing a man during a carjacking. Also, the daughter of Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer complained that she had been racially profiled after being stopped for a traffic violation. Why is racial profiling seen as such a critical issue among all this mayhem? The main reason, I think, is the tendency of any group to externalize evil. It is much more reassuring to perceive violence and evil coming from without than within. Thus, the killing of a single black man by a group of mostly white police officers is remembered years afterwards while the day-to-day mayhem goes virtually unnoticed. Is there anything that can be done to stem this tide of violence? Continued law enforcement has already brought big dividends. It is an open question whether those dividends will continue in the face of a national crusade against racial profiling. Police are likelier to throw up their hands and tolerate greater disorder than they are to be aggressive and risk accusations of profiling. But there is one place where the justice system does egregiously and visibly discriminate, and it is overdue for attention by crusaders targeting racial injustice. Studies have shown that prosecutors, judges, and juries are six times less likely to impose capital punishment when the murder victim is black rather than white. This probably helps to explain why blacks are six times more likely than whites to be murder victims. It is also why black convicts are underrepresented on death row. Most of their murders are committed against other blacks. During the 1930s, when similar, although less pervasive, violence engulfed Italian neighborhoods, cities often adopted a tacit policy not to lean too heavily on enforcing the law. “They only kill each other” was the byword. As long as killing was confined to other gangsters, the justice system turned a blind eye. Only when the violence spilled into the larger society was it punished. The same principle remains a constant temptation for police today, and the campaign against racial profiling will only encourage it. When blacks kill other blacks, the system is less responsive. Enforcing the death penalty for black-on-black murder would be the best way to break the back of the cycle of violence in black communities. It would also be highly embarrassing. It would explode the myth that violence comes from outside the black community and that bigoted law enforcement or white-on-black crime is the principal problem. More t
han 85 percent of the additional people put on death row would be black. It’s a painful and difficult decision for liberals and their African-American political allies to face. It’s certainly understandable why they prefer to go on hand-wringing over “racial profiling.” William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn. His most recent article for The Weekly Standard was “The Myth of Alternative Energy” (May 21, 2001).
