COPS ARE NOT THE ONLY RACIAL PROFILERS

Recently, I blogged "Racial Profiling By Police Not Altogether Bad" (8-1-09) and "Racial Profiling As Effective Police Work" (8-2-09). I pointed out that when I was a cop, racial profiling was used as an effective crime fighting tool and that today, the judicious use of racial profiling continues to be just as effective in fighting crime.

In today’s Townhall.com, columnist Walter Williams covers a whole range of racial profiling, especially its use in the field of medicine. Williams, who happens to be black, also includes racial profiling as it applies to criminal behavior. That is the part I have chosen to reproduce below. His column shows that cops are not the only racial profilers – even Jesse Jackson is one!

IS RACIAL PROFILING RACIST?
by Walter E. Williams

Townhall.com
August 19, 2009

Harvard Professor Henry Gates' arrest has given new life to the issue of racial profiling……

……Surely, race and ethnicity are not perfect indicators of ……. criminal behavior; however, there are concrete factual data that surely indicate associations. Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang says, "For four violent offenses -- homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- the crime rates for blacks are at least 10 times as high as they are for whites."

In a 1999 article, "Capital Cabbies Salute Race Profiling," James Owens writes, "If racial profiling is racism, then the cab drivers of Washington, D.C., they themselves mainly blacks and Hispanics, are all for it. A District taxicab commissioner, Sandra Seegars, who is black, issued a safety-advice statement urging D.C.'s 6,800 cabbies to refuse to pick up 'dangerous looking' passengers. She described 'dangerous looking' as a young black guy ... with shirttail hanging down longer than his coat, baggy pants, unlaced tennis shoes."

The Pizza Marketing Quarterly carried a story of charges of racial discrimination filed in St. Louis against Papa John’s pizza delivery services. Papa John's district manager said she could not and would not ask her drivers to put their lives on the line. She added that the racial discrimination accusation is false because 75 to 85 percent of the drivers in the complaining neighborhood are black and, moreover, most of those drivers lived in the very neighborhood being denied delivery service.

Some years ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson complained, "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." ……