Reporting while wrong
The Manhattan Institute has posted Heather Mac Donald's National Review article on the latest traffic stop data bearing on racial profiling. As might be deduced from the article's title, Mac Donald explores the New York Times's abuse of the data: "Reporting while wrong." The article's subhead is "The New York Times peddles more driving while black malarkey." This is a beat that Mac Donald has simply owned for the past five years and that she covered in her book Are Cops Racist?.
Her article begins with an exposition of the key role played by University of Toledo Law School Professor David Harris in creating the myth of racial profiling. Harris has served as the intellectual guru of the racial profiling campaign waged by the ACLU. As an ACLU consultant, he wrote wrote the influential "Driving While Black" pamphlet to which Mac Donald refers at the top of her article; the racial profiling litigation that brought the issue of alleged racial profiling in traffic stops to national attention in 2000 was a project of the ACLU.
Mac Donald also notes that Harris expanded his pamphlet into the 2002 book Profiles in Injustice. I read the book when I was invited to debate Harris in early 2002 on his visit to the Twin Cities to promote the book. I'm not easily shocked, but I was shocked by the sophisticated misrepresentations and omissions in Harris's book. Harris argues that crime rates do not differ by racial group, that they are equal among racial groups. He simply discounts the basic data regarding racial disparities in crime rates, omits any reference to the basic data regarding the racial identification of perpetrators by victims, and dispenses with the related criminological scholarship of the past 30 years or so.
I wrote an article on the subject for the January/February 2003 issue of the American Enterprise that ran with an excerpt from Harris's book: "Better Unsafe than (Occasionally) Sorry?" Harris subsequently wrote the magazine:
The personal attack on me in Scott Johnson's article contains inaccuracies, distortions, as well as a breathtaking slander: that I am responsible for the success of the September 11 attacks. All of this from a writer who never even bothered to talk to me, which could have at least saved him from making many of the errors in the piece.Although Harris accused me of not talking to him before writing the article, I have an autographed copy of his book that refutes him. I responded:
The article is not a personal attack on Professor Harris; it is fair comment on his book. I am not aware of any factual errors and he does not cite any. Harris also does not mention the excerpt from his book that accompanies the piece; it allows him to speak in his own words. In any case, the suggestion that I should have talked to him before critiquing his article lacks a basis in any journalistic practice. Besides, on March 7, 2002, I attended two presentations by Harris in the Twin Cities. After the first of his talks I commented as a panelist. Following the second presentation, I debated him. I regret Professor Harris has taken offense, but he is a voluntary participant in a serious debate and can expect his controversial claims to be engaged and refuted by a concerned public.The gist of my American Enterprise article was akin to that of Mac Donald's current National Review piece -- the alleged phenomenon of racial profiling condemned by advocates like Harris generally does not exist.
