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Racial profiling redux
John Leo has written what can serve as a follow-up to recent VFR discussions on “racial profiling” and the Beltway Sniper case: P.C. timidity in sniper case may have cost lives. A key additional bit of information Leo provides is that “Eric Hickey, a criminal psychology professor at California State University-Fresno, says there are plenty of minority serial killers — blacks account for about 13 percent of the U.S. population and 22 percent of serial killers.” So not only is a white man less likely than a non-white to be a sniper murderer — that we already knew — but he is also less likely than a black man to be a serial killer at all. The racial profiling of whites in this case
was therefore different from most racial profiling in a very basic way: it had the relative probabilities reversed. Because at least if
Professor Hickey is correct, being black increases the chances that someone is a serial murderer. When the significant correlation of blackness with serial murder is combined with the indications that plainly connected the snipers with Jamaica and with Black Muslims — indications that must have rung bells with at least some DC policemen — the refusal to consider the possibility that the sniper might be someone other than the eternal Angry White Male of our rulers’ self-justifying fantasies becomes inexcusable.
Comments
What, prior to their arrests, were “the indications that plainly connected the snipers with Jamaica and with Black Muslims” Posted by: Lawrence Auster on November 6, 2002 9:31 PMLeo goes into them toward the end of his piece — the “word is bond,” the five stars and so on. They’re not things that would mean much to anyone not clued into odd corners of black life, but as he points out some cops in the DC area must have made the connection. Posted by: Jim Kalb on November 7, 2002 7:51 AMThat’s absolute bull. I studied psychology and did research on serial killers in the early 90s. Serial killers are more often than not, white males. It’s rare to find either minorities or women who commit this sort of crime. Interesting how the right always attempts to absolve white males of any sort of guilt or complicity in any of the evils of the world though history proves that they have been the culprits of a great deal of it. Posted by: Monnica on November 11, 2002 6:47 PMHere’s a discussion from WorldNetDaily on Moose: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29590 . Posted by: Jim Kalb on November 11, 2002 9:06 PMIt would help, Monnica, if you took an elementary course is statistics. While it is true that the numerical majority of serial killers are white (55%), whites are 72% of the population and therefore statistically less likely to be serial killers than blacks and others. Of course, if you like repeating those leftist slogans over and over again like a mantra, you’ll find this blog to be quite annoying. Posted by: Carl on November 12, 2002 2:36 AM |