Posted on 04/30/2008 11:38:15 AM PDT by radar101
The report to the city Police Commission is greeted with skepticism. 'This is not a racist department,' Chief Bratton says in defending the report.
Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they investigated more than 300 complaints of racial profiling against officers last year and found that none had merit -- a conclusion that left members of the department's oversight commission incredulous.
It is at least the sixth consecutive year that all allegations of racial profiling against LAPD officers have been dismissed, according to department documents reviewed by The Times.
In 2007, the LAPD's Internal Affairs Group closed 320 investigations into allegations that officers stopped, questioned or otherwise confronted someone solely because of the person's race. Nearly 80% of the time -- 252 of the cases -- the claims were dismissed outright as "unfounded," according to an annual complaint report presented Tuesday to the civilian Police Commission. In the remaining cases, there was either insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion or no misconduct was uncovered.
"A big, fat zero," said a visibly flummoxed Commissioner John Mack, who is African American and the former president of the Los Angeles Urban League. "In my mind, there is no such thing as a perfect institution . . . I find it baffling that we have these zeros."
His disbelief, echoed by other commissioners, drew a quick response from Police Chief William J. Bratton. Unsolicited, he told the commission he would have his staff conduct a survey of other large, urban police departments, as well as the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, to back up his belief that the findings in the LAPD are similar elsewhere.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
The numbers do not suggest that the LAPD is perfect.
The numbers suggest that the LAPD are too busy to pull people over for no reason at all.
Ahhh, but you're overlooking the fact that the charge of "racial profiling" is itself perfect in its way: It is perfectly ideological. As Walter Williams points out, if a thing is "politically correct," that implies it is not factually correct. Racial profiling as a phenomenon in law enforcement may be sufficiently divorced from measurable, real-world events that every allegation of wrong-doing related to it is perfectly false.
“A big, fat zero,” said a visibly flummoxed Commissioner John Mack, who is African American and the former president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “In my mind, there is no such thing as a perfect institution . . . I find it baffling that we have these zeros.”
Damn those slippery racist crackers. /s
What a sad state when the police chief of a major city comes out and says he can’t believe his officers are not harrasing innocent people.
Complaints about profiling are nonsense. A graduate student at Georgetown University in DC, Kambiz Fattahi, 30, who was born in Iran, filed a lawsuit against the school because he was interrogated far half an hour at graduation ceremony a year ago after he kept repeatedly opening a bag that made others nervous. He claims he was checking his cellphone and said he thinks he was target because of his appearance. BTW, he hold dual Iranian and American citizenship. He rejected the school's letter of regret. (The Washington Times, April 30, 2009)
My old high school bud has been a cop for 30+ years, and it was interesting to hear him describe the things that caused him to pull over folks. Now, he could be lying, but since I’ve never known him to be racist - not one of the things he mentioned involved race. However, some of the driving habits and vehicle conditions are possibly more correlated with certain races than with others. If they are, does this constitute racism? Let us remember that libs use very elementary stats to “prove” their cases. Secondary and subsequent effects (required by advanced levels of analysis) are way past their capabilities. I know there are some bad cops out there...but... this is LA we’re talking about. A good cop could find one car per minute to pull over just by looking for s**tty drivers.
Actually, that was a member of the police commission. They are a civilian body appointed by the city to “oversee” the P.D. The chief, Bratton, defended the department.
The comment about lousy drivers is so true. It reminds me of the old joke:
Driver: “So, have you got your quota for the day yet?”
Officer giving him the ticket: “No, sir. I don’t have a quota. They tell me I can write as many as I want and they’ll give me more tickets when I run out.”
I don't find it baffling that they have them.
I find it fascinating that those sort of people all gravitate to the LAPD.
Where I live, there was one corridor of highway where the police regularly stopped and searched cars for drugs. These stops and searches led to the arrest of many drug dealers. OTOH, many innocent people were subjected to searches in the process.
MOST DRIVERS drive over the speed limit along that corridor, but the police figured they'd find more drugs if they focused on the "profile group" that matched the description of most drug dealers that are arrested. So, if a study were conducted on everyone in the profile group stopped along that corridor, it would conclude that all were stopped for a valid reason (speeding). No longer do police departments have department-wide policies to focus more on certain drivers. So, there would be no evidence of racial profiling, unless the police officers themselves admitted to it.
So, I'm not sure how they're going about studying an idea that cannot be proven. (?) Anyway, the real issue is about whether or not a search is constitutional.
I noticed the article backs up my comments here further down with this:
In 2006, the city contracted with an outside consulting group to look into the issue. The study found that Latino and African American motorists in most areas of Los Angeles are significantly more likely than whites to be asked to leave their vehicles and submit to searches when stopped by police. The firm concluded, however, that its analysis of the data was too broad to determine whether the disparities were a sign of racial profiling.
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.