Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> According to the official statistics (NCVS), over 80% of all Black
> victims of violent crimes, but less than 17% of all White victims, are
> victimized by Black offenders.
Unfortunately, the reverse is also true: Blacks are massively more vicitimized by zero tolerance policies. The recently leaked report by the US Civil Rights commission investigating the New York police force accused it racial profiling, meaning that what zero tolerance laws meant in effect was that all young black men would be stopped and frisked in order to pick up those among them that were offenders. To take just one striking statistic from the excerpts reported, in Staten Island, where 11% of the people are black or latino, 91% of those stopped by special police groups were black or latino. Or to take another striking result, shortly after the Amadou Diallo case, the Daily News took a random sample of 100 young black men. 90 plus of them had been stopped and frisked at least once in their life.
> And here is where I see that zero tolerance policies (provided they
> are carried in a professional, nondiscriminatory manner and in
> cooperation with local communities) can have a role.
This is exactly the problem, Wojtek -- none of those three conditions obtain. If they did, we'd all think differently. If you emphasized that those three conditions are sine non qua of legitimate policing, I don't think you'd get much disagreement. But the name "zero tolerance" is very strongly associated with the opposite approach. Perhaps the term you want is "community policing."
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com