10/16/00 9:40 a.m.
Racial Profiling?
You can only run so far from the truth.

By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department

here was much discussion of "racial profiling" in last week's presidential debate, but after scouring the transcript in search of some honesty on the subject, I've come away disappointed. A good friend is a psychiatrist here in Los Angeles, and when he treats patients prone to rationalization he falls back on a time-tested maxim: You can only run so far from the truth.

And the truth, gentle readers, is that in the United States of America in the year 2000 A.D., certain ethnic groups tend to violate the law in numbers far in excess of their representation in the population. The debate may rage as to why this is so, but only after accepting the truth can honest dialogue take place.

Don't take my word for it. Go to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Statistics website and look up Tables 40 and 46, where you will discover that in 1998, the most recent statistics available, blacks committed about 38 percent of the reported robberies while making up about 13 percent of the population. Consider further that nearly all of those robberies were committed by black males between the ages of 15 and 24, and you'll come to the realization that a tiny demographic group is responsible for a whole lot of trouble out there.

These statistics are based on the "perceived race" of the perpetrators as reported by the victims. To disbelieve these numbers, you must subscribe to the phantasmagoric notion that robbery victims, a large number of whom are black themselves, are so consumed with racial animus that they will falsely describe their assailants to the police so as to further a negative stereotype.

Still not satisfied? Try conducting this little exercise. Go to the APB Online website and click on "Police Scanners." You can listen to live broadcasts from police dispatch centers in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and many other cities. Choose a city, and on a piece of paper make three columns, marked "white," "black," and "other." Listen to the broadcasts as you're absorbing the wisdom contained in the other NRO features today, and make a mark in the appropriate column when you hear a criminal suspect described. Try it for an hour or for a few hours over several days. You'll soon see a pattern develop.

You may even reach the same conclusion reached by none other than Jesse Jackson, who in 1994 said, "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 someone white and feel relieved."

Don't look for any similarly honest quotes on the matter during the next debate.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management .)