hard heads soft hearts |
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a scratch pad for half-formed thoughts by a liberal political junkie who's nobody special. ''Hard Heads, Soft Hearts'' is the title of a book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, and tends to be a favorite motto of neoliberals, especially liberal economists. mobile
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Friday, June 14, 2002
I have nothing against your racial profiling article. But i wished you had picked a harder target. And I especially wished you had made the super-important point that the fuss over racial profiling is inseparable from the obtuse injustice that is our Drug War. The simplest way to show this is a numerical example. Suppose blacks commit 50% of all murders and robberies, possess 20% of all drugs (for consumption & dealing purposes), and are 10% of the population. Lets further suppose .1% of whites are murderers/robbers, 20% possess drugs (absolute realism is not the point here). That means, to make the numbers come out approximately right, 1% of blacks are murderers/robbers, and 45% possess drugs. So then, the conservatives trumpet: Random stops of blacks are *10 times* more likely to be murderers/robbers than whites. Obviously racial profiling is a good thing, else we will have more murders/robberies. So let's say the police stop blacks 5 times more than they stop whites. Two problems: 1) most murders/robberies are not solved by random stops of the general population. Instead, the predominant types of crimes dealt with random stops are drugs, resisting arrest, driving without a license, etc.. 2) Something very strange has happened. Blacks are only twice as likely to possess drugs as whites, but because they are stopped five times more, they are *ten* times more likely to be arrested on drug charges. Blacks are not inherently unfair people, and neither are cops. If the only consequences of racial profiling was 1) increased inconvenience for law-abiding minorities 2) caching more bad guys (robbers/murderers), they would accept profiling. Perhaps not cheerfully, but they would accept it. The problem is that blacks view the stated goal of catching more bad guys as a pretext to incarcerate more and more blacks for non-violent (i.e. drug) offences, thus improving police statistics and their revenue, the prison-industrial complex, etc. And largely, they are right. I'm not saying police are bad people. They are merely following the incentives set by shameless politicians of the Ashcroft variety (and cowardly politicians of the Clinton-Gore variety), which equates the unpleasant practice of drug dealing not with selling tobacco or alcohol or pornography or sweet, sweet can . .dy, but with murder, rape, and pillage (gang warfare arising out of drug-dealing is another matter). The racial profiling debate is actually very similar to the affirmative action debate in college admissions, in that minorites cling to the dubious, certainly very small advantages, of affirmative action, as a small recompense for the huge disadvantages of lousy public schools and lack of social capital. And most conservatives make a mountain out of the tiny molehill of an issue that is affirmative action, while keeping mum about the real gaping sources of inequality. Frankly, whites get much more benefit from bitching about affirmative action than they would if AA was completely abolished and the few slots on the margin that now go to minorities went instead to their racial brethren. (I am aware of the sincere desire of many conservatives to improve minority schooling, though it was precisely this issue - of taking an active, non-fatalistic, interest in improving social capital, without gratuitous, counter-productive, not to mention innacurrate, scapegoating and stigmatizing - that caused Glenn Loury to quit the conservative movement -. However, even on vouchers/ school choice there is a lot more talk than action. Bush spent precisely none of his political capital trying to pass vouchers - or elect the "loser" Schundler) |