Sometimes I Hate Being Right

[morrigirl]

For the last five or so years, as Manhattan has grown increasingly gentrified, I have been telling people that if the island continues to change at the current rate Harlem will be all white by 2020. Looks like I'm right.

PS Oh, and just in case anyone was worried, racial profiling is alive and well in New York City.

Comments

[electra310.livejournal.com]

[...]percentage-wise, cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspects. That suggests less rigorous search standards used by cops against white people.

Uh, they proofread much? If you have twice as many successful searches on one group than another, and that group has a much lower overall percentage, wouldn't that suggest a more rigorous standard being used? Anyway, it's an interesting study that suggests problems certainly exist, but I think they are discounting too easily the claim that Terry stops are being made correspondent to descriptions of violent offenders. If they want to contend that stops are being made on people who aren't doing anything wrong, that likely means they're being stopped while in pursuit of another suspect.

Go into the records of the descriptions given by witnesses of offenders to various crimes and do a study there. If what they're saying is true, and they're stopping more African-Americans, not necessarily because they commit more crimes, but because they commit more crimes where they remain at large for a period of time, then what do you do to stop that? You're not going to tell officers that they can't ask witnesses what race a perpetrator was, or tell them that if they're looking for a Latino suspect, that they'd better frisk as many Caucasians as they do Latinos. Racial animus in the police force is something that absolutely must be weeded out, but I think that in this article, they're pointing the finger without sufficient evidence, which is exactly what they're so worked up about in the first place.