Whenever a white police officer conducts a ‘stop and frisk’ on a black person, he is immediately suspected of being racially biased. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and civil rights groups have long thrived on complaints that disproportionate stops of minorities prove that America’s police are racists. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that blacks and Hispanics are victimized by black and Hispanic criminals. Thus, the stop and frisks serve to protect the minority communities from the thugs within their midst.
The only thing Jackson, Sharpton and their ilk have accomplished with their charges of police racism is to stir up a lot of animosity between the races. But then, that’s how Reverend Jesse and Reverend Al make their living.
In a New York Times op-ed column, Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "Are Cops Racist?," put to rest the myth that cops conducting stop and frisks of minorities are racially biased. Here are some excerpts from Mac Donald’s column:
FIGHTING CRIME WHERE THE CRIMINALS ARE
By Heather Mac Donald
The New York Times
June 25, 2010
THERE was a predictable chorus of criticism from civil rights groups last month when the New York Police Department released its data on stop-and-frisk interactions for 2009. The department made 575,000 pedestrian stops last year. Fifty-five percent involved blacks, even though blacks are only 23 percent of the city’s population. Whites, by contrast, were involved in 10 percent of all stops, though they make up 35 percent of the city’s population.
According to the department’s critics, that imbalance in stop rates results from officers’ racial bias. The use of these stops, they say, should be sharply curtailed, if not eliminated entirely, and some activists are suing the department to achieve that end.
Allegations of racial bias, however, ignore the most important factor governing the Police Department’s operations: crime. Trends in criminal acts, not census data, drive everything that the department does. Given the patterns of crime in New York, it is inevitable that stop rates will not mirror the city’s ethnic and racial breakdown.
Such stops happen more frequently in minority neighborhoods because that is where the vast majority of violent crime occurs — and thus where police presence is most intense. Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults. And the vast majority of the victims of violent crime were also members of minority groups.
Non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, committed 5 percent of the city’s violent crimes in 2009, 1.4 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.
Given these facts, the Police Department cannot direct its resources where they are most needed without generating racially disproportionate stop data, even though the department’s tactics themselves are colorblind. The per capita rate of shootings in the 73rd Precinct — which covers Brooklyn’s largely black Ocean Hill and Brownsville neighborhoods — is 81 times higher than in the 68th Precinct in largely white Bay Ridge. Not surprisingly, the per capita stop rate in the 73rd Precinct is 15 times higher than that in the 68th.
Some critics charge that the more than half a million stops last year indicate that the department is out of control. But the ratios of stops to population and of stops to total arrests in New York are very close to those in Los Angeles, where last summer a judge lifted a federal consent decree under which the police department had operated for the last eight years. The police stop data in Los Angeles are as racially disproportionate as New York’s, yet the judge deemed them consistent with civil rights.
For several years, the ratio of stops in New York that resulted in an arrest or summons — about 12 percent of the total — was identical for whites, blacks and Hispanics, suggesting that the police use the same measure of reasonable suspicion in stopping members of different racial and ethnic groups.
The attack on the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data is based on the false premise that police activity should mirror census data, not crime. If the critics get their way, it would strip police protection from the New Yorkers who need it most.
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