Gee, Officer Krupke!

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Insignificant Thoughts, in a post he titles "Rules, what rules?…just racism" links to a Tongue Tied post called "That Card Again" about a woman kicked off a bus for, well, let's listen in:

An Arab-American woman who was kicked off a city bus in Juneau, Alaska when she refused to stop eating says the incident was racially motivated and caused her at least $150,000 worth of severe emotional distress, reports the Juneau Empire.

As I may have mentioned before, I have an hour-long commute to work everyday up and down I-91 running through Massachusetts and Connecticut. Sometimes, as I'm tooling along at a healthy 70-75mph, I'll see a car in the rear-view mirror obviously moving at meteoric rate. I mean, the kind of speed that causes you to freeze in your lane because you don't want to get in the way. It's unnerving to see a ton of metal moving at such a rate – the kinetic energy is enormous. As the car passes, I always look over and – take my word for it – half the time it's a black guy behind the wheel.

Now, for the country in general, but New England in particular, my informal research would lead me to conclude that as a percentage of the general population, blacks (black men) speed more. But here's the thing that bothers me: when these men get pulled over for triple-digit speeding, you know they're blaming it on "driving while black".

The only problem with this is that a study by an independent group found that black drivers do speed more:

The Public Service Research Institute used specially designed radar gun cameras to photograph tens of thousands of drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike last spring. The photos were shown to teams of three evaluators who tried to determine each driver's race without knowing whether the driver was speeding.

The study, which has not been formally released, found black drivers went 15 mph or more over the speed limit much more than other drivers, and the racial gap widened at higher speed limits. It found little difference in 55 mph zones.

Mark Posner, a Justice Department lawyer who asked that the findings be withheld, said he feared the results had been skewed by factors such as glare on windshields, weather and camera placement.

That's right, the study was buried by the Bush Justice Department because it disturbed the popular notion of racial profiling. But Heather MacDonald of City Journal will not be swayed in an article for City Journal titled "The Racial Profiling Myth Debunked":

The driver identifications are not reliable! whined the Justice Department. The researchers had established a driver’s race by agreement among two of the three evaluators. So in response to DOJ’s complaint, the researchers reran their analysis, using only photos about which the evaluators had reached unanimous agreement. The speeding ratios came out identically to before.

The status of the study is unknown; it will probably never see the light of day. Meanwhile, every African-American leadfoot, candy-chewing Arab-American, and member of the Jets gang will shift the blame for their guilt away – always away – from their own behavior.