Salon political writer and former TPM reporter Brian Beutler powerfully recounted his own personal story about getting shot by a black man wearing a hoodie in an article published Monday that dressed down the practice of racial profiling.
Beutler was shot in the shoulder when two hoodie-wearing, young black men attempted to mug him and a friend five years ago in Washington, D.C. He wrote that recent high-profile events — like public reaction to the George Zimmerman trial — prompted him to share the episode. Beutler wrote that he was also partly responding to actor and former Obama administration official Kal Penn, who recently made comments in favor of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practice after being held at gunpoint in Washington.
From Beutler’s case against racial profiling:
Penn got in trouble for touting the supposed merits of New York’s stop-and-frisk policy. To the objection that the policy disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos, he responded, “And who, sadly, commits & are victims of the most crimes?”
But that’s a non sequitur. A false rationale. Take people’s fear out of the equation and the logical artifice collapses. Canadians are highly overrepresented in the field of professional ice hockey, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to walk around Alberta presumptively asking strangers on the street for autographs. When you treat everyone as a suspect, you get a lot of false positives. That’s why above and beyond the obvious injustice of it, stop and frisk isn’t wise policy. Minorities might commit most of the crime in U.S. cities, and be the likeliest victims of it, and that’s a problem with a lot of causes that should be addressed in a lot of ways. But crime is pretty rare. Not rare like being a professional hockey player is rare. But rare. Most people, white or minority, don’t do it at all.
Read Beutler’s full piece here.
