Correspondence
Correspondence RACE WARS HEATHER MAC DONALD has a gift for overstatement and oversimplification ("The War on the Police," Dec. 31/Jan. 7). Having been the subject of her attacks in print before,...
...Thus, while Mac Donald may feel the searches of those she finds less threatening than Arabs are too much to bear, they are absolutely essential to our safety...
...This is why the economic redevelopment of the site is so necessary—as necessary as building a formal memorial to the dead...
...The study Mac Donald refers to—only one of the many thus far pro-duced—shows roughly equal contraband hit rates among blacks and whites...
...Mac Donald's stating that hit rates for finding contraband tend to be equal on black and white drivers is nothing less than a misrepresentation of the available evidence...
...To be sure, al Qaeda's reach is global, extending in particular to Indonesia and Asia, but the bulk of its manpower will likely always be bred from Islamic fanaticism...
...Beyond the lives of the innocent, this is what the terrorists destroyed when they brought down the towers...
...And with the government's announcement that it cannot possibly have electronic explosive detection equipment in place to meet the January deadline, smuggling bombs onto planes in the bags of terrorists themselves or of other passengers is a much greater threat than a replay of the September 11 scenario...
...Perhaps Harris has not noticed that the al Qaeda cells recently exposed in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Britain are made up overwhelmingly of Middle Eastern and North African Islamic men...
...GUILTY BY EXPOSURE THERE IS AN ADDITIONAL POINT to be made in David Tell's "Dan Burton, Wrong Again" (Jan...
...As Tell notes, the present grand jury proceedings in the matter of the FBI's Boston office are being conducted in secrecy...
...I believe that this attitude, while understandable, is misguided and wrong...
...Worse still, she misunderstands what we must do to win the war against terrorists...
...Harris argues that these "statistically indistinguishable" hit rates show that all groups carry drugs equally and that the police are "racially profiling" minorities...
...My point is that in most cases of alleged racial profiling, the police are merely going where the crime is, and are then blamed for where they end up...
...they knew we'd be watching for them...
...Next time, please think more about safety and less about ideology...
...if police critics spent more time observing officers or talking to them on their beats, they would better understand the complex factors that go into the decision to stop someone...
...Suffice it to say that so much of what is good about our country, the fruits of its economic and social freedom, happened at the World Trade Center on a daily basis...
...Nevertheless, it remains true that we are all beneficiaries of and are protected by these same rules, and we should all recoil at the idea of members of Congress exploring, second-guessing, and, of course, publicizing, grand jury proceedings and investigations of individuals who were never indicted...
...Al Qaeda changed its means of destruction between the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks, but the participants and planners shared the same religious, regional, and gender identities...
...Some have even suggested that the site should be mostly or entirely dedicated to the memorial, as if other development would somehow profane the memory of those who died there...
...The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 was not the first, but the second, such attempt...
...The study, which looked at police reports of almost 190,000 stop and frisks in New York City over 15 months, indicates that neither crime rates of individual precincts nor suspect descriptions had anything to do with who got stopped and frisked...
...only the race or ethnicity of the pedestrians involved explained who police stopped...
...When the first, in 1993, failed to accomplish the terrorists' objective, they took eight years to devise a new method of attack, plan it carefully, and carry it out...
...No serious person fails to acknowledge the fact that crime rates for blacks are higher, but that is not the real problem with racial and ethnic profiling...
...If we fail to do this, then we would unwittingly perpetuate the destruction that has been wrought...
...DAVID A. HARRIS Professor of Law, University of Toledo Toledo, OH HEATHER MAC DONALD RESPONDS: In May 2000, David Harris testified before a Senate subcommittee that the claim that blacks and Latinos were "disproportionately involved" in the drug trade was "wrong on the facts" and the "creature of stereotypes...
...In fact, stops and searches are less productive when police use race and ethnic appearance than when they use traditional observation of suspicious behavior...
...If such an acknowledgement is so common, however, why was the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police fired in 1999 for stating that minorities dominate the distribution of cocaine and marijuana—a fact reported for years in federal drug analyses...
...For the past 15 years, I have worked two blocks from the World Trade Center, and I was in the complex two or more times most days...
...She doesn't want us to waste time searching non-Middle Easterners, because the people who attacked us on September 11 were all Middle Eastern males...
...The fact that the U.S...
...Clearly, these data show that racial profiling does not work, but acknowledging this would have required Mac Donald to reconsider her preconceived views...
...He could have added a survey from New Jersey, in which drugs were found on a higher proportion of black and Hispanic than white motorists...
...Suspicious individuals from countries that harbor terrorists should be scrutinized more carefully...
...only someone who believes that all groups commit terrorism at equal rates would feel safer seeing American grandmothers and elderly men in wheelchairs subjected to full body searches at the airport...
...Mac Donald neglects to mention that the same study showed clear discrimination against Latinos, and that not just some but all of the other studies showed lower hit rates for profiled blacks than for whites, not equal hit rates...
...More troubling is Mac Donald's failure to understand what we are up against in al Qaeda...
...It is impossible to describe everything that happened there...
...Arafat didn't become chairman until 1969...
...Every day it was filled with thousands of workers, shoppers, tourists, and people passing through from the train stations that serviced the complex...
...MARK SCHROEDER Houston, TX REBUILDING THE WTC I READ WITH INTEREST Catesby Leigh's piece concerning the debate that has begun about how the World Trade Center site should be redeveloped and the nature and scope of the memorial that will be built there ("Rebuilding Ground Zero," Jan...
...This is now the dominant faction of the PLo...
...I am glad that he has now joined the ranks of "serious" people who acknowledge higher minority crime rates...
...government lacks the capacity for reliably detecting bombs and other instruments of death makes the need to use all available intelligence about terrorism even greater...
...West Bank leaders loyal to King Hussein of Jordan originally controlled the group...
...Focusing on Arab or Middle Eastern ethnicity puts our attention on yesterday's method, instead of tomorrow's...
...To the contrary, they show the opposite...
...By rebuilding the offices and the shops, we re-create what they once created and what the terrorists thought they could destroy...
...When al Qaeda wanted to make a postSeptember 11 attempt on an airliner, they didn't send another group of young male Middle Eastern hijackers...
...It is often the case that our rules of law are invoked in cases of unsavory circumstances and by unsavory individuals whose reputations may already be dubious, or that the likely subjects of an investigation may be well known or obvious...
...Instead, they sent shoe bomber Richard Reid—a nonMiddle Eastern British citizen with a valid United Kingdom passport...
...In fact, most police look at the same set of behavioral cues for all drivers, which yield drugs at roughly equal rates...
...Mac Donald's attempts to set up a straw man—the argument of all the police bashers who believe blacks don't really show disproportionate representation in crime—rings hollow...
...ROBERT F. WALSH Belle Mead, NJ FOUNDING FATHERS CONTRARY to what Tom Rose writes, Yasser Arafat didn't found the Palestine Liberation Organization ("Arafat's Naval Adventure," Jan...
...To my knowledge, only the year 2000 data set out of New Jersey shows a higher hit rate for white drivers...
...The complex was a vibrant community all its own...
...Mac Donald conveniently forgets that al Qaeda has unfortunately shown itself to be not only vicious, but very clever and adaptable...
...We can already see signs that this is happening now...
...The Arab League established the PLo in 1964 under Ahmad Shuqeiri...
...PETER KAUFFNER Seoul, South Korea...
...I have never advocated "racial profiling" in domestic law enforcement...
...That black drivers are searched more often than whites reflects the fact that blacks are disproportionately involved in drug trafficking and so exhibit the behavior of drug traffickers more often...
...Having been the subject of her attacks in print before, I'm not surprised to see her attack me again...
...If he accuses me of "misrepresentation," then he himself is guilty of misleading the Senate...
...21), concerning grand jury proceedings and the exercise of prosecutorial discretion...
...The real problem is that these tactics do not work—they do not improve the effectiveness of law enforcement...
...There is a tendency among some involved in the debate to view the memorial as completely separate from the office buildings and residential buildings that also may be built at the site...
...In his Senate testimony, Harris stressed that the hit rates for finding drugs on black and white drivers in the leading study are "statistically indistinguishable...
...As for the NYPD study to which Harris alludes and whose results he greatly exaggerates, he fails to note that the study found that blacks were "significantly" less likely to be stopped on suspicion of property crimes than whites or Hispanics, in total contradiction to the "racist police" hypothesis...
...Far more serious, however, is her refusal to recognize facts that don't support her position...
...Given her comments about crime in New York and stop and frisks, Mac Donald's failure to acknowledge in any way the recent study of the NYPD's stop and frisk practices by two of the nation's foremost researchers in criminal justice is surprising...
...This secrecy exists for, among other reasons, the fundamental reason that individuals who have been or are being investigated but are not subsequently indicted should not have their names and reputations put at risk through publication of allegations insufficient to meet the threshold test for indictment...
...Arafat did found Fatah in 1956...
...Harris also cited Customs Service data that found drugs on 6.8 percent of searched whites, 6.2 percent of searched blacks—hardly a massive difference—and 2.8 percent of searched Hispanics...
...When people refer to the PLo today, usually they really mean Fatah, so the larger point Rose makes in his article is still valid...
...If the police were singling out black drivers merely because of their race, the hit rates for blacks would be much lower than for whites...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 20
