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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (154047)	6/18/2001 7:12:39 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769670

dear flappy, I figured I'd try a run on sentence for a no run mind and maybe get it started. Sometime I do indulge in the impossible dream. But the vacant liberal minds on this board are dead in the water stuck in hatred and recrimination. Being in awe of the first rapist for so long they now struggle for an identity constantly looking back and not understanding why. tom watson tosiwmee

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (154047)	6/18/2001 7:27:35 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

What's your preference? "Racial justice" or crime control? The dirty (and obvious) little secret about "racial profiling" msnbc.com Hillary Raises Her Profile Sen. Clinton takes on race and crime—a subject much more complex than it seems By Jonathan Alter NEWSWEEK June 25 issue — Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Racial profiling has got to go!” In Highland Park, Ill., a ritzy suburb north of Chicago, Jesse Jackson led a protest last week against racial profiling and the firing of Rodney Watt, a white cop who had complained about it. “They told me to enforce NNUTS—No N——rs Uptown,” Watt told the crowd. He filed suit in 1998 charging that Highland Park police singled out black and Hispanic motorists for ticketing when they drove through the overwhelmingly white suburb. THE POLICE DENY Watt’s particular charges, but nobody can deny the prevalence of racial profiling—official and unofficial—across the country. Almost every African-American male old enough to see over the dashboard has a story of being harassed by police for nothing more than DWB—driving while black. After the New Jersey State Police were shown in 1999 to have had an explicit policy of racial profiling, the issue exploded. Now Hillary Clinton, in her first major initiative in the Senate, is sponsoring legislation (with some bipartisan support) to enact a federal ban on the practice. The politically incorrect truth is that minorities do in fact commit a disproportionate number of crimes. Admitting that doesn’t weaken the case against racial profiling; it just complicates it. While this Clinton shows no signs of running for president (in 2004, anyway), she is ready—after six months of lying fairly low—to step into the fray. When she sees injustice, she fights it, which is what we should want in our leaders. But Clinton is tackling an issue that is a lot more complex than it sounds. Ending racial profiling is not like ending Jim Crow segregation. There’s a potential trade-off involved—less profiling might mean more crime—that Clinton doesn’t acknowledge. The politically incorrect truth is that minorities do in fact commit a disproportionate number of crimes. Admitting that doesn’t weaken the case against racial profiling; it just complicates it. At first glance, the proposal looks like an example of what Will Saletan of Slate magazine calls “wedgislation”—bills designed more for campaign positioning and “wedge” politics than for law-making. Anticipating this criticism, Hillary structured the bill for passage as well as posturing. “It’s a balancing issue,” Clinton told me. “There’s a nearly unanimous belief that racial profiling is fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, we don’t want to do anything to undermine legitimate law enforcement.” The bill bars racial profiling for “routine investigatory activities,” but says that using race when necessary to apprehend “a specific suspect” is OK and does not constitute profiling. It provides incentive grants to police departments that train officers to avoid racial profiling and end mindless arrest quotas (under which officers are evaluated by the number of arrests). But the bill doesn’t allow individuals who have been stopped and frisked to collect damages without establishing a pattern. If they could, of course, that might be the end of law enforcement. Hillary was adamant in telling me “there is no trade-off” that would lead to weakened policing and increased crime. She may be right in Highland Park. But the inner city is a different place. Geoffrey Canada, a major Harlem leader whose Rheedlen Centers have been helping kids there for decades, recalls a recent conversation with William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner who did so much to reduce crime in the city. Like almost all law-enforcement officials, Bratton says he opposes racial profiling (and the NYPD has a policy against it). But his point to Canada echoed the analysis of prosecutors with whom I’ve spoken: in recent years young black men in Harlem have known the police were stopping them and searching for guns, so they stopped carrying weapons, a major contributor to the reduction in crime. Canada replied: “Do I worry that if the heat [from cops] goes off, my kids will die? Yes. But I told Bill, you wouldn’t feel so good if it was your kid in a chokehold with a knee in his back. When any group can document that it is being singled out for race, country, dress—we are violating the fundamental ideas on which this country is based.” In other words, some marginal reduction in crime is not worth a police state. Acknowledging that trade-off might hurt Hillary’s bill, but it would contribute to a more clear-eyed assessment of the issue if crime goes back up. Canada and Clinton both know there’s a better way, without racial profiling. They point to Boston, which reduced crime by 80 percent over the last decade with a multipronged effort featuring improved community relations and intensive youth development, not Giuliani-style frisking. And they both know that legislation of this kind is necessarily symbolic. Changing the law won’t mean much without changing attitudes, which is a longer process. But at least that process is underway. Thomas V. Manahan, the Union County, N.J., prosecutor, issued a statement this month in support of the bill that ended with a quote from James Baldwin, the author and poet: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”