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Derbyshire has an article in the current (Feb. 19) issue of National
Review entitled, "In
Defense of Racial Profiling: Where Is Our Common Sense?" I am
a great fan of Mr.
Derbyshire's, and even in this article there is much with which
I agree. But his conclusion — that racial profiling is an acceptable
policy — is wrong.
Mr. Derbyshire is correct in his major premise, that racial profiling
is perfectly rational. A disproportionate amount of street crime
is committed by people who are young, and male, and black, and if
you are all three then it makes perfect sense for the police to
keep an especially keen eye on you, and pull you over more often,
question you more carefully, and press you more aggressively to
allow a search of your car. That is, it makes perfect sense if all
the police are trying to do is maximize in the short term the number
of their successful searches and arrests.
But that is not the police's overarching mission. They have to think
of the long-term, too, and successful policing requires the cooperation
of the rest of the community. If racially biased policing is an
established policy, then that cooperation will be jeopardized. Moreover,
the order which the police are charged with maintaining includes
not just the prevention of crime but the racially unbiased treatment
of law-abiding citizens.
Let's put the shoe on the other foot. The Left frequently supports
the use of racial and ethnic preferences in university admissions,
arguing that this discrimination is justified because it increases
classroom racial and ethnic diversity, and racial and ethnic diversity
results in greater viewpoint diversity. The conservative response
is that, even if it is true that you might
| “Mr.
Derbyshire is wrong is in his apparent belief that a police
policy of stopping individuals because of their race is
consistent with 'the concept of belonging to a single
nation.'” |
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increase "diversity" this way, and even if it is true that such
diversity has educational advantages, it's just not worth it. That
is, it's not that discrimination is irrational in terms of a particular
narrow goal, but that the countervailing costs — the unfairness,
sacrifice of principle, resentment, stigmatization, and so forth
— are too great.
Maybe the odds favor a black student's being disadvantaged or having
an activist view, but there will be exceptions, just as most blacks
are law-abiding. Finally, conservatives in the college-admissions
context quickly and correctly reject the leftist defense that race
is "just one factor" because, whenever it is the deciding factor,
then in those cases discrimination on the basis of race has occurred.
The same, pace Mr. Derbyshire, is true for profiling.
Here's another example. Suppose that a city agency is interested
in hiring only people with a high-school diploma, and in that city
the overwhelming majority of whites have a diploma and the overwhelming
majority of Hispanics don't. Rather than have to go to the trouble
of checking out the records of each applicant, it may be much more
cost-efficient simply to hire all whites and no Hispanics. But I
think that most of us would insist that each applicant be assessed
individually. (Clearly, that is what the law requires.)
Let me now hasten to add some points on which Mr. Derbyshire and
I agree. I am not condemning decisionmaking that relies on neutral
criteria that happen to have a disproportionate effect on
some racial or ethnic group. For instance, if Mayor Giuliani decides
to adopt aggressive but race-neutral policing tactics — like
sending more beat patrolmen into high-crime areas — that's
perfectly fine, even if it results in arrests that are disproportionately
African American. Or, in my earlier examples, there is nothing wrong
with a college insisting on high SATs or a city agency on high-school
diplomas, even if that has a disproportionate effect on some racial
or ethnic groups.
Nor, of course, do I have any problem with the police including
race or ethnicity in the description of a particular suspect. To
be sure, the lines can blur between this and racial profiling. In
upstate New York recently, for example, the police decided to question
every black in a small town because they were looking for a black
robbery suspect and there weren't very many blacks there. The court,
correctly in my view, upheld the police. But over the line, again
in my opinion, would be a decision to stop all Hispanic youths in
a neighborhood and search them for drugs because the police knew
there was a drug-dealing Hispanic gang there. The difference between
the two cases is that a specific crime being investigated in the
first example, but not in the second.
I also agree with Mr. Derbyshire that requiring individual policemen
to record the race of each person they stop is a bad idea, because
it will pressure them to stop some people they might not really
need to stop, while passing up some other people that they do. I
was told that the District of Columbia's police chief — who
happens to be black — made exactly this point in a recent interview.
He didn't like the record-keeping proposal. If I've already stopped
two black men on a particular evening, he said, I may be reluctant
to stop a third, even if would make sense to.
Mr. Derbyshire deserves credit for presenting Professor Randall
Kennedy's arguments against racial profiling — and indeed he
fails to refute them. Being stopped or searched because of your
race is a big deal. It's a much bigger deal than being stopped because
one is male or young in light of our sad history of racism. And
one can reject racial profiling without requiring racial quotas
for arrests. Indeed, both should be rejected for the same reason:
The state should be colorblind.
Mr. Derbyshire concludes with a stirring warning that "Americans
are drifting away from the concept of belonging to a single nation."
I agree. I also agree that listening to people like Al Sharpton
is a recipe for social disaster. But where I think Mr. Derbyshire
is wrong is in his apparent belief that a police policy of stopping
individuals because of their race — even if it is just one
of the factors considered — is consistent with "the concept
of belonging to a single nation." It isn't.
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