Racist or Racial Profiler?

There's been a lot of talk about whether George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin as he walked down a Florida street with his bag of Skittles, is a racist. Zimmerman's lawyer says he's not. I'm willing to take Zimmerman at his word: if he says that some of his best friends are black, that he's raising money for an African American church, I'll believe it.

But that isn't really the issue. You don't have to be a racist to be a racial profiler. In 2009, 40% of male prisoners in the United States were black (whites were 33% and Hispanics 21%). In the 2010 census blacks made up 12.9% of the U.S. population. George Zimmerman has taken a 14-week citizen's police academy course. His father is a retired Virginia Supreme Court magistrate judge and his mother worked as a deputy clerk of courts.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/23/2712299_p2/george-zimmerman-self-appointed.html#storylink=cpy

Given the incarceration rates, someone like Zimmerman could easily come to the following conclusion: blacks are three times more like to commit crimes than whites. However, that's really not what the numbers say: all they say is that the percentage of blacks in prisons is three times higher than that of whites.

There could be any number of reasons why that is: Blacks are more likely to be jailed than whites. Blacks receive longer prison sentences than whites for the same or similar crimes (as evidenced by now-outlawed crack/powder cocaine sentencing guideline disparities). Blacks are more likely to be poor, and can't afford top lawyers and wind up going to jail for crimes that whites typically avoid conviction for or obtain non-prison plea deals. Judges are more lenient sentencing white criminals, and lighter-skinned blacks receive shorter sentences. Whites who steals millions of dollars in white-collar crimes often get off with no jail time or one-year stints in Club Fed, while blacks caught with a few dime bags can go to jail for the rest of their lives because of three-strikes laws. Many blacks live in poor areas dominated by drug gangs, where young black men are often forced to choose sides in gang turf wars on pain of death, which predisposes them to committing crimes in the first place. The whole gangsta rap/hip hop vibe romanticizes the image of the black man as a street tough. And so on.

Interestingly, the incarceration rates among women are different: white women constitute 46% of the prison population, black women 32% and Hispanics 16%.

Geraldo Rivera has, as always, brought much needed logic to the debate: he says that Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed. Because you know what kind of people wear hoodies...

Zimmerman hasn't been arrested because the local sheriff thinks that Florida's "stand your ground" law protects him. But one of the sponsors of that law, former Senator Durell Peaden, disagrees:

The 911 tapes strongly suggest Zimmerman overstepped his bounds, they say, when the Sanford neighborhood crime-watch captain said he was following Trayvon and appeared to ignore a police request to stay away. 

“The guy lost his defense right then,” said Peaden. “When he said ‘I’m following him,’ he lost his defense.”

Given what I heard in that 911 call and what I've read about his history, it sounds like Zimmerman is an overzealous neighborhood vigilante and a wanna-be cop. He has a history of being short-tempered, getting into fights and has had a couple of brushes with the law. He was tired of punks breaking into houses on his watch and he was gonna be the hero.

Our laws are supposed to protect us from people who might do us harm, intentionally or unintentionally. We don't want loose cannons on a short fuse out there playing cops and robbers. Because, as Geraldo so sagely reminded us, it's not just black kids who walk down the street at night wearing hoodies and listening to hip hop blaring in their earbuds.