What we seek to avoid, they pursue. They do this for reasons of simple efficiency. A policeman who concentrates a disproportionate amount of his limited time and resources on young black men is going to uncover far more crimes and therefore be far more successful in his career that one who biases his attention toward, say, middle-aged Asian men. It is, as Chief Parks said, common sense. Similarly with the tail of the tadpole racial profiling issues that do not involve black people.
China is known to have obtained a top-secret warhead design.
Among those with clearance to work on that design are people from various kinds of national and racial background. In Philadelphia, a federal court order now requires police to fill out both sides of an 8 by 11 sheet on every citizen contact. Law enforcement agencies nationwide are engaged in similar statistics-gathering exercises, under pressure from federal lawmakers like U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who has announced that he will introduce a bill to force police agencies to keep detailed information about traffic stops. The mountain of statistics that is being brought forth by all this panic does not, on the evidence so far, seem likely to shed much light on what is happening. The numbers have a way of leading off into infinite regresses of uncertainty.