Opinion: In today’s pages: the “real” America, racial profiling, Israel
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Yale Law School Prof. Ian Ayres heads up the Op-Ed page with a defense of his report for the ACLU that found that a disparate number of blacks and Latinos stopped and frisked by Los Angeles police officers compared with whites. Ayres stands his ground against police ire, returning a salvo to Police Chief William J. Bratton, who rejected Ayres’ findings on the grounds that the study used four-year-old data. The professor concedes the validity of that point but nothing else, writing:
It is particularly telling that neither Bratton nor [police union president Tim] Sands responded to the evidence that the frisks and searches of minorities systematically produced less evidence of crime than the frisks and searches of whites. It is implausible that higher frisk and search rates are justified by higher minority criminality, when these frisks and searches are substantially less likely to uncover weapons.
In her column, Rosa Brooks says the real America is a land of ‘change and perpetual renewal, not the edited version put forth by John McCain andSarah Palin.
The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, bit-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the ‘real’ Ameirca, where people live in small downs, believe in God and country, and are...well...white.’
Meanwhile, Patt Morrison says that if Disney wants to create a California Adventure draws crowds, unlike the current one, it should ditch its faux excitement and include some of the Golden State qualities that make California fascinating: its hucksterism, innocence and ‘rascality.’
Over in the editorial stack, the Times advises voters not to be misled by Proposition 4, which would require parental notification before a minor could have an abortion, pointing out that girls in states that have them aren’t more likely to notify their parents, anyway. The board also has little patience with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert , who late in the day says that peace with Palestinians will require the dismantling of most settlments on the West Bank. But that’s too little too late. The settlements never should have been built. Third in the column is the text of a negative McCain campaign robocall being deployed in battleground states. Californians, by virture of their residence in a rock-solid blue state, are missing many of the worst ads on both sides of the race, the board says. So here’s a taste.