Search Results for: deep secrets of racial profiling
June 11, 2015 — Scott Johnson
A brief look back at where we have been in this series. If you missed any of its ten parts, I hope you will take a quick look. I would like to point out in particular the post on Michelle Alexander (part 4), which I believe makes a contribution to the subject with a lot of help from the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald. Part 1: “Here I set forth
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June 10, 2015 — Scott Johnson
The deepest secret of the campaign against law enforcement in the name of racial disparities is this one: behavioral disparities account for the racial disparities. Huge differences in crime rates between and among groups sorted by race permeate the relevant data. John Diiulio put it concisely in a notable 1996 City Journal essay: “If blacks are overrepresented in the ranks of the imprisoned, it is because blacks are overrepresented in
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June 9, 2015 — Scott Johnson
James Scanlan is a Washington attorney specializing in the use of statistics with respect to employment discrimination litigation and compliance. He has forwarded a copy of the letter he has submitted to Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges and Chief of Police Janeé Harteau regarding the recent American Civil Liberties Union Minnesota study of the racial impact of Minneapolis policing practices. I have referred to the ACLU study at several points in
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June 8, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Heather Mac Donald has turned herself into an invaluable national resource on matters of crime and policing. She has written important essays such as her recent Wall Street Journal column headlined somewhat inaccurately “The new nationwide crime wave.” The Manhattan Institute has collected some of her newspaper columns, magazine essays, podcasts, videos, and congressional testimony here, and Mac Donald herself has collected several of her important essays, mostly written for
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June 7, 2015 — Scott Johnson
I have sought in this series to provide a background of relevant facts within which to understand the welter of stories featuring race and law enforcement over the past nine months. This past week the Star Tribune’s Eric Roper delivered another such story, this one with a local angle, in “Push is on for more policing reforms in Minneapolis.” For relevant background to Roper’s story, please see John Hinderaker’s post
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June 5, 2015 — Scott Johnson
In Minnesota we caught the wave of the assault on law enforcement in the name of racial disparities courtesy of the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Minnesota Civil Liberties Union and other organizations have since piled on, but the Minnesota Supreme Court was on the case early and its imprimatur has given the local movement destructive legitimacy. In the early 1990s the Court appointed a 40-member committee of attorneys and judges
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June 4, 2015 — Scott Johnson
In part 3 of this series, I quoted ACLU racial profiling guru David Harris’s account of the randomized security system ordered into place by the FAA in 1998. Harris portrays it as a great triumph. I think 9/11 cast its own negative verdict on the system. With the farcical TSA security theater, however, we live with its legacy. It’s an old story that we have all observed with our own
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June 3, 2015 — Scott Johnson
If you’re trying to get a handle on the race-based assault on law enforcement, unfortunately, you must acquaint yourself with Michelle Alexander and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.. Published in paperback in 2012, the book is now in its eighteenth printing with a new foreword by Cornel West. In his foreword, West declares it “the secular bible for a new social movement.” This he
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June 2, 2015 — Scott Johnson
In part 2 of this series, I wrote about David Harris’s book Profiles In Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work. Harris’s book had obviously been written before 9/11, though it was published in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the book’s chapter 6, Harris provided an account of the reform of airline passenger screening in the Clinton administration to avert alleged racial profiling. By the time of the book’s publication
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June 1, 2015 — Scott Johnson
A few years back I had a close encounter with the guy who helped create the firestorm over alleged racial profiling in traffic stops. It came as the result of an invitation extended to me in 2002 by Minnesota Civil Liberties Union executive director Chuck Samuelson to debate the guy. The MCLU is the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. For a long time the ACLU has constituted
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May 31, 2015 — Scott Johnson
The current assault on the criminal justice system has taken the form of an assault on local law enforcement as racist. Who speaks for the police? Not many. The task has apparently fallen to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, profiled recently by Charles Cooke in the NR cover story “The sheriff as rebel.” Inundated as we are by a farrago of politically inspired falsehood and hysteria, it may be useful
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March 20, 2003 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 22, 2022 — Scott Johnson
A friend forwards Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon’s report from the frontiers of social equity in Vermont. High times have come in legal form to Vermont. Vermont’s Cannabis Control Board began issuing licenses for cannabis retail stores (a/k/a “recreational dispensaries”) on October 1. Kenyon celebrates the license awarded Miriam Wood to open a store in Hartford, Vermont, up the road a few miles from White River Junction: Wood, who is
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October 11, 2022 — Scott Johnson
On the morning after after President Biden’s proclamation of a pardon for all those convicted of marijuana possession last week I commented in “High on foggy Biden.” In response to the mind-numbing racial disparities shibboleths that Biden cited to support the pardons, I referred to part 4 of my 2015 Deep secrets of racial profiling series. In the linked part 4 I wrote about Michelle Alexander’s noxious The New Jim
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October 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday President Biden issued a blanket pardon of all those convicted of marijuana possession under federal law. The White House has posted the text of Biden’s proclamation of pardon is here.The White House has posted Biden’s video statement on the pardon on Twitter (below). Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. Hear from @POTUS on the three steps he is taking to right these
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June 3, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Looking for yesterday’s Minnesota Health Department press briefing at 2:00 yesterday afternoon, I found instead Governor Walz and his crew announcing the filing of a state civil rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department (video below). I have posted the video below. Featured among the Walz crew yesterday was Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan — the self-advertised “light-skinned Native woman” who specializes in racial emoting. By her own account, she “grapple[s]
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January 9, 2017 — Scott Johnson
In the important City Journal column “A window into a depraved culture,” Heather Mac Donald turns to the kidnapping and torture of the disabled white man by four black men and women in Chicago last week. Heather may be our foremost public intellectual on current controversies involving race and crime. Everything Heather writes on the subject is must reading, yet this column merits special attention. What is the cultural context
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