Something is Wrong: Exploring the Roots of Violence

346 Section Six: Curricular Resources blacks, more than 70% of the drivers stopped by state troopers are black. This statistical “discrimination”—to liberals, the worst sin—has prompted the usual commotion and calls for investigation.

More Black Criminals than White As of June 30 [1995], close to 6.8 percent of black male adults in America were in jail or prison compared to less than 1 percent of white male adults.

This is a tragedy all right. But it’s a tragedy spawned for the most part by a permissive system of social coddling in this country that has black ghetto thugs practically immune to old-fashioned standards of right and wrong.

It is not a tragedy, as some would claim, spawned by widespread racism among our American police.

Ken Hamblin, Conservative Chronicle, December 27, 1995.

Racial Melodrama To check up on troopers in future, patrol cars are being equipped with videocams to record all traffic stops.

(Consider the waste in having policemen watching tapes at headquarters instead of being out protecting life and property, their proper function.) A more immediate result was the firing by New Jersey’s governor, at the behest of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and “Black Ministers Council of New Jersey,” of the State Police Superintendent, Carl Williams. The reason: he did not go along with the feeble defense other NJ officials were offering of NJHP tactics.

These other officials had mostly led with their chins, making up lame excuses or denying the obvious. At first the NJHP kept insisting that its troopers did not single out blacks, and that cars are stopped for minor infractions like malfunctioning taillights—which hardly explains why blacks are stopped more often, unless (what nobody had the guts to say) blacks are more neglectful of their cars. A TV station then produced an embarrassing patrolman’s guide for a NJ township in which cars flying Ethiopian flags were described as likely to be transporting drugs.

Seeking to inject a note of realism into the debate, Williams called it “naive” to separate the race issue from crime. “Two weeks ago the president of the United States went to Mexico to talk to the president of Mexico about drugs. He didn’t go to Ireland. He didn’t go to England. [Today] the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that’s involved with that.”

A Perfectly Proper Response Certainly, drugs should be legal; trafficking is so lucrative and the cause of so much crime only because drugs are now illegal. State troopers shouldn’t be stopping anyone for drug searches. But this is beside the larger point, which is that racial profiling is a perfectly proper response to what even the staunchest libertarian will regard as criminal. Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of all forms of violence against persons and property. So long as society either privately or collectively is justified in using force against criminals (as of course it is), blacks will be disproportionately discomfited.

Per capita, blacks commit about ten times as many robberies, murders, and rapes as do whites. This disparity, usually chalked up to bias in the justice system, is also found in victim reports. And this disparity is one that all policemen are aware of. They are more suspicious of a black than they would