Heather MacDonald Quotations

You don't want to be red-flagged for racial profiling. So you back away. The result of this is less effective policing. And this is what we see resulting from this.

If you're working in a high-crime neighborhood, and you see a person on a street corner hitching his belt up in a way that he would if he were concealing a handgun, you would want to examine that situation more closely. Or if you were patrolling a known drug-sales zone at three in the morning and saw somebody on their cell phone, you would want to look into that. But if you get to the fifth or sixth situation, and everybody that you have come across to this point has been black, you're going to second-guess yourself.

If you were to design a truly effective measure that would include a wide variety of factors that go into an examination of how police go about their jobs, you could, perhaps, achieve that end. But the analyses that we see come as a result of these kinds of efforts are crude and primitive. The goal is to achieve the desired result.

Because the purpose of these mandates is not to expose the myth of racial profiling, but is instead to serve the aims of anti-police advocates who want to undermine law-enforcement agencies from being able to do their jobs, I can't see where this can have a positive impact.