Posted on 07/28/2009 6:21:57 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
One of the many tricks the left has developed to make conservatives play Argument Defense is the trick of renaming simple, normal things so that they sound like they’re evil. My personal favorite is “objectifying women.” When a man appreciates a woman’s beauty, or longs for her, or even lusts for her, that’s just nature taking its course. Nothing wrong with it, as long as he behaves himself. But “objectifying women,” or “regarding women as sex objects,” sure sounds bad, doesn’t it? Makes you feel like you have to come up with some way to explain yourself–something, I mean, other than, “Woman pretty. I like. Because me be man.”
It’s the same thing with “racial profiling.” Is it wrong? Is it even racial? I don’t think so. I think it’s just an evil-sounding name for basic, normal police work. I think any cop who doesn’t do it isn’t doing his job properly. If you’re in a neighborhood or a town or a country where crime is more likely to be committed by a guy with brown skin, then a guy with brown skin is more suspicious-looking than other people by definition. It’s not that people with brown skin are criminals, it’s that, in that locality, criminals are more likely to have brown skin. That’s a fact a policeman has to include in his assessment of a situation. It may be unfortunate – even crummy – that he has to do that, but what other reasonable choice does he have? Is he supposed to ignore it so we can tell his widow what a nice guy he was when he was alive?
Police work – like soldier work – doesn’t take place in the mind of a college professor or editorialist. It takes place on the mean streets. It’s dangerous and it doesn’t pay all that well and it keeps the rest of us safe. So while the people who do it must obey the laws of the land, they can’t be hog-tied by social pieties. When police patrol the world-as-we-would-like-it-to-be, then they can worry about political correctness. As long as they’re out there in the world-as-it-is, let them worry about staying safe and doing their jobs.
And by the way, in the recent case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., race doesn’t even come into it. The guy’s a Harvard professor. He should’ve been arrested long ago on those grounds alone.
Isn’t profiling of various types used in law enforcement? For example, if there is a rash of car thefts happening somewhere, don’t the police look into the activities of suspected “chop shops”? And they will investigate regardless of the race of those involved, so that wouldn’t be racial profiling.
And what about witnesses to a crime? If witnesses or security cameras indicate that a suspect is a tall bald white man, then such people will be the subject of the search. Ditto if a suspect is a black man with a goatee. Are those types of identification considered illegal racial profiling?
I think we’re all smart enough to know that, even if disproportionate numbers of black men commit crimes, of course it doesn’t mean that all black men are criminals.
This sort of inference is a two-edged sword. Suppose, for example, all axe murderers are green, but only 1/1000 green people are axe murderers. It wouldn’t do to treat all of them like criminals; that would be an offense to their liberty and their right to equal treatment under the law. On the other hand, it wouldn’t make sense to waste most of your resources investigating little old purple ladies when you have no evidence they’ve ever behaved in this way. People on all sides need to recognize that a balance needs to be struck.
Yeah. It’s also extremely offensive when they say they are looking for a female or male too - oh and height profiling is especially egregious.
“And by the way, in the recent case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., race doesn’t even come into it. The guy’s a Harvard professor. He should’ve been arrested long ago on those grounds alone.”
Truth, and I concur.
Call it racial profiling or police work or gut, feeling the real reason people like Obama, Sharpton and Jackson are so opposed to so-called “racial profiling” is because it’s remarkably sucessful in apprehending black criminal-as it is with white criminals.
I have no problem with racial profiling.
In spite of this attitude, I am not a racist. I think racial profiling at airports is perfectly acceptable in order to prevent terrorists from gaining access to airlines in flight.
Second, prisons are filled to the rafters with minorities. Why? Simple. Minorities often commit the most crimes. Minorities are often illegal aliens, more often they are gang bangers, more often they commit the most crimes over all, both violent and non-violent and lastly they are more likely to use and deal in illegal drugs.
These are facts and it would be the very height of folly to ignore them.
Maybe the time has come for white people to start playing the same game that the minorities play by accusing the police of “racial profiling” whenever a white person is arrested.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.