From
NY Times
The Bush administration is replacing the director of a small but critical branch of the Justice Department, months after he complained that senior political officials at the department were seeking to play down newly compiled data on the aggressive police treatment of black and Hispanic drivers.
I feel the same as Rep. John Conyers:
"My suspicions always go up if a report like this is just deep-sixed," said Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and plans to introduce legislation this fall that would ban the use of racial or ethnic police profiling.
What was the statistic that they tried to bury?
Once they were stopped, Hispanic drivers were searched or had their vehicles searched by the police 11.4 percent of the time and blacks 10.2 percent of the time, compared with 3.5 percent for white drivers. Blacks and Hispanics were also subjected to force or the threat of force more often than whites, and the police were much more likely to issue tickets to Hispanics rather than simply giving them a warning, the study found.
That is three times the rate of search for blacks and hispanics compared to whites. That is after they are stopped. The rate at which the different races are stopped by police is the same.
In addition, the blacks and hispanics were three times more likely to be handcuffed, arrested, and have force used against them.
The same holds true for men. They are about three times more likely to be searched, although in this case they are also 50% more likely to be stopped in the first place.
In the end, there is no conclusion to what the statistic means.
Here is the actual study.
What is more interesting than the numbers is that someone wanted to suppress this information.
But the references in the draft to higher rates of searches and use of force for blacks and Hispanics were crossed out by hand, with a notation in the margin that read, "Do we need this?" A note affixed to the edited draft, which the officials said was written by Ms. Henke, read "Make the changes," and it was signed "Tracy." That led to a fierce dispute after Mr. Greenfeld refused to delete the references, officials said.
Ms. Henke, who was nominated by Mr. Bush last month to a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a brief telephone interview that she did not recall the episode.
Henke is an Ashcroft appointee. Her influence here isn't an accident. She was put here for this purpose. From a Sept 22, 2002 NY Times article:
Criminal justice experts are concerned that Attorney General John Ashcroft is moving to exert political control over the agencies within the department that collect crime statistics and grant crime research awards, reports the New York Times. "At stake, [experts] say, is the integrity of the crime statistics and the findings of scholars about what causes crime and how to reduce it.
These critics trace the shift to the passage in October of the U.S.A. Patriot Act [which] removed much of the freedom the directors of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice [and gave] their authority to the assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs, Deborah Daniels, and her deputy, Tracy Henke."
The report notes that Daniels is the sister of OMB Director Mitch Daniels and Henke is a close associate of Mr. Ashcroft who, according to employees, was responsible for inserting language in the Patriot Act undercutting the two agencies' independence.
And of course, like all the Bush flunkies, she was promoted for doing a disservice to her country.