Speed Kills Racial Profiling Study

radar-1-0819-dcgjpg-91ea17025ff934f6_largeIn an article about police shootings in last Sunday’s New York Times (8/31), Michael Wines disputes the conventional wisdom about a disproportionate number of African-Americans being shot by police, saying there are no data one way or another. But Wines revives the canard about blacks being disproportionately targeted in traffic stops.

There actually is a study for that.

Throughout the 1990s, the nation was fixated on tales of jack-booted New Jersey state troopers who were stopping speeders on the turnpike just because they were black! In a 2000 primary debate, Vice President Al Gore sneered at then-New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, saying, “Racial profiling practically began in New Jersey, Senator Bradley.”

Attorney General Eric Holder recently paid tribute to the myth, claiming that when he was in college, he had been stopped “driving from New York to Washington.” He didn’t mention how fast he was going.

The story never made sense. How could the troopers tell the race of drivers in speeding cars? Did they wait until the driver rolled down his window and, if he was white, say, “Oh, sorry — have a nice day!”

But the Clinton administration was slapping consent decrees for racial profiling on police departments across the country, and the N.J. highway patrol was its prime evidence, based on a study that a child wouldn’t believe.

As is usually the case with bogus race studies, the pivotal 1993 survey compared speed stops on the New Jersey turnpike to the population of all drivers on the turnpike — not with the population of all speeders on the turnpike.

Such meaningless studies are popular on the left, where it is assumed that people of different races, genders and ethnicities will always behave identically in all respects.

If fewer women pass the physical test to become firefighters, that can only be because of sexism. If fewer blacks pass the written test — that’s racism. If fewer whites play professional basketball — no, forget that one. Sports are important. (Unlike arson or vehicular homicide.)

Nonetheless, based on the assumption that blacks speed just as much as whites — because to believe otherwise would be racist! — Temple University’s John Lamberth announced that while only 13.5 percent of drivers along a particular stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike were black, 46 percent of those stopped for speeding were black.

Racial profiling, Q.E.D.

The New York Times ran a dozen articles trumpeting the nonsense study, proclaiming it “the most thorough documentation of the contention that the police regularly pulled over black drivers.” Lamberth himself praised his research for ruling out the possibility of coincidence — and if you can’t trust Lamberth on his own study, who can you trust?

Largely on the basis of that investigation, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert E. Francis threw out the contraband evidence seized from 19 African-American men in traffic stops on the turnpike. New Jersey’s ninny governor, Christie Todd Whitman, pronounced her state’s troopers guilty of racial profiling and agreed to a consent decree with the Department of Justice (DOJ) that basically prohibited the troopers from doing their jobs.

Statisticians, and other people with common sense, tried to explain to liberals that human beings are not identical. Any study purporting to show that too many blacks are stopped for speeding must first determine how many speeders are black.

Being denounced as virtual Klansmen, the state troopers demanded a real study.

Confident that any new study would merely serve to confirm the troopers’ racism, the DOJ and the New Jersey attorney general commissioned a statistical investigation from the Public Services Research Institute in Maryland.

The institute’s study was a spectacular thing. Using expensive monitors with high-speed cameras and radar detectors, they clocked the speeds of nearly 40,000 drivers on the relevant section of the turnpike. Three researchers then examined the photos to determine the race of the driver — without knowing whether the driver was speeding, which was defined as going more than 80 mph in 65 mph zones.

The result: No racial profiling.

Blacks constituted 25 percent of all speeders and they were 23 percent of drivers stopped for speeding. Controlling for age and gender, blacks sped at about twice the rate of whites. The racial disparity was even greater for drivers exceeding 90 mph.

Inasmuch as the study was irrefutable, Mark Posner, a lefty Clinton holdover in the Bush Justice Department, tried to block it from being released, continuously demanding more information.

But no matter how statisticians fiddled with the data, the results were identical: Blacks were twice as likely to speed as whites — and at much higher speeds. The troopers were completely vindicated.

When the study finally leaked — over Posner’s objections — he informed the press it wasn’t “valid” without articulating any actual problems with it. The attorney general of New Jersey, David Samson, nonsensically said the results didn’t matter because New Jersey had already admitted its troopers were engaging in racial profiling.

Perhaps the Times is right and there is no comprehensive study of police shootings by race. But it’s also possible that there is one, it didn’t come out as planned, so it has never seen the light of day.

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  • DaCoachK

    When Ann Coulter is on, she is spot on. I still can’t get her obsession with Mitt Romney.

    • PharmDoc61

      Or Chris Christie.

    • Nabukuduriuzhur

      Mitt Romney is a classic case of the media creating a liberal image out of a conservative. He’s been a consistent reformer.

      When the leftist media tries to make a republican out to be a liberal, ask why. It’s not like the media is doing it to help the republicans.

      Santorum’s another example. The liberal media played him up as a liberal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

      On the flip side, how much effort did the media do to get the dishonorable Ron Paul to be seen as a conservative, when he’s thrown one election after another to the Democrats? I’d love to see where he gets his campaign money from. When the media shows a person with absolutely no morals like Paul as a “conservative”, don’t accept it at all. It’s a lie to try to get the republicans to lose.

      • DaCoachK

        Agree with you on Ron Paul the nut. Mitt Romney is no conservative though, with his Romneycare and stance on social issues. He is a great businessman, who should have been elected, but a conservative he is not.

        • SCREW SOCIALISM

          MORON Paul.

        • objectivefactsmatter

          Mitt Romney wants to lead directly from the center. He just knows that the DP platform is based on nonsense. But he cares about all Americans. At least I think he does.

          Is that enough? Not saying that.

  • tagalog

    Ms. Coulter and others just don’t fully understand the issue of American racism, which is: if a black person did it, you can’t criticize it. To do so is to be racist.

    • Virgil Hilts

      Interesting screen name…do you speak that language? A friend of mine, many years ago, volunteered with The Peace Corps…i don’t recall where he went, whether the Philippines or SE Asia…but he LEARNED to speak it. Thanks for the memory.

      • tagalog

        No; I’m not from the Philippines, nor do I speak Tagalog.

  • Sheik Yerbouti

    The sad reality is that nobody can trust a cop anymore. They are given by law the authority to lie to us, which they use to great effect. I have no doubt that blacks are driving badly all over the country. I’ve seen it in living color. I’ve seen them fail driving tests that Mexican peasants pass with ease.

    Their culture of denial, the need to hide their dirty laundry in the open, makes it easy to assume that they are being targeted on the highways. Just as they assume that whites have an easier time in court than blacks. Of course, whites also very rarely take their frustrations out on the cop tasked with dealing with them. Resisting arrest, complicates ANYBODY’S case.

    But they seem to see resisting arrest as some sort of honorable way to show they will never be slaves again. Very warped values overall. And yet, they are legally our equals. It is THEY who complicate their own lives by refusing to conform with the most modern example of civilization to date.

    Why should I feel sorry for such people? They don’t even try to be Americans.

    • verneoz

      You are very correct about their refusal to conform. This concept first appeared in the 1960s as part of the black militancy movement. Other components were in the movement too: “If you study and make good grades, you are trying to be white; we will not assimilate and lose our blackness etc.” Roll the clock forward to today and we are seeing some of the effects of that frame of mind that took root in the black community.

      • Sheik Yerbouti

        I had a front row seat. Lots of us did thanks to busing and targeted HUD programs. We see the lies.

  • Lightbringer

    It would be interesting to perform statistical analyses of arrests and speeding stops by age of the person arrested or stopped. My guess — and without a mountain of data behind me it is most definitely just a guess — is that both studies would skew toward younger males of all races. Young men are not known for their common sense and are more likely to do stupid things than their sisters or parents. That’s why armies throughout history have put them in the front lines.

    As a group, blacks tend to be younger than whites, who tend to be younger Asians. Thomas Sowell made this point when determining why it is easier for Asians to get mortgages than for whites, and easier for members of both of those groups to get mortgages than blacks, due to the fact that older people have had longer to accrue assets and develop an employment history. He thereby should have laid to rest any accusations of prejudice in mortgage lending, but political wonks and grievance-mongers would be the last people to read his reasoned, intelligent words. Such a study also might shed light on idiotic behaviors like crime and speeding, which are generally performed by young people and particularly young men.

  • ConcernedCitizen999

    Excellent article. For a whole book full of similar evidence that the races are fundamentally genetically different in more ways than you ever imagined please read “Racism, Guilt, Self-Hatred and Self-Deceit” by Gadaliah Braun.

  • objectivefactsmatter

    “Such meaningless studies are popular on the left, where it is assumed that people of different races, genders and ethnicities will always behave identically in all respects.”

    Exactly. Humans are completely fungible when the left needs them to be for the sake of an argument (accusation).

  • MrUniteUs1

    What percentage of the 3 researchers were Black.

    • objectivefactsmatter

      You can’t really trust any study until you look at the data and test the analysis on your own.

      • MrUniteUs1

        Agreed.