The Encouraging Waning of Support For Authoritarian Racial Profiling
By Shorter Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly: Our program of using racial profiling to make arbitrary stops and frisks isn’t racial profiling, and it should be allowed to continue because racial profiling works if you credit all decreases in crime including the larger ones before we started our program of racial profiling to our program of racial profiling.
Two additional points in the Pareene piece are worth highlighting. First, it’s dismaying although not surprising that network conventions about “fairness and balance” didn’t apply in this case, with Kelly being allowed to make his case for unconstitutional searches without anybody who knows what she’s talking about in a position to respond. Second, while normally the obvious unconstitutionality of stop-and-frisk as practiced by the NYPD wouldn’t necessarily affect its popularity, the political support for the program is fading. De Blasio’s opposition to stop-and-frisk seems to be a big winner and even Quinn has seen which way the wind is blowing. Democratic primary voters aren’t the electorate, of course, but it’s still good news.
…Related: Brian Beutler on why being the victim of a violent crime didn’t compel him to support racial profiling.