TRUTH ABOUT CRIME AND RACE

Distorting the Truth about Crime and Race by Heather MacDonald

Distorting the Truth about Crime and Race by Heather Mac Donald

Introduction

The article under analysis is,” Distorting the truth about crime and race” written by Heather Mac Donald published in the New York Times. In this article, the author emphasizes that in order to prevent crime; thorough checking should be done by the Law and Enforcement agencies. Police has been accused of racially biased checking due to the fact that blacks are more scrutinized as compared to whites. It is widely known that ethnic groups comprising of blacks, Hispanics and etc are more involved into criminal activities compared to other groups.

Stop and frisk tactics on streets in the U.S. have been in use for much longer than these drug courier interdiction efforts, and there is evidence, going back decades, that police have employed stops and frisks more commonly and with greater intensity against racial and ethnic minorities. But those tactics did not attract the same kind of attention that racial profiling of drivers did in the 1990s. This means that much of the data and analysis on racial and ethnic profiling in the U.S. in the last fifteen years has had little to do with stops and frisks of pedestrians, and is largely confined to vehicle stops (Skogan and Frydl, 2004).

Many leaders of U.S. law enforcement agencies have created policies and strategies utilizing stop and frisk intensively, as part of departmental anti-crime efforts. For those less than familiar with American law enforcement, it may be useful to understand how policing in the U.S. is structured. This will help the reader to see why and how police policies on stop and frisk (and other issues) are formed, and how this has led to the adoption of stop and frisk tactics.

Unlike the many nations that have a relatively small number of police agencies under some degree of central control, law enforcement in the U.S. is highly decentralized. There are more than 17,000 police departments in the U.S.; some are large, but most are relatively small (in terms of numbers of sworn officers and geographic jurisdiction, and sometimes both) (MacDonald and Dunham, 2005). Some are also specialized: police departments for a city's public housing or transportation systems, or for a university, for example. There are national police agencies - the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATFE), and the Secret Service, for example - which are creatures of the national government and have nationwide jurisdiction. But for each of these national agencies, their subject matter jurisdiction is somewhat limited, and they have no say over what more local police departments might do (Thompson, 1999).

Discussion and Analysis

The most common type of agency by far is the municipal police department, covering one city, town, or county. States also have their own police agencies (e.g., the New Jersey State Police, the Ohio Highway Patrol). Both municipal and state police agencies are created by state law, ...