St. Pete Times, 8/27: The antitruth administration

[teach1st]

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/27/Opinion/The_antitruth_adminis.shtml

The antitruth administration
St. Petersburg Times, 8/27/05

Facts are facts, unless you work for the Bush administration. Then facts are squishy things that can be altered, manipulated, glossed-over or subverted to fit a political agenda.

That is what statistician Lawrence Greenfeld discovered. The director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics was threatened with dismissal and likely will be banished to a lesser federal post because he stood up for certain facts that senior political officials at the Justice Department didn't want highlighted.

The small unit of the Justice Department that Greenfeld heads is supposed to enjoy some independence from political influence. It is charged with crunching law enforcement data in order to provide a clear and accurate picture of crime patterns and crime control activities across the country. But when Greenfeld refused to delete information in a draft news release on a new racial profiling study, Greenfeld's 23-year career trajectory screeched to a halt.

Political supervisors of Greenfeld didn't want it publicized that a congressionally mandated study found that black and Hispanic drivers were substantially more likely to have their vehicles searched and to have force used against them during a traffic stop than were white drivers. Data like that could embolden lawmakers who are pushing to make policing agencies more accountable on race issues. Because the Bush administration has been ambivalent toward these efforts, no press release was issued on the study, which was quietly published. It garnered no media or congressional attention.

Read more

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Did I tell ya'll that I LOVE the ST. Pete Times.

You'd be shocked, SHOCKED at the reaction of the white-wing relatives when 5 years ago I tried to tell them there was a racial discrepancy in the way that minorities were handled by the police versus white people. I even researched it when I returned back to school for a second degree. The relatives simply wouldn't believe it and treated me like I had a chip on my shoulder. They felt that minorities commit more crimes and that's why there are so many more of them in jail. I'll never forget how they raised their voices and guffawed.

Well, now that we've got this report out, it has another major ramification that no paper will tell you. The conclusion of my research paper a few years ago was that the statistics that were compiled by the police reports were skewed. If they are profiling minorities and stopping them more often, then it stands to reason that the number of crimes the police did discover would be skewed. Anyone who read the statistics, without taking into account that the police were prejudicially over-selecting minorities for searches, would reach the wrong conclusion that minorities committed more crime. So the police help create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now the BIG ramifications. Our courts, and especially Scalia, have been using these skewed reports to legitimize racial profiling. Basically, the court's opinions have been leaning to give police the right to use racial profiling as a legitimate reason to investigate further due to high probability of crime based on police experience. Except, of course, that the statistics are SKEWED.

You applied the same searches in a random fashion on a college campus, and it would blow away any belief that minorities commit more crimes. And, can you imagine how many white careers you would truncate with felony charges of possession at such an early age if you were to do this?

The real problem is that the crimes that white people tend to commit are underrepresented by our criminal system And I think the fact that our country's ethical and moral base has been steadily deteriorating is a by-product of this underrepresentation.