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From the City and Beyond

Diversity, Badillo-style

The University of Wisconsin admissions office was caught red-handed when they admitted to digitally manipulating a photo on the cover of their application in an attempt to portray the school as racially diverse.

Undergraduate admissions director Rob Seltzer, apparently unaware of what diversity means, authorized splicing the face of a black student, Diallo Shabazz, into the picture of a crowd of white students cheering at a UW football game after an unsuccessful search for a photo that would show the school's diversity. Sharp-eyed staffers at the student newspaper caught the photo.

Shabazz told the Chicago Sun-Times that "it's a symptom of a much larger problem...Diversity on [the UW] campus is not really being dealt with. People really don't care about the photo itself. People care about having more students of color on campus."

Rudy Giuliani: a kinder, gentler bigot

Despite the mainstream media's oft-reported "mellowing" of the Mayor since his prostate cancer diagnosis, not much has really changed. This October 6th Associated Press report says it all:

"Mayor Rudolph Giuliani refused to apologize Friday for telling reporters that as many as 2 in 5 black men questioned by police searching for a hypothetical black rape suspect could be arrested for some crime... On Thursday, during a 30-minute talk in which he denied reports that the Police Department's Street Crime Unit has engaged in racial profiling of suspects, Giuliani used the hypothetical example of a rape suspect on the Upper West Side who he described as "6-foot-2, African-American, roughly 35 years old."

Giuliani said: "What is going to happen in order to find that person is a lot of people are going to be approached. You are going to have to search for people, you are going to have to interview people, you are going to have to ask them questions. When you approach some of them to ask questions, you may be frightened about the fact that maybe they have a gun, maybe they don't have a gun. So you frisk them. Sometimes you do find a gun. In the course of looking for that one rapist, you may arrest 30, 40 people.

You may approach 100 people. But who are you going to be focusing on? You are not going to be focusing on a 70-year-old white male, if in fact the report is that the rapist is a 35-year-old African-American male. And that happens in large percentages, and that is what drives what's going on."

Giuliani's comments contradict Police Department statistics. In 1998, the Street Crime Unit made 45,000 stop-and-frisk searches although 35,000 of those stops, or about 78 percent, did not result in arrests. About 90 percent of those stopped were Blacks and Latinos.

It works for coffee, too

A late revelation of the presidential race was the reports that both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were both arrested for drunk driving (though many years ago). So much for family values and personal responsibility.

An interesting tidbit is that on the same day (Nov. 3rd) that Bush held a press conference fessing up to the DUI charge the Bush campaign website (www.georgewbush.com) had a sale on "W" drinking glasses: $8 for a set of 4. Not a bad deal, but, given his record, Bush might be better of with the spillproof commuter mug, also on sale for the same price.

In desperate need of a few good men

PFC David Rivera, a Puerto Rican Marine, has withdrawn his service from the USMC to protest the U.S. military's rampant racism and continued bombing of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. To support his discharge without court martial, contact: Lt. General Bruce Knutson, C.O., Quantico Combat Development Command, Quantico, VA 22134-5001, www.quantico.usmc.mil.

News Flash: NYPD uses racial profiling!

In a revelation that surprises no one, the New York Times reported that a federal investigation of the New York Police Department's Street Crime Unit has determined that its officers used racial profiling to target victims for street searches across the city.

The feds based their findings on a statistical analysis of the Street Crime Unit's searches of people stopped for suspicion of committing crimes or carrying guns. The analysis concluded that blacks and Hispanics in the city were disproportionately singled out in the searches, and that the imbalance could not be explained by higher crime rates in the city's minority neighborhoods.

Crime and punishment

The first national study on the impact of incarceration on crime in the 1990s finds that higher increases in incarceration were less effective in reducing crime. The new 50-state report by The Sentencing Project shows that states with the greatest incarceration increases over the last decade had less impact on crime, including violent crime, than states with lower increases.

The report, Diminishing Returns: Crime and Incarceration in the 1990s, examined the relationship of incarceration and crime rates for all fifty states between 1991-98, when crime rates dropped by 22%, with a 47% rise in incarceration. It also examined the previous seven-year period 1984-91 when crime rose by 17% despite a 65% rise in incarceration.

The study concluded that while incarceration rose continuously at record levels from 1984 to 1998, crime rates fluctuated over the 14-year period, indicating no strong relationship between imprisonment and crime.

Record incarceration, while showing little benefit, costs $40 billion annually, diverting resources from more effective public safety measures like social, economic and public health programs. Between '84-91, states with the highest incarceration hikes experienced only 2% less of an increase in crime (15% versus 17%) than states with less than half that rise in incarceration.

"These findings refute the popular notion about the benefits of increasing incarceration levels and shed serious doubt on the wisdom of continuing to build prisons as a means of controlling crime," says Jenni Gainsborough, Senior Policy Analyst for The Sentencing Project and co-author of the report.

Its recommendations include: a moratorium on the construction of new prisons; repeal of mandatory sentencing laws; strengthening probation and parole systems, and investing in programs that aid families and communities.

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