Posted by Jay Livingston
Under current New York City policy, Blacks are far more likely to be stopped and frisked by the police. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post (here) defends the policy.
In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects -- almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.Needless to say, some people – especially people likely to be stopped and frisked – objected (see Ta-Nehisi Coates for example.)
Those statistics represent the justification for New York City's controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk.
Here’s an analogy, though as with most analogies, it’s imperfect. Maybe it’s completely wrong. It is merely submitted for your approval . . . or disapproval.
Suppose that back in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s, a Bloomberg-like mayor looked at New York City’s contracts for construction, paving, concrete, etc. and discovered that there was a good deal of fraud and waste because the work went mostly to mob-affiliated companies. The city was paying too much and sometimes getting shoddy goods. The great majority of these companies, or the people who ran them, had Italian names.
So the mayor decrees that all companies with Italian names, or companies whose owners or directors are Italian-Americans, will be barred from doing business with the city. To become eligible for city contracts, such a company must submit to a thorough audit of its books, a review of previous deals that the company has had with the city, and a thorough background check of its owners’ or executives’ contacts – business and social. Only after passing these rigorous investigations can an Italianate company be allowed to bid on city business.
The new policy will save the taxpayers millions of dollars, and it will dry up an income stream that had been flowing to mobsters. Win-win.
Sure, some Italian-Americans would protest, but the inconvenience and resentment of at most a few hundred businesses or even a couple million people is a small price to pay in the fight against organized crime and for honest government.
I went to look up something about RICO on Wikipedia and found this semi-relevant quote: "Although its primary intent was to deal with organized crime, Blakey said that Congress never intended it to merely apply to the Mob. He once told Time, "We don't want one set of rules for people whose collars are blue or whose names end in vowels, and another set for those whose collars are white and have Ivy League diplomas.""
ReplyDeleteThat same Wikipedia article notes that Blakey won't say whether the Italian name of the acronym was intentional. But he's right that the law was written so that it might be used in white-collar crime cases. In fact, the breadth of its scope and its inclusion of civil lawsuits means that it can be used against just about any group. And it has been, as the list of cases shows.
ReplyDeleteA pretty good analogy. Another one I heard was that the mayor is obviously deeply troubled by mass shootings. Mass shootings are almost always carried out by young white men. So in order to protect ourselves from mass shooters, we need to stop, question and frisk more young white men.
ReplyDeletePeople who generally subscribe to a statement like: "People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people" are generally fine with a group of people living in fear of the government so long as it isn't them.
Ray Kelly said, according to testimony given by state Senator and former police captain Eric Adams, that it's his job to instill fear in black and Latino men in order to get guns off the street. This goes far beyond saying that stops will naturally reflect the demographics of criminal behavior.
Keep an entire population afraid and you keep the few troublemakers among them afraid as well. Israeli soldiers have spoken out about similar tactics in Palestinian territories such as catch-and-release nighttime raids and even throwing glow sticks through random windows in the middle of the night to let families know that they had been there without them having the slightest idea why.
It's classic psychological warfare, and trotting out "black on black" crime statistics is just a rehash of the White Man's Burden to "protect them from themselves."