Proactive Policing Is Not ‘Racial Profiling’

If officers back off from legitimate police actions, residents in high-crime minority neighborhoods will be the first to suffer.

Here’s the latest definition of “racial profiling:” taking legitimate police action against a black criminal. This definition comes to us by way of St. Louis, where a new set of property-destroying protests have broken out, in addition to the daily agitation in Ferguson, Mo. The protest trigger this time: An officer killed a black teenager who had been shooting at the officer with a stolen handgun. This latest agitation and the rhetoric around it are a troubling indication that the demagoguery against the police is spinning dangerously out of control

According to the police report, on Wednesday night, an off-duty officer waspatrolling a St. Louis neighborhood for a private security company searching for suspects in a recent home invasion. The officer was in uniform and presumably driving a marked car. When a group of three men saw the officer, one took off running. The officer made a U-turn in his car, and the other two men started running as well. The officer noticed that one of the men was holding his waistband as if he had a gun, and the officer then pursued on foot. The suspect, 18-year-old Vonderrit D. Myers, got into an “intense struggle” with the officer, according to the incident report, then shot off three rounds at him. The officer responded with fire as Myers continued to pull the trigger; Myers’s gun jammed, and the officer killed Myers.

More