Today’s Wall Street Journal has a lucid and compelling ” target=”_blank”>As of the end of 2012 a majority of the NYPD’s rank and file officers was minority (e.g. Black, Latino or Asian) for the first time ever. While the overall majority of NYPD cops is white (53%), the cops on the beat (those most likely to make “stop, question and frisk” decisions) are majority minority. The likelihood of a majority minority police force systematically selecting minorities to harass on a scale that produces the numbers at play here (i.e. more than double their percentage of the population) strains credulity.
Another uncomfortable fact, one that has little sway in Federal court, is that the process as practiced by the NYPD works! Since it was instituted in the early 1990s, “New York has experienced the longest and steepest crime drop in the modern history of policing. Murders have gone down by nearly 80%, and combined major felonies by nearly 75%.”
Also often overlooked in the passionate discussion of “minority profiling” is that the major beneficiaries of the policy and the drop in crime are the residents of the formerly crime plagued areas. “Minorities make up nearly 80% of the drop in homicide victims since the early 1990s. New York policing has transformed inner-city neighborhoods and allowed their hardworking members a once unthinkable freedom from fear.”
MacDonald correctly warns that the plaintiffs’ success in New York would encourage similar law suits around the country; actions that could undermine the astonishing advances that have been made in law enforcement and crime prevention in big cities over the past two decades.
It would be a shame if in the pursuit of a well-intentioned effort to protect minorities and their rights that they would become the people who are once again consigned to a life of fear, violence and death. That benefits no one.
