The cop’s best gal, Heather McDonald, has tried to single-handedly undo one of the few reforms to policing that nearly everyone, cops excepted, else has agreed goes beyond the pale: racial profiling.* Her weapon of choice? Redefinition.

The anti-“racial profiling” juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities. The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. Yet politicians are swarming on board. In February, President George W. Bush joined the rush, declaring portentously: “Racial profiling is wrong, and we will end it in America.”

Too bad no one asked President Bush: “What exactly do you mean by ‘racial profiling,’ and what evidence do you have that it exists?” For the anti-profiling crusaders have created a headlong movement without defining their central term and without providing a shred of credible evidence that “racial profiling” is a widespread police practice.

This would be terrible if true. The good news is that its not true. The generous view is that nobody told McDonald, so she’s left to her own devices.

Two meanings of “racial profiling” intermingle in the activists’ rhetoric. What we may call “hard” profiling uses race as the only factor in assessing criminal suspiciousness: an officer sees a black person and, without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons.

“Soft” racial profiling is using race as one factor among others in gauging criminal suspiciousness: the highway police, for example, have intelligence that Jamaican drug posses with a fondness for Nissan Pathfinders are transporting marijuana along the northeast corridor. A New Jersey trooper sees a black motorist speeding in a Pathfinder and pulls him over in the hope of finding drugs.

McDonald’s argument, buried below self-serving anecdotes of cop heroics, is that the former, “hard” profiling, rarely happened and the latter, “soft” profiling, is just reasonable policing, despite the taboo notion that blacks are more criminal-y because that’s just how it is.  As McDonald notes, even Rudy Giuliani says so, and would he lie?

Except this ignores a few things. First is the experience, both on the highway and the sidewalk with New York’s infamous and unconstitutional stop and frisk, where millions (not dozens, or hundreds, or tens of thousands, but millions) of minority kids were tossed and found to be . . . completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

Why were the stopped and searched? Walking while black. Driving while black. Breathing while black. If cops don’t toss people in white neighborhoods, then the numbers will be all about blacks. Even McDonald is subject to the Newton’s third law.

But that’s just the flagrant profiling, when a cop is told to make his numbers and aims at the most likely target, likely being his prejudice that the black guy is more likely to have weed or a gun than, say, well it doesn’t matter, since they’re only tossing people in black neighborhoods.

But there are other definitional aspects to racial profiling that McDonald ignores, such as the interpretation of facts through the lens of bias. A white guy reaches into a car and the cop figures he’s getting his driver’s license, as requested. A black guy reaches into a car and he’s going to pull out a gun and kill the cop. Thus, kill him first. Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six, you know.

The use or racial profiling as an interpretative metric falls into McDonald’s “taboo” argument, that blacks are more prone to commit crimes and therefore being black is a totally reasonable basis for a cop to consider it as a factor in their calculus of whether to stop, search or shoot.

Judging by arrest rates, minorities are vastly overrepresented among drug traffickers. Blacks make up over 60 percent of arrests in New Jersey for drugs and weapons, though they are 13.5 percent of the population. Against such a benchmark, the state police search rates look proportionate.

This has been explained by what McDonald calls the “circularity argument,” that focus on blacks and more blacks get arrested, justifying more focus on blacks.

The circularity argument is an insult to law enforcement and a prime example of the anti-police advocates’ willingness to rewrite reality. Though it is hard to prove a negative—in this case, that there is not a large cadre of white drug lords operating in the inner cities—circumstantial evidence rebuts the activists’ insinuation. Between 1976 and 1994, 64 percent of the homicide victims in drug turf wars were black, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of FBI data.

Some sly shifts in there: First, we’re suddenly talking about drug lords. No, every white guy isn’t a drug lord, but neither is every black guy. Second, we’re using data from the crack epidemic, which was an inner city phenomenon that has, thankfully, passed.

McDonald goes on to describe the mad cop skillz of noting anomalies in behavior, like blacks avoiding eye contact or checking to see if they’re being followed. She has the gall to chalk this up to cause and effect.

Hard as it is to believe, criminals actually do keep turning around to look at officers, though it would seem an obvious give-away. “Thank God they’re stupid, or we’d be out of a job,” the sergeant laughs.

The irony of this quote flies over McDonald’s head. When a black guy gets stopped twice a week for nothing, is it surprising he’s concerned? After all, the next time could be the last, and not because the cops suddenly decide to stop racial profiling. McDonald’s use of anecdotes where cops found drugs or guns only proves her ignoring the exceptionally low percentage of stops that turn out well-founded.

The racial profiling analysis profoundly confuses cause and effect. “Police develop tactics in response to the disproportionate victimization of minorities by minorities, and you are calling the tactics the problem?” Flynn marvels.

The key failing here is the “police develop tactics” line, which glosses over the problem that the tactic developed is assume every black person to be more likely to be a criminal. If the tactic was based on “articulable suspicion,” without regard to race, nobody would have a problem as it wouldn’t be racial profiling. If the cop interpreted the same acts of black person as a white person, rather than more likely to be threatening or indicative of crime, there would be no problem.

Heather McDonald doesn’t apologize for racial profiling, but seeks to justify it because, well, blacks are more prone to crime, so being black is reason enough for a cop to be suspicious. She says it’s not her, but the data. Here’s the data:

In 2010, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 601,285 times.
518,849 were totally innocent (86 percent).
315,083 were black (54 percent).
189,326 were Latino (33 percent).
54,810 were white (9 percent).
295,902 were aged 14-24 (49 percent).

In 2011, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 685,724 times.
605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent).**
350,743 were black (53 percent).
223,740 were Latino (34 percent).
61,805 were white (9 percent).
341,581 were aged 14-24 (51 percent).

In 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 533,042 times
473,300 were totally innocent (89 percent).
286,684 were black (55 percent).
166,212 were Latino (32 percent).
50,615 were white (10 percent).

If you happen to be one of those black or Latino people getting tossed for no good reason, you’ve got a pretty good gripe about racial profiling, because they, just like McDonald, are entitled to their constitutional right to be left alone, despite their race.

*Edit: As noted in the comments (and as I should have made clear from the outset), this was a 2001 post by Heather McDonald. So why revisit it 16 years later? Because I didn’t write about it at the time (there was no SJ back then) and the return to the “old ways” of tough on crime compel me to remind people why we don’t do this and shouldn’t forget why this was a very wrong, very bad, tactic, so we don’t forget and aren’t condemned to repeat the past.

**By “totally innocent,” it means that police found no basis whatsoever to arrest or cite the individual. Those who weren’t “totally innocent” received some form of legal process, possibly for a serious offense, possibly for a trivial offense or possibly for mouthing off to the cop after being pissed about being tossed for the third time that week on their way to school. It does not necessarily mean they had guns or drugs.