They cannot help themselves. The New York Times, that is. With absolute regularity, they continue to report certain issues in the most biased and fact-avoiding way possible.
A Sept. 1, 2011, story by Al Baker covers a federal judge’s ruling that a case challenging the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” policy can go forward. But the story is so one-sided that it practically topples over as you’re reading it.
Advertisement
The suit was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a leftist outfit that sued Reagan over Grenada and El Salvador, represented performance artist Karen Finley in a suit against the National Endowment for the Arts, represented a Palestinian “immigrant activist,” and so forth. The Times naturally omits this history. The suit alleges that the NYPD’s policy is based “not on reasonable suspicion of individuals but on racial profiling.”
The judge (who sounds like she might have done a stint at the CCR at some time in her career) declined to dismiss the case, saying, “This case presents an issue of great public concern. Writ large, that issue is the disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos who become entangled in our criminal justice system, as compared to Caucasians.” Note the passive voice. Like flies in a spider’s web, they become “entangled” in the criminal justice system.
The Times story then duly repeats statistics offered by the CCR’s assistant legal director, Christopher Dunn. “In 2010, city officers made more street stops — 601,055 — than in any previous 12-month period.” Proving what exactly? The story editorializes: “As a practical matter, the stops display a measurable racial disparity: Black and Hispanic people generally represent more than 85 percent of those stopped by the police, though their combined populations make up a small share of the city’s racial composition.”
Okay. Are there any other relevant statistics here? The story does cite Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s position that “the racial breakdown of the stops correlates to the racial breakdown of crime suspects.” But no sooner does the story allude to the elephant in the room than it takes issue with the NYPD, warning that the rising number of stops is “bringing the practice under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers [none is quoted], academics [ditto], the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union.”
With the exception of the glancing reference to Kelly’s explanation, the Times never provides the most relevant statistics regarding minorities and violent crime, which concern not the percentage of blacks or Hispanics in the population, but the percentage who commit violent crimes. City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald supplied them:
Blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.
According to the New York Times and the CCR, police should respond to crimes only in proportion to population statistics. They should deploy as many officers to Central Park South as to Bedford/Stuyvesant. And they should stop and frisk only a percentage of minority suspects.
Since 1994, the NYPD has aggressively deployed officers to high-crime districts and kept careful tabs on patterns of criminal activity. Crime has dropped 77 percent, to levels not seen since the early 1960s. In its reply brief, the NYPD pointed out that it deploys resources based upon crime statistics, witnesses, and citizen complaints — the successful CompStat program. What it could have added is that most of those complaints come from law-abiding blacks and Hispanics.
People who live in high-crime areas (not federal judges, lawyers for the CCR, or New York Times reporters) are very happy to have increased police attention to their neighborhoods. The overwhelming majority of crime victims are also members of minority groups, and since the mid-1990s — thanks to the kind of policing initiated by the Giuliani administration and under fire now — they have seen crime rates in their communities plummet.
The Times is fixated on the idea of racial profiling. No doubt the Times missed the news that about half of the members of the NYPD are members of minority groups themselves. But if the kind of harassment represented by this suit and the tendentious reporting of the New York Times succeeds in intimidating the police, the most successful reform of city life in 100 years could be undone.
Federal statistics track with these. FBI has numbers like, 15% of the population, 50% of the murders and 30% of the prison population for one minority group (not the exact numbers, this is what I recall from reading a report on crime). The real question is how we stop it.
It isn't ethnicity/heritage that is responsible. It is either culture or economics. I tend to believe the culture leads to some of it but, I'm not a sociologist (I'm not even sure if I spelled it correctly).
The Times piece, linked above, is nothing like Charen's description, which is probably why, once again, she doesn't link to it.
Perhaps the most outrageous error in Charen's column is this:
"With the exception of the glancing reference to Kelly’s explanation, the Times never provides the most relevant statistics regarding minorities and violent crime, which concern not the percentage of blacks or Hispanics in the population, but the percentage who commit violent crimes. City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald supplied them [. . . .]"
I say "perhaps" because I'm not sure, but a quick search of the Manhattan Institute's website doesn't indicate that it filed an amicus brief in this case. CCR of course filed a brief and a statistical report which is being challenged by the City of New York, not by the Manhattan Institute. So did Heather Mac Donald "supply" any statistics?
Again, I am not sure. Perhaps Charen can tell us who Heather Mac Donald supplied these statistics to, besides Charen.
MikeB - Thanks for the link. In my view, the article is exactly as Mona Charen portrayed it. Is your point that Heather MacDonald should have gone to the Times and provided it with her statistics? Is that how journalism works? Isn't it the responsibility of the reporter to obtain such statistics when writing the article - statistics which, I assume, are from public sources? Isn't it the reporter's responsibility to interview people from all sides of a controversy? That's the way it was supposed to work when I was in "J" school. I guess there's a new model.
Roger H.: The story is about a judge ruling that there's enough evidence for a case to go ahead. The story is not about how a judge erroneously ruled that there's enough evidence for the case to go ahead. Charen would have written the latter story, which is not about what happened, but about what she believes should have happened.
There will come a time when the reporter covering the story will write about the challenge to the statistics which, as he notes, the defendants will mount. But, as I said, unless there was evidence submitted refuting the statistics entered into evidence (and there probably wasn't, because for purposes of this motion the plaintiffs' evidence is simply assumed to be true so there's no point in challenging it unless you can show that it is not reasonably possible for the evidence to convince a jury), he did his job as a reporter.
Since you went to J school, you will recognize that this was a beat piece and not an investigative piece. And it's certainly not intended to be an opinion piece.
Mike B- Ms. Charen isn't talking about the trial, she's talking about a newspaper story. Duhh. Why would Heather MacDonald file an amicus brief? She's trying to rebut a biased report by the NYT, not get involved in the lawsuit the Times is allegedly reporting on.
The whole slant of the Times, and other left-wing organs can be summed up by the stereotypical headline, "More people than ever in prison, despite drop in crime rates". I suspect you subscribe to a similar point of view.
Let me repeat that. The story is about the case. Good, we've got that one clear.
Now, in the story, the reporter says that one side released statistics, presumably the statistics the plaintiffs relied on and introduced into evidence. The reporter also says that the other side plans to contest the reliability and methodology of the report of the plaintiff's statistical expert.
What is the reporter supposed to do here? Go out and disprove the statistics? Where's the slanted reporting? Where are the statistics in the case that the reporter failed to give equal time to? Answer: Nowhere. The statistics Charen is citing are outside the case. If they're inside the case then yes, the reporter, to be fair, should have raised them. But there's no indication they're in the case. If they were, wouldn't Charen have said that the Times failed to mention the following statistics "introduced into evidence by the defendants" as opposed to "supplied [to Charen, the world, the judge?] by Heather Mac Donald"? The reporter duly noted that the statistics will be challenged. That's awfully fair.
Any reasonable person reading the NY Times article could not conclude anything other than that the article is as biased as Mona states. And we are talking about reporting got it? Reporting, do you get that?
One other inconvenient statistic is the overwhelming majority of victims are black and Hispanic. These thugs are preying on their own people. So in instituting the policy the police are protecting black and Hispanic communities from violent crime perpetrated by their own people. Whites aren't going into black neighborhoods to rob, mug, rape or kill black people. When there is a rare case of white on black crime (or alleged) you can be sure the Reverend Al Sharpton and his fellow race-baiters will be there to exploit it.
1.) The NYT is irrelevant, and has been to people who espouse commonsense and decency, for many years.
I'd rather subscribe to Pravda than even glance at a headline in that tabloid-pretending-to-practice-journalism.
2.) NRO's constant referring to that trash rag gives it an air of legitimacy that it does not possess. You would be far better served to ignore it completely, as any sane person does.
You cannot change the minds of the liberal believers. Those who worship at the altar of liberalism can only be defeated - not shown the truth - which they shun at all costs.
There are many times more men than women in prison. Does that mean we should be stopping and frisking more women?
It would be interesting to see if the NY Times staff mirrors the demographics of the population. Just looking at the editorial page it seems they are guilty of bias in hiring!
RickP, that point about prison populations is excellent.
I'm male. Males are ridiculously more likely to shoot cops than females. Does it bug me that, when a cop pulls me over, he is far more sensitive to me in an IFF (identify friend or foe) sense than if my wife were in the car instead?
No. It doesn't. I admit it, it doesn't. I just don't get the sense I'm being unfairly singled out merely because your basic cop killer is almost invariably a guy.
You know where I am going with this. Take it the rest of the way.
Oh the hypocrisy of the government-shrinking tea partier who rails against judicial oversight of questionable police practices. That your concern for "liberty" appears to begin with your wallet but stop short of (shackled) wrists betrays an extreme ignorance of the array of threats presented by government overreach. I am only as paranoid as the silly billy goats who penned the Bill of Rights.
This quote alone from the judge should make the tea in your veins run cold:
“In sum,” she wrote, “I find that there is a triable issue of fact as to whether N.Y.P.D. supervisors have a custom or practice of imposing quotas on officer activity, and whether such quotas can be said to be the ‘moving force,’ behind widespread SUSPICIONLESS STOPS.” (caps mine)
Suspicionless stops? A suspicionless stop is the government intruding into your day, detaining you (however briefly) FOR NO REASON. That the judge would acknowledge this concept without denouncing it as antithetical to 4th amendment jurisprudence since Terry v. Ohio does not speak well for NY jurists. That you would vilify the judge for merely acknowledging that a controversy ripe for court is presented when statistics indicate that this practice is being used disproportionately against people of darker hues speaks poorly of you.
I don't care if the hairiest socialist stalking your most intense fever dreams is bringing the case, this matter should hardly be a bridge too far for any true conservative.
(btw - Charen is right that the NYT article is thin on facts - so is hers; after reading both, I am no closer to understanding the nature of the NYPD practices at issue)
Follow
