by
Friday, April 20, 2001 1:27 P.M. EDT

Hillary and the Rule of Law
U.S. News & World Report's "Washington Whispers" column (April 19 item) notes that Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York is "one of several Washington legal stars" who will speak at a July World Bank conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, on "Empowerment, Security and Opportunity Through Law and Justice." The senator's husband had his Arkansas law license suspended for lying under oath in part of what the senator called "a vast right-wing conspiracy."

Barbra the Book Critic
MSNBC.com reports (second item) that Democratic thinker Barbra Streisand is urging people to read Paul Begala's book on President Bush, titled "Is Our Children Learning." Judging from the excerpts Babs has posted on her Web site, we think we'll wait for the movie.

Beijing Arrests Another American
Chinese authorities have detained Wu Jianming, a U.S. citizen, on suspicion of spying for Taiwan, Reuters reports. Beijing is holding at least three other American citizens or residents: Gao Zhan, a U.S. resident who was teaching at Washington's American University; Qin Guangguang, a resident who works for a U.S. medical group; and Li Shaomin, a citizen who was teaching business at the City University of Hong Kong.

The New York Times reports (link requires registration) that more than 600 Chinese police and paramilitary troops opened fire on a crowd of unarmed farmers last Sunday in the village of Yuntang, killing two and wounding at least 18. The 1,400 residents of the village, who have been upset about high taxes, are "defiant but also fearful of further reprisals," the Times reports. One resident tells a reporter, "If the Communist regime knows we are meeting the foreign press, they might level our village."

'Cultural Competence'
State Sen. Avel Gordly is pushing legislation that would require Oregon teachers to demonstrate their "cultural competence." So what the heck is "cultural competence"? Apparently Gordly doesn't know either. Reports the Salem Statesman Journal: "The bill would set up an advisory committee to define cultural competence and how it should be required of teachers. But people involved in the process can't agree on who should be on the panel, how they would define the requirement or a timeline for its implementation."

Zero-Tolerance Watch
Jon Katz of Slashdot.org ("News for nerds") recounts the story of Sean Sheeley, a high school junior in the McKinney Independent School District near Dallas. Sheeley, whom Katz describes as a "computer geek," had been bullied by classmates through most of the school year. His father, Patrick Sheeley, described to Katz what happened:

One of the kids in his class came up to Sean while others were taunting him and said aloud with others present, "One of these days, he's going to bring a gun to school and shoot us."

Patrick Sheeley, a Slashdot regular, says that "my son, being a little sarcastic, took out a small case that he carries his keys in and pretended to be loading a gun. The same student then said, 'Look, he's loading his gun.' "

At some point, says Patrick, one of the other students joined in with some additional comments, further upsetting Sean, who then responded:

"If this had been a real gun, you'd be dead now." One of the kids turned him in.

Punishment: First, Sean was suspended for three days. Then, Katz writes, school officials "notified his parents that Sean was being removed from the high school and sent to an alternative school for kids with learning and other problems." The youngster could appeal the decision to the district, but not until next month, when the school year would be all but over. Katz reports the school took no action against the students who were bullying Sean. The Sheeleys have withdrawn Sean altogether and are home-schooling him.

Slashdot has active and sometimes interesting discussion boards; to read comments on Katz's article, use this link and scroll down past the article. We noted one user who pointed out that one of the schools in the McKinney district is called Slaughter Elementary. Its slogan: "The strength of the wolf is in the pack."

Wisconsin's Cedarburg High School was the site of a police sting operation last week. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that Cedarburg's Finest restored order to the school cafeteria after it was the scene of . . . a food fight! "Saying over-the-top pranks won't be tolerated, police had the lunchroom staked out in anticipation of the melee and now have asked the Ozaukee County district attorney to file criminal misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges against two students."

In Altamont, Kan., five students who spent two months in jail in 1999 for joking about "mounting rocket launchers on a car and driving it through the school halls" are suing the school board, city and county officials and law-enforcement officials, the Associated Press reports. The five were barred from school even after the charges of conspiracy to commit murder were dropped. They had been accused by another student, who, they said, had started the jocose conversation. The classmate was charged with falsely reporting a crime, but that charge also was dropped.

Is Racial Profiling a Myth?
In the just-out Spring issue of City Journal, Heather Mac Donald examines studies purporting to demonstrate the pervasiveness of "racial profiling" by police, and concludes that it is a myth. She cites a raft of statistics demonstrating that if blacks and Hispanics have more run-ins with police, it is because they have higher rates of lawbreaking, and not just violent crime:

Do minorities commit more of the kinds of traffic violations that police target? This is a taboo question among the racial profiling crowd; to ask it is to reveal one's racism. No one has studied it. But some evidence suggests that it may be the case. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that blacks were 10 percent of drivers nationally, 13 percent of drivers in fatal accidents, and 16 percent of drivers in injury accidents. (Lower rates of seat-belt use may contribute to these numbers.) Random national surveys of drivers on weekend nights in 1973, 1986, and 1996 found that blacks were more likely to fail breathalyzer tests than whites. In Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist fatality rate than whites. Blacks in one New Jersey study were 23 percent of all drivers arrested at the scene of an accident for driving drunk, though only 13.5 percent of highway users. In San Diego, blacks have more accidents than their population figures would predict. Hispanics get in a disproportionate number of accidents nationally.

Mac Donald notes that Attorney General John Ashcroft has encouraged initiatives to gather data on race and police traffic stops and searches. "He should instead withhold his support, unless local proponents can prove that they will capture the complex realities of law enforcement," she writes. Hamstringing the police will have the most damaging effect on law-abiding minorities in drug-plagued neighborhoods, she argues.

Mac Donald's painstakingly researched article is a valuable contribution to the debate, and we'll second George Will's praise for her as "the indispensable journalist." But the "complex realities" of this issue are even more complex than Mac Donald acknowledges. If, as she suggests, police are generally colorblind, why do we frequently hear complaints from prominent (and completely law-abiding) blacks that they have been the victims of profiling? Are cops racist after all, or are these blacks oversensitive?

Maybe neither. Mac Donald writes that "the ultimate question in the profiling controversy is whether the disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics with law enforcement reflects police racism or the consequences of disproportionate minority crime." But that's not right. The evil of racial profiling lies in its effect, not its intent (though bad intent can produce bad effect). Precisely because of higher minority crime rates, innocent blacks and members of other minorities are likely to be subjected disproportionately to the inconvenience, humiliation and in some cases danger of encounters with cops--even if policemen are always well-intentioned and rational.

To understand why, ponder this story Robert Pollock, who rode along with a Cincinnati cop earlier this week, tells in today's Wall Street Journal:

A call comes in over the radio. The suspect, alleged to have just threatened a neighborhood woman with a gun, is described as a young black man wearing a black-and-red leather jacket. Off we go. And after 15 minutes driving we spot a man fitting that description. Officer Bell calls for backup and pulls over next to the suspect, emerging slowly behind the hood of the car and asking him to place his hands over his head. The man complies and is not handcuffed. After a quick frisk and identity check it turns out this isn't who we want. Officer Bell explains the reason for the stop and apologizes for the inconvenience. The suspect, gracious but smiling nervously, is free to go. An uncomfortable situation. But was he "racially profiled"? Only to the extent that the caller described her assailant as a black man fitting his description. We stopped no blacks responding to a subsequent drunk-and-disorderly call about about a white man in a leather jacket and khaki pants in a tony white neighborhood nearby.

Officer Bell's actions seem unassailable. Yet how can we not sympathize with the innocent man who was stopped and frisked (and who would have been handcuffed or worse if he had, unwisely but understandably, responded with indignation rather than compliance)? If blacks are more likely than whites to commit crimes, innocent blacks are more likely than innocent whites to have encounters like this with police. Because blacks are a relatively small minority, the disparity can be quite severe. Consider these figures Mac Donald quotes from a report by New Jersey's former attorney general, Peter Verniero:

Between 1994 and 1998, claims the report, 53 percent of consent searches on the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike involved a black person, 21 percent involved whites, and overall, 77 percent involved minorities. But these figures are meaningless, because Verniero does not include racial information about search requests that were denied, and his report mixes stops, searches, and arrests from different time periods.

But most important: Verniero finds culpable racial imbalance in the search figures without suggesting a proper benchmark. He simply assumes that 53 percent black consent searches is too high. Compared with what? If blacks in fact carry drugs at a higher rate than do whites, then this search rate merely reflects good law enforcement.

For the sake of argument, assume Mac Donald is right, and the New Jersey police are innocent of any invidious racial discrimination. Assume further that whatever methods they use to determine whom to search are equally accurate with respect to blacks and whites, so that equal proportions of blacks and whites who consent to searches--say, 80%--are guilty. This would mean that 20% of the 21% of motorists in question who are white, and 20% of the 53% who are black, are innocent.

These assumptions leave us with the following numbers: 10.6% of all motorists who consent to be searched are innocent blacks, and 4.2% are innocent whites. The raw number of innocent black motorists who are subjected to this type of encounter with law enforcement thus is 2.5 times as high as the number of innocent whites. If we adjust for the racial proportion of the overall U.S. population (75.1% white, 12.3% black, according to 2000 census figures), an innocent black is 15 times as likely as an innocent white to be involved in a consent search on the southern part of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Granted, these are back-of-the-envelope calculations, and some of our assumptions, though neutral, may be wrong. But the overall point is clear: Law-enforcement efforts that sweep in a disproportionate share of blacks--even if the only reason they do is that blacks have higher levels of crime--are likely to sweep in a disproportionate share of innocent blacks. Is that a price worth paying for effective law enforcement? Maybe, but this is one of those rare cases in which your race would seem genuinely pertinent to your view of the trade-off.

It's a terrible conundrum, and we have no answer for it. Mac Donald does a public service by showing that the idea of widespread bigotry among police is probably a myth. But even if she wins that argument, the debate over racial profiling is likely to be with us for a long time to come.

An English-Speaking Union
Britain should establish closer ties with other English-speaking countries, rather than bowing to the bureaucrats in Brussels, writes Robert Conquest in the Spring issue of the Hudson Institute's American Outlook: "A full-fledged union of English-speaking nations is still rather sketchy and only in the idea stage, of course, but it provides a distinct, plausible direction for the world's future political evolution. For Great Britain, in particular, it is a viable alternative to greater integration into the European Union, and it provides a forum for those who think it wise to get out of Europe or at least break free of the present constraints the European Union imposes."

Gopher Broke
An Arizona jury awards $450,000 to Michelle Nations, who stepped in a gopher hole in a Tucson city park and sprained her ankle. Comments Overlawyered.com: "Quite an ankle sprain." The Arizona Daily Star quotes a lawyer for the city, Michael Owen, saying he was "astonished" at the verdict: "You would think in a park--in a natural space--people should have to watch where they're going." There were warning signs about the holes posted near parking areas of the park, but Nations's lawyer argued the signs weren't prominent enough.

Holiday Blues
Christmas will remain a legal holiday in the U.S. Why is this news? Because the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear Rick Ganulin's appeal. Ganulin, a Cincinnati city lawyer and "unaffiliated Jew," had sued, claiming that the official designation of Christmas as a holiday violated the constitutional separation of church and state. Susan Dlott, the federal district judge who first heard Ganulin's lawsuit, had also rejected his claim, writing: "We are all better for Santa, the Easter Bunny, too. And maybe The Great Pumpkin, too. To name just a few! An extra day off is hardly high treason. It may be spent as you wish, regardless of reason."

No Longer Living Free
Meldrim Thomson, a governor of New Hampshire from 1973 to 1979 who was known for his opposition to taxes, dies at age 89. He is responsible for putting the state motto, "Live Free or Die," on Granite State license plates.

Live Free or Dye
A 15-year-old Michigan girl who dyed her hair green for Easter will have to spend her school days in the office until the original color returns. "Columbia Middle School students are not allowed to dye their hair any unnatural color," the Associated Press reports. The girl's name is Marie Whitehead.

(Thanks to Michael Barone, Barry Annis, Jonathan Cohen, Paul Rinkes, George Hall, Gary Rogowski and Mike Daley. If you have a tip for Best of the Web Today, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)