PICKIN' UP STIX:

How Profiling Saved My Life: Reflections on Crime and Black Supremacy (Nicholas Stix, December 14, 2003, Toogood Reports)

It never occurred to us to sue the Long Beach Police Department for abuse of authority and profiling. Maybe that was because when Kevan & Co. jumped out of their cars, we were just about to commit a felony or three, breaking into cars in that parking lot. Maybe because we hadn’t been taught to scream bloody murder, when we got caught doing wrong. Maybe because we were white.

And what if Kevan & Co. had left us alone? We would have broken into cars, and stolen stereos and such, as planned, sold our booty for a couple of dollars, and eventually shifted about to steal bigger and more expensive objects - like entire cars. Between the law of averages and our natural stupidity, we all would have ended up arrested multiple times.

And Dennis did, in fact, end up in the Berkshire School for Boys, a reform school in upstate New York, for an early experiment in multiculturalism. He went on a mugging spree one night with two slightly older sociopaths - a Jew named David Kaiser and a black drug addict named Tyrone Huffman. (One night, for no particular reason, Tyrone decided to stomp me to death, but was interrupted by a righteous, black Christian woman whom I remember only as “Darnell’s mother.”)

I know that Mike spent some time in Nassau County Jail as a teenager, because he bragged about it (“Nassau County’s eggs suck!”). And since Steve was unable or unwilling to go to school, show up for even a security guard job, stay off the booze or hold his booze, I’m going to presume that he spent at least some time inside. (I didn’t hang around to find out.)

Eventually, I realized that I was unable to stay cool enough to avoid getting caught when the police were chasing me, had no talent for the violence that is inevitable even in a con man’s life, and didn’t want to get raped. And so, I changed my ways. Otherwise, I doubt I would still be alive.

That was 1971, this is now.

Now, when a group of teenage boys hangs out on the street at night, they think they have a right to be left alone by the police. At least they do, if they are black or Hispanic. And where do they get such notions? And why are they routinely out on the street - not at 9 p.m., but at 10, 11, midnight and later - on school nights?

These reflections were inspired by the New York City government’s recent settlement of a lawsuit, in which it agreed to pay a total of $167,500 to ten plaintiffs who alleged they had been targeted by police, merely because they were black.

The tragedy is that it's law abiding minorities who pay the price of our not profiling--because it's their neighborhoods that bear the brunt of crime.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 12, 2003 7:47 AM