The Latest Sharpton Scam?

Al Sharpton is considering suing the NYPD and the City of New York over what he calls “racial profiling.”

In fact, black males in New York do get stopped by police in greater numbers than their proportion in the city.

Last year blacks were the targets of 55% of the police stops in New York, while they represent only 24% of the population, while whites, who are nearly 35% of the population were involved in only 11% of the NYPD stops.

Sounds out-of-whack, doesn’t it?

But, percentage in society isn’t the basis for police stops, even though Sharpton and some others seem to believe it should be.

Police stops are based more on the percentage of crimes each groups commits. Viewed in that regard, blacks, who commit 68.5% of all the murders, rapes, robberies and assaults are stopped LESS than the proportion of the felonies that group commits, while whites who are stopped in 11% of the NYP are stopped double to their proportion of violent crime (5.3%). Those stats prove that the police are 13 times more likely to be searching for a black suspect than a white one, for any given violent crime, based on victim identification, thus it stands to reason that the rate at which police stop blacks far more often than whites, when looking for suspects in violent crimes.

Now that doesn’t sound as much like “racial profiling,” does it?

Higher crime rates determine which people get stopped by police. The NYPD, like all police departments, focuses the bulk of its resources where crime is the highest. That’s a public service. When Bill Bratton led the turn around on crime when Giuliani became Mayor in 1993, reducing New York City’s murder rate from over 2,000 to about a quarter of that, disproportionately benefited black New Yorkers, because the bulk of those saved in cutting that murder rate were indeed black.

As Heather Mac Donald, editor of the City Journal so eloquently put it, “If Sharpton really wanted to get the black stop rate down, he would be working day and night to bring the crime rate down. He would be telling young men to stay in school and to marry the mothers of their children so that boys would not grow up without fathers. He would be demonizing criminals, not the police. Until that happens, his pose as caring about the well-being of the black community should be regarded with skepticism.”

Without question, Heather Mac Donals is right.

Victim of Police Shooting Rebuffs the Race Charge Made by Others

This past Wednesday (January 24, 2007), NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly was grilled by the New York City Council on the November 25th Sean Bell killing, in which undercover cops fired fifty shots at a car Sean Bell was driving.

In Kelly’s opening statement he said, “However it should be noted that the first officer who fired his weapon that night was black and of the five officers who fired their weapons that night, three were black and two were white.”

He added, “...we strongly contest that the Department engages in any racial profiling.”

As expected, Commissioner Kelly’s remarks sparked outrage among some of the Council members.

Helen Foster (D-Bnx) said, “This is real. SO when you say it’s not racially motivated...it doesn’t matter because you’re not the one being racially profiled.”

Charles Barron (D-Bklyn) said, “You have sent a signal to your department that they can kill us, brutalize us with impunity. They know that 99% of the time they’re going to get away with it, whether it’s 41 bullets (a reference to the 1999 Amadou Diallo killing) or 50 bullets, no matter what it is, they’re going to get away with it.”

Ironically enough, Joseph Guzman, who was in the car and was hit with 16 of the 50 shots, said “I’m not going to sit here and play the race card, I don’t think this was racial, but I do think a crime was committed.”

Of course Guzman’s testimony means nothing to the likes of Charles Barron, to Barron, black police officers “are Blue.”