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Racial Profiling & Community Order

I’m going to be away from the keys for much of this morning, so here’s a little something to fire you up. This bit jumped out at me the other day from the Times-Picayune report about the New Orleans homeowner who shot and gravely wounded the 14-year-old thief he encountered in his backyard at two […]

I’m going to be away from the keys for much of this morning, so here’s a little something to fire you up.

This bit jumped out at me the other day from the Times-Picayune report about the New Orleans homeowner who shot and gravely wounded the 14-year-old thief he encountered in his backyard at two a.m.:

Earlier in the evening, a different neighbor said the teen in the blue tank top had been biking around the area around 8 p.m. and the neighbor believed he was looking at different houses.

“I thought about calling the cops, but the last thing I want to do is racially profile a little kid who’s just biking,” said the neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The neighbor and Landry are white; the two teens are black.

A surveillance video showed that the two teens were, in fact, casing houses, and one of them stood guard in the street while the other climbed the fence into the homeowner’s backyard, where he was shot.

Interesting to note that the fear of racial profiling stopped this resident from letting the cops know he or she saw a couple of suspicious characters behaving in ways consistent with thieves casing houses, which, of course, they were.

Another item, this one from Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He talks about how for 20 years there had been violence on his block in DC, but he never let it scare him away from walking past young black men in groups. The other day, three black men jumped a white guy on the block, beat him up, and, say police, yelled at him, “This is for Trayvon Martin,” then robbed him. Andrew:

Will that change my attitude when I manage to return from NYC? No. Does it deeply depress and anger me? Yes.

Andrew is willing to let 20 years of experience continue to guide his behavior, versus a single incident. That seems reasonable, in one sense. In another sense, that victim could easily have lost his life, or been seriously wounded in this attack. The odds of being attacked by young black men on that block in DC are very small, based on Andrew’s experience, but not nearly as small as if you lived in a part of town farther from where young black inner-city men live. But if you are attacked, the price you might pay is your life. Is that a prudential gamble you are willing to take to avoid passing a racial-profiling judgment as a pedestrian?

I’m not asking rhetorically. It’s a practical and serious moral question.

Here is a much more morally complicated question related to this topic. There was the other day in Baltimore’s Little Italy a terrible crime. A group of young black men jumped, robbed, and severely beat a white man:

“They beat this boy. He got up, he’d run, they beat him. He got up, he’d run, they beat him. He got up, he’d run, they beat him,” said Blattermann [a witness].

More:

Blattermann and other neighbors believe the same mob has robbed other residents. they’re now banding together to protect their neighborhood.

“I don’t want to have to feel like at any given moment I can’t walk out of my house,” Blattermann said.

Are they going to be racially profiling young black men who come into Little Italy? You bet they will, for the sake of their own lives and property. Here’s the queasy-making part, though. The friend who sent me this used to live either in or near that neighborhood when it was still authentically Italian, and said when he was a resident, they never had problems with crime there, even though the neighborhood abutted a bad black ghetto. The reason? The understanding was that the Italian mafia reached a certain understanding with the ghetto residents, telling them that if they came into Little Italy and wreaked mayhem, life would quickly become very difficult for them.

It worked.

Now, how would you feel if you were a white person living in Little Italy at the time? Would you find it intolerable that the safety of your streets depended on the authority of the mafia to intimidate racially the people in the neighborhood next door? Or would you be grateful, and decide that feeling morally conflicted over the end of safe streets achieved via the means of organized crime intimidating outsiders? It’s a dirty bargain, for sure. But what if the choice you had was safety guaranteed by the Mob, or streets you were afraid to walk in? In other words, what if your safety depended on a set of violent criminals who were on your side, so to speak, intimidating violent criminals on the other side?

The reader who sent me that story writes:

What to make of that? Is this a story of racism? Is it a story of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know? If it is true, at one point this neighborhood had the internal wherewithal–not relying on the police or prosecutors–to ensure the order and safety of “their own.” Forget that these same enforces regularly shook down their own for protection and visited their own kind of violence upon them.

But… not random people being stomped on their way home from restaurants.

Nope. No way. Not in Little Italy. Do we just need better gangsters? I don’t know. But I can tell you that in 1996, I felt perfectly safe stumbling through Little Italy drunk as a skunk at 3 am.

I wouldn’t do that anymore.

When the state cannot protect its citizens, what, as a moral (not legal) question, are they entitled to do to protect themselves? I think we all can agree that the Mob is not the way to go, but when it comes to the matter of doing things like personal racial profiling, at what point does doing that become justified? In the extremely long comments thread on the Times-Pic story, you have New Orleanians — some identifying themselves as black — saying they don’t feel a bit sorry for that kid who got popped at two in the morning, because they’re sick and tired of these hoodlums ruling their streets. Are these people bad, or are they in some sense responsible citizens?

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