Krissah Thompson reports in the WaPo:
The first of several studies looking into the arrest last summer of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., which attracted the interest of President Obama and became a national controversy, essentially clears the Cambridge, Mass., police department of the charge of racial profiling.Note that is population investigated for the offense in question, not the general population. Rochelle Sharpe and Maggie Mulvihill explain in the Boston Globe:
The report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which was published Thursday in the Boston Globe, bases its findings on a review of the department's handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009.
Of the 392 adults arrested for disorderly conduct, 57 percent were white and 34 percent were black. That racial breakdown almost exactly mirrored the racial composition of the population that Cambridge police investigated for disorderly conduct, the center's analysis shows.
Cambridge is 68 percent white and 12 percent black, the latest US Census data show. But multiple racial profiling specialists said the fairest way to analyze the Cambridge Police Department's conduct was to compare the racial makeup of those charged to that of those investigated and not to the racial makeup of the overall population.Well, well. The "racial profiling specialists" have come around to what persons of sense have always known. I am soooooo tired of the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Denominator, wailing that some criminal justice policy or other is racist because it "falls more heavily on [name your group]," then comparing persons sentenced, arrested, or whatever to the irrelevant denominator of the general population, not the relevant denominator of persons convicted or reasonably suspected of having violated the law in question.
This is progress.
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