Article | Challenging Orthodoxy: Galileo Comes To The Jersey Turnpike
Excerpts: Writing in the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald reports that the Public Research Institute researched speeding on the highway. It seems that even after a Department of Justice consent decree and a federal regulator were put in place, troopers continued to stop a higher percentage of black motorists for speeding. Frustrated by this development, the state's attorney general commissioned the institute to study behavior on the thoroughfare.
After correlating race with behavior, the study found that black motorists "are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, and are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour." In short, blacks represented 25 percent of the total violators and 23 percent of those stopped. It appears that behavior, not race, is prompting the cops to make traffic stops.
Now, here's a twist: At first blush, you'd think that the law-and-order crowd at the Department of Justice would be delighted to learn that New Jersey cops were enforcing the speed limit without bias. Hardly. With John Ashcroft at the helm, Justice attempted to bury the report. In response to superficial objections to the study, the institute offered an ultimatum: Submit its work to a "peer-reviewed journal or ... the National Academy of Sciences" with the proviso that the results would be made public if the methodology was determined to be sound. No deal. Eventually, the report was published on the Internet -- which forced the hand of the state's attorney general, who belatedly announced its official release.
Further studies are now under way to better determine to what extent racial profiling affects police interaction with minority communities. Their findings may or may not validate the reality of the phenomenon, but they merit free and open discussion.
posted by Barry | 6/17/2003 07:01:00 AM
