If They'd Just Stop Committing All Those Crimes, They'd Stop Getting Pulled Over When They're Innocent

In 2009, blacks were 62% more likely than whites to be pulled over in Missouri. Countenance Blog, predictably, doesn't think this is a problem. Noticing that this has occurred, in fact, is just "peddling the no-snitching culture." He actually argues that to vote for a Democrat is to do that, but his argument is mostly unintelligible to me (the person writing Countenance Blog refers to him/herself as "Blogmeister," which leads me to believe he's a he, but I could be wrong). It seems to go that many Democratic policies, like ending racial profiling, "[support] black crime." How, he doesn't say, which, I suppose, is why the argument is unintelligible. I think the next tortured leap goes something like "supporting black crime is what no-snitching does, so Democrats, who support black crime, are basically not snitchin'." Or something. Behind the whole post seems to be the idea, popular among white people, who don't have to deal with the negative effects of racial profiling, that if those damn minorities would just stop committing crimes, they wouldn't get pulled over when they're innocent.

Predictably, this view is espoused ineloquently in the comments on the stltoday.com article.

jeepmom is back, and she's characteristically ugly:

Her reasoning proves way, way too much. If, as she claims, a person having a particular characteristic makes him or her more likely to have committed a crime, then it would be okay to seize on that characteristic and ONLY harass people who have it. After all, it's just good police work to hassle the people who are more likely to have committed a crime. Why have the cops been wasting their time pulling over any white folks at all? Doing so will only MAYBE net you a bad guy. But running a black guy through the system is much more likely to come up with something good. It's like making sure all the brown-skinned people in Arizona have their papers in order. It's not like the red-head with the sunburn just hopped the border fence, after all. jeepmom's twisted logic, carried to its endpoint, would have one race (or people having some other characteristic deemed to have a correlation with crime) harassed by the cops to the exclusion of all others.

And the crazy thing is that I'm not sure that jeepmom would object to living in that world, provided that white skin was not the characteristic in question.

molly3, who is a horrible person, probably wouldn't object to a policy like that either:

Ick.

If you want more examples of racists cheering on racial profiling, read the rest of the thread. Then, if you're really brave, you can move on to the "discussion" that resulted from this article about young car thieves.

I had plans to write a long post about why racial profiling is wrong, but suddenly I've realized that a) you've most likely read that post before somewhere else and b) I sound ridiculous above, making arguments that refute jeepmom's "logic." So I'll just say that racial profiling is wrong for many reasons, but, since St. Louis is full of racists, it's going to continue to happen here, with the support of a large portion of the community. And that sucks.