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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (31051)	10/6/2001 9:30:55 AM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

This describes it from one perspective. In life, we call it 'assessing people' and race enters into that perspective. My sister, when a black man entered her building with her and she had the thought, "there are no black people in this building and no one is around this time of day, i'm afraid to walk up the stairs with this man here," then had a revulsion for the racial profiling she had just seen herself engage in, proceeded up the stairs, and was terrifying raped, thinking at every moment she was going to be shot. (The guy was caught when he came back the next day pretending at the door to be a cop, fortunately. Went to prison.) Someone PM'd me that if every male on a deserted street were questioned because that's scary for a woman, males wouldn''t like it. True. But women profile males in that situation all the same. And any male who gets indignant because a woman in that situation crosses to the better lit side of the street, or goes into a lighted place to wait until that male has gone his way, or asks the neighborhood cop she sees in a diner to wait with her while she gets a cab, doen't have a wife or daughter or friend he hopes will take care of herself. So it's "assessing" as in this article (see link), and assessing, for law enforcement efficiency, whether they are members of a group statistically more likely to be engaging in criminal activity. Is that profiling? The PM i mentioned made the distinction between profiling and racial harassment. That's the distinction that matters. At this point, closer scrutiny of Arabs who are boarding planes, not to mention taking crop-dusting or piloting lessons, scrutiny that can be done courteously if not without inconvenience, is necessary. The whole question of "the war on drugs" and whether it makes sense arises with many profiling cases. My opinion about whether drugs should be legalized changes between lunch and dinner and again before breakfast. I wouldn't mind seeing what others here think. If you mean "assessing people" one by one w/o regard to their statistical likelihood to be a member of a class more highly associated with a particular type of crime, that's obviously not racial profiling. For each category statistically associated with higher crime in the area being investigated yet omitted from the "assessment" criteria, the assessment is less statistically efficient. If my sister had racially profiled her rapist, her life since would have been different. My PM correspondent feels that whites are as likely as blacks to be transporting drugs. She was referring to a NJ case, a suit,i haven't been following closely. But her suspicion about that could be pretty easily checked out as a statistical question. She also says it was harassment, not profiling. If that's true, the plaintiffs should win their suit. So how do you distinguish between harassment and profiling with race as one of the indicators? It's a distinction that needs to be made, clearly. fredoneverything.net There are other posts on this subject from yesterday i still haven't acknowledged, though i solicited them. Most seemed to agree that not to profile is, per se, a silly, PC thought-control notion, not only by race but by other less-unPC criteria, of course. I think that as long as blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes, those we hire to protect us against crime will disproportionately scrutinize blacks, and demogogues should put their attention more on their crime-ridden communities than on pretending they're all being framed. I think that as long as the Islamic Jihad is a reality, Arabs getting on airplanes will have to suffer the inconvenience of closer scrutiny. What do you think, Solon? especially about how to distinguish between racist harassment and racial profiling based on valid stats? I'm having a migraine and, speaking of drugs, am pretty spaced out. Forgive any incoherence.