The deep secrets of “racial profiling”

Anyone who has done much reading in the serious literature regarding racial disparities in crime rates knows that the controversy over “racial profiling” is a hoax. The data on which allegations of “racial profiling” rest reflect underying racial disparities in crime rates; they do not reflect discrimatory law enforcement behavior. Heather Mac Donald has served as a one-person truth squad on the realities of this difficult issue, and has collected her writings on the subject into a book that has just been published. David Frum has reviewed the book for the current issue of National Review. Frum’s review is a handy summary of Mac Donald’s research and is worth reading on its own terms: “Support your police.”
In doing my own research on the subject over the past two years, I discovered that the controversy over “racial profiling” has been manufactured by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU was the instigator of the bogus lawsuits against the state highway police of New Jersey and Maryland that did so much to inject this issue into the mainstream of national politics in 1999 and 2000. The legal brains behind the ACLU litigation is law professor David Harris, and the heart of Harris’ work on the subject is a complete and utter fraud. For details, see my piece “Better unsafe than (occasionally) sorry?” published in the January/February issue of the American Enterprise magazine.

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