The Wrong Profile - Northern

The Wrong Profile - Northern Alliance pals Powerline gut Doug Grow's report that Minnesota is rife with racial profiling.

According to the actual data that led to Grow's report, while black drivers are pulled over disproportionately, the officers who actually did the pulling over were unaware of the drivers' races about 90 percent of the time. I think we can grant this figure a bit of leeway - cops will fudge paperwork - and still say that "profiling" stops still verges on liberal fantasy.

Here's an interesting finding - the rate at which cops found "contraband" in cars (things that aren't supposed to be there, like bottles of booze, bales of marijuana, murder victims and the like):

Although blacks were stopped and searched much more frequently than whites in Minneapolis, the hit rates were roughly equal -- 13 percent for whites, 11 percent for blacks. Accordingly, contrary to Grow's allegation in the column, the data strongly suggest that the Minneapolis police officers are conducting searches based on observed conduct rather than the skin color of the driver.

And so on. Read the whole piece

Especially interesting is Hindrocket's view of Trunk's appearance on an MPR show dedicated to the topic:

The other participants treated him like ants at a picnic, and the fact that he had actually read not only the report but the data underlying it made it so awkward to have him on the show that they disconnected him after a few minutes.

Ah, the fair and balanced MPR.

Posted by Mitch at September 29, 2003 06:01 AM