July 1, 2013

Profiling: George Zimmerman v. Michael Bloomberg

Perhaps the most shocking allegation against George Zimmerman has been that he "profiled" Trayvon Martin, as can be seen by the 103,000,000 Google hits that search generates.

The mayor of New York City, billionaire Michael Bloomberg is similarly accused of having his 44,000-officer New York Police Department racially profile black and Hispanic youths (a.k.a., "the right people") to be stopped and frisked. But the decade-or-so long Bloomberg profiling controversy, such as it is, has generated almost 100,000,000 fewer web pages than the Zimmerman profiling controversy. (And many of those pages seem to be admiring "profiles" of Bloomberg rather than damning him over "profiling.")
And rightly so. After all, this Bloomberg person is just some provincial nobody with a crimefighting complex. He's not George Zimmerman. Let's keep our priorities straight, people.

29 comments:

Anonymous said...

speaking of, when i first heard of rachel jeantel, i tried googling her name. it took till the "t" before her name popped up. On bing, it only too to the "c".

Anonymous said...

http://streetcarnage.com/blog/obamas-new-america-is-this-shit-even-working/

"Exhibit A: KFC still won’t put black people into their ads."

Anonymous said...

speaking of, when i first heard of rachel jeantel, i tried googling her name. it took till the "t" before her name popped up. On bing, it only too to the "c".

Time to switch to Bing. I've already done it on my iPhone.

Anonymous said...

I see the coverage of this story by the Telegraph is sickening in its bias. I thought that was a respectable, albeit neoconnish newspaper.

Anonymous said...

Steve, why are you trying to ruin things for us here in New York?

Pat Boyle said...

Normally you would think that 'profiling' would be a good thing. It means the ability to discern patterns in a mass of confusing clues.

I used to be a management consultant for example. Typically you are injected into the middle of an organizational problem in which there are many theories and many opinions. Your job is to discover some underlying pattern. To see the clues and put them together in a coherent pattern.

Lots of jobs that take some brainpower are like that.

We used to celebrate police profilers. They were the subject of several Hollywood movies. This is the skill that has allowed us to locate and capture serial killers. Previously in human history serial killers operated undetected for years.

But profiling is normally valued because the profiler spots some tiny pattern in the confusing body of clues. In race-violence cases the pattern is anything but subtle.

In medical statistics for another example, we like to reject the null hypothesis at the p<.001 or less. Therefore we need large sample sizes. The effects we are looking for are usually very small.

But in race-violence cases no one bothers with hypothesis testing. In a typical medical question like - Does moderate drinking improve your health? You might see a difference in a sample of a thousand because the effect is small. Social drinkers might have 100 coronaries while teetotalers might have 102. A two percent difference is real and important.

But in race-violence the difference is not 2% or 20%. It's not even 200%. It's more like &00% to 1,000%. It doesn't take any kind of subtle pattern recognition to realize that an armed robbery, rape or murder was probably done by a black man under thirty. The rates are so dramatically different that a child could make the appropriate prediction.

Oddly enough because the rates are so different - and even more so for Asians - instead of acting on that knowledge we do just the opposite. We see the same thing in screening for potential terrorists getting on a plane. If all the terrorists to date have been young Muslim men we oddly enough think it's virtuous to especially scrutinize old Chinese women or infants.

This fear or profiling seems to be the triumph of advocacy groups. In one case those who are pro-Muslim and those who are pro-black. As a strategy it paradoxically works best when the perpetrator group is most predictably quilty.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

I live in NYC and the first I heard of Bloomie's remarks was here. Granted I don't listen to the MSM but still. If what he said struck a nerve I'd have heard about it. I didn't.

Another example of a 70IQ, in this case, combined with raging testosterone:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2351858/Shawn-Custis-Nanny-cam-home-invader-assaulted-mother-child-known-entering-neighbors-homes.html

That article leads you to:

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/alleged-nanny-cam-beater-entered-homes-neighbors-article-1.1386099

The article mentions Dyckman Houses – the word "houses" is a dead giveaway that he lives in a housing project. Why do these things still exist? They should be privatized.

Custis has an extensive criminal record, big surprise. He should be hung and cremated. The pictures of this dumb, good-for-nothing WELL FED brute glowering over a helpless woman are sickening.

Quote from article:

"There are people saying we need a Neighborhood Watch now,” Alzadon added. “I guess we do."

Anonymous said...

How's Zimmerman's lawsuit against NBC coming? And weren't there others?

ben tillman said...

Well done, Steve.

Anonymous said...

Mayor "Sundowner" Bloomberg ftw

stari_momak said...

OT: Nineteen white men die doing a difficult, dirty, dangerous job. Public sector employees to boot, the kind the modern GOP so loves to beat up on.

Marc B said...

The profiled thing had riled me up from the start. The press denounces Zimmerman as an annoying busy body who should have stayed inside his house and watched TV that night while his neighborhood continued to degenerate into a war zone, yet now he now he his somehow "profiling" like a bigoted cop. This is purposeful attempt to conflate law enforcement standards with the standards of private citizens by both the media and the prosecution. Citizens do not have to meet the same standards as law enforcement. We are legally allowed to be as suspicious of any group of people we choose.

anony-mouse said...

Well the fact that there's a murder trial going on for one and not the other might have an effect too, perhaps.

All time best-selling female author: Agatha Christie.

Belisarius said...

And racial profiling is not only non-sinful but an absolute sacrament when it benefits the vibrant- like, for instance, when they want to go to UT Law School.

Anonymous said...

You know, it is not in the slightest bit illegal for one private citizen to "profile" another.

mulebag said...

@7/1/13, 12:48 AM Google and Bing don't share their queries; it may just be that a higher class of person uses Google than Bing, and they don't /search/ for 'Rachel Jeantel' as much.

Gene said...

I don't understand the racial profiling issue. An attorney for the Trayvon Martin family said Zimmerman was guilty of "criminally profiling" Martin. I don't know what th is means or what law the attorney is referring to.

Since when is it illegal for a neighborhood watch volunteer to profile anyone? If Zimmerman's goal was to fight crime he would have been pretty stupid not to profile young black men walking around the complex after dark. They were they ones, the residents were complaining, who were burglarizing their houses.

Anonymous said...

I think the comparison is a little faulty. Bloomberg just recently made his comment about stop and frisk, while the Zimmerman affair is more than one year old.

Anonymous said...

"I think the comparison is a little faulty. Bloomberg just recently made his comment about stop and frisk, while the Zimmerman affair is more than one year old."

Bloomy has been using s-n-f for 8 yrs. That it got so little media attention is proof of media collusion and bias.

mel belli said...

Public sector employees to boot

Be fair, we have no idea (at least I don't) whether Arizona public employees have the same kinds of outrageous pay packages and work habits as their California counterparts. Don't forget, two years ago in Alameda the cops and firemen refused to save a drowning man by pretending the action wasn't "authorized" by their contracts.

Anonymous said...

Manhattan its where the true power in this country is placed, Steve.

They decide if America goes to war, which banks get bailout, what the common folk should think when they watch the TV.

Anonymous said...

I guess Bloomberg isn't planning on being a viable presidential candidate one day. Even if he can keep the media from commenting on this now, I would think that if he's ever nominated his opponent would dig this up and paint him as an ugly racist in attack ads.

Anonymous said...

"why are you trying to ruin things for us here in New York?"

Why has the New York media covered up the black crime problem for decades thereby preventing anything being done to prevent *millions* of preventable violent crimes - literally millions.

Why should the same New York media responsible for millions of preventable violent crimes in other cities be able to get away with covering up the use of sundowner tactics to cleanse black people from Manhattan while still publically denying the problem exists and therefore denying any solution to everybody else.

Violent crime didn't fall in New York. New Yorkers displaced it onto other people elsewhere while at the same time preventing them from doing anything about it.

Anonymous said...

What if Mandela dies on the day of Zimmerman's acquittal?

Anonymous said...

Money is moving from Manhattan to DC so if Manhattan is where the real power is, it is pretty ineffectual power.

After Dodd Frank and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the only question in Manhattan is "how high?"

Anonymous said...

What if Mandela dies on the day of Zimmerman's acquittal?


Steady now, its only the beginning of July, Christmas Day is still months off yet.

Anonymous said...

What if Mandela dies on the same day Zimmerman is acquitted ... and the new Denzel blockbuster flops, and Barack Obama comes down with sleeping sickness he got from a tsetse fly in Africa, and Michelle Obama goes apesh*t on a white reporter for disrespecting her, and Al Sharpton chokes on a hot wing, and Rev. Jesse is indicted on massive corruption charges and Jay-Z and Puff Daddy kill each other in a shootout and the NBA goes broke and riots break out all over the place?

I'm just saying, what if?

Anonymous said...

Sailer becoming mainstream alert: Greg Gutfeld just used the term "hatefact" on "The Five" while defending Bloomberg from accusations of profiling and racial insensitivity!

Cail Corishev said...

I'm just saying, what if?

Well, if all that happened, the GOP might win in 2016 after all.