Heather Mac Donald unloads on the Brown University students who shut down NY Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s speech, in protest of the stop-and-frisk program. Excerpt:

The nauseating combination of ignorance, self-righteousness, entitlement, and boorishness that characterizes campus  politics today was on appalling display yesterday at Brown University, as a massive crowd of students prevented New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly from addressing the school. Kelly had come to Brown to talk about the New York Police Department’s unmatched success in lowering New York’s crime rate.  The students, however, heckled him off the stage, shouting that Kelly had “institute[ed] systemic racism” in the city through the NYPD’s contested stop, question, and frisk tactics.

The protesters of course take for granted that they can go about blithely squandering their parents’ tuition money at Brown without fear of getting shot, robbed, or raped.  Nor do they have to navigate through a gauntlet of drug dealers on their way to the store or while picking up their mail.  Residents of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods by contrast endured just such constant fear and disorder until the NYPD embraced proactive policing and other revolutionary reforms in the early 1990s, reforms which Kelly perfected.  When every criminologist predicted that the NYPD’s 1990s crime drop had bottomed out, Kelly drove crime down another 31%, in the process saving another 5000 minority lives.

The Brown students have zero understanding of the massive disproportionality in crime commission in New York and other American cities.  In New York, for example, blacks commit nearly 80% of all shootings, though they are 23% of the city’s population, while whites, 34% of New York residents, commit around 2% of all shootings.  Such a disparity means that policing will be concentrated in minority areas and will result inevitably in disproportionate police activity, including stops.   The police focus on minority neighborhoods in order to protect the many law-abiding residents there; if the police ignored those areas, only then could they rightly be accused of racism.

Read the whole thing.  I don’t care what you think about stop-and-frisk, preventing the man from speaking is disgusting, and ignores the complexities of the policy, and of meaningfully addressing crime. In the big city nearest to me, Baton Rouge, nearly all of the violent crimes are committed by black males against black people, usually other black males. If the cops did something like stop-and-frisk there (which wouldn’t make as much sense, given that BR is not a pedestrian culture like NYC), they would focus on the two or three zip codes that account for nearly all the violent crime, and that would mean they focused almost exclusively on black neighborhoods. The people they would frisk, and take guns from, would be black, to the man — as would the lives they would save. But they would arguably violate civil liberties to do so. They would target black men in Baton Rouge because, like Willie Sutton robbing banks, that’s where the violent crime is. 

They don’t do that for arguably justifiable reasons. It ought to make us squeamish on civil liberties grounds, even if one supports the policy in the end. We can have an argument over that. But “systemic racism”? Really? As if the only reason for stop-and-frisk, and for targeting the minority communities, was bigotry, as opposed to a rational response to the facts of crime in that city.

UPDATE: Some of you commenters seem to think I’m defending stop-and-frisk. I’m not. As I said, I don’t know enough about the constitutional issues to say one way or the other. It was undeniably an effective crime-stopping policy. What I am arguing is that stop-and-frisk was not motivated by racism, or if it was, the fact that it had disparate impact on minority populations was not because of racism, but because a rational policy aimed at disarming those who commit gun crimes would disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics, because they are the populations who commit far more of these crimes than whites and Asians. This is not the same thing as arguing that stop-and-frisk is constitutionally permissible.