The New York Times has treated the NYPD's new data breaking down police stops of civilians by race as front page news and new evidence of racial profiling. Which it would indeed be, if the data shows anything of the sort—but it doesn't, and and the Times knows it.

The paper has now run three dispatches on the subject in the last four days. The first dispatch, published in the metro section the day after the data appeared, was a look by Al Baker and Emily Vasquez at why the number of stop and frisks and the arrest rate from stop and frisks have both risen substantially since comparable data was first released in 2002. All else being equal and assuming the arrests lead to convictions, a higher arrest rate from such encounters is a sign of good policing, especially when it track to a lower crime rate—it means less resentment from people who have been stopped despite having done nothing wrong, and it surely has something to do with the fact that New York's crime rate has continued to dip to record lows under Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly. That is, lower than anyone thought was possible 15 years ago, and lower than anyone thought it would remain after Giuliani left office.

And, remarkably, New York is virtually alone in having done this without incarcerating more people—so that the governor is now talking about a long-overdue commission to close underused upstate jails. [More on jails tomorrow…]

Anotherarticle in the metro section, by Emily Vasquez, was an interesting and unopinionated comparison of policing in the city's precincts with the highest and lowest crime rates.

When the profiling story made it to the front page, though, it became deranged.

There, Trymaine Lee led off As Officers Stop and Frisk, Residents Raise Their Guard with four paragraphs detailing the classic Times-ian victim, a 14 year old who "knows the routine: You raise your hands high, you keep your mouth shut and you don’t dare move a muscle… 'They tell you that you’re selling drugs. But I don’t do nothing wrong. I just play ball,' he said."

And then the pull back from anecdote to big picture: "More than half of those stopped, and sometimes frisked, by the police were black," Lee reports. This is true—in fact blacks were stopped at about five times the rate of whites.

But it's meaningless without context, which is buried well after the jump in the 23rd (of 27) paragraphs—"Responding to complaints of profiling, the department noted that while 55.2 percent of those stopped were black, 68.5 percent of reported crimes involved suspects described as black."

This is profiling?

What's more, arrest rates broken down by race suggest good policing, at least in the aggregate. White accounted for ten per cent of searches and 12 per cent of arrests, Hispanics for 29 per cent of searches and 30 per cent of arrests, and blacks for 55 per cent of searches and 51 per cent of arrests.

These numbers are never reported by Lee, who instead spends his space on a sanitation worker who keeps late hours complaining about being stopped by the police, and a man who explains that his "'bad-boy' days are behind him" complaining about police stopping people leaving known drug buildings—'But we live here. I put my 7-year-old son to bed here. We have grandmas and old ladies up in here. This ain’t just a drug building, this is home,” he said. “It’s serious and dangerous out here, and they wonder why some people want to pull out their guns and start blasting.” Why not leave it to the drug dealers, then?

Finally, Lee finds the department's most reliable race-baiters (Al Sharpton's line was busy, I'm guessing), who offer the predictable:

“These numbers substantiate what we’ve been saying for years,” said Noel Leader, a co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. “The New York Police Department under Raymond Kelly is actively committing some of the grossest forms of racial profiling in the history of the New York Police Department.”

The numbers, of course, say nothing of the sort, but since they're hardly reported, how's the reader to know?

In the physical paper, the story jumped to the metro section, where it ran across from another story entitled "Mothers Harness Grief to Try to Save Lives"about mothers in Harlem who have lost children to gun violence, and are now working with the police to get guns off the street.

I imagine the irony went unnoticed at the paper, which continues to believe in crime as something environmental and inexorable, something along the lines of the recent AP headline "Global warming unstoppable; scientists hoping for fast government action." The best example in recent memory comes from a Jan. 1 story:

Yet what is puzzling, one expert said, is that overall crime is dropping even as New York becomes an increasingly polarized city, with haves and have-nots often living side by side in luxury condominiums and public housing. “Within a few blocks, people are living worlds apart,” said Andrew Karmen, a sociology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of “New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s.”   “In theory, that should make the poor more dissatisfied and drive people to commit crimes,” he said. “But that doesn’t seem to be happening in New York.”One possible explanation, Dr. Karmen said, is that the city is largely populated by immigrants, many of whom are driven by a determination to succeed. “I think they still maintain a positive outlook and faith in the American dream,” he said. “But if it doesn’t deliver, attitudes could change.”

The piece goes on, though, to offer the case for stop-and-frisks, and the context on project life (which is all too often indeed cut off rom the American dream) that Lee and the paper ignore when it might prove inconvenient for their argument:      

It has proven difficult to root out violent crime in the city’s toughest corners. One of the city’s most perilous neighborhoods is in the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn, which includes East New York. There the number of slayings last year was virtually unchanged from 2005 at 28, and 3,239 crimes were reported. Public housing projects have a disproportionate number of crimes. While 5 percent of New York’s eight million residents live in public housing, Commissioner Kelly said, 16 percent of the city’s homicides take place there. The Police Department plans to tackle that seemingly intractable problem by redeploying personnel from other areas and opening police substations in the most troubled housing complexes, Commissioner Kelly said.

Both homicide victims and suspects tend to have links to crime already, he said. Of those arrested last year in homicides, 95 percent had criminal histories; 75 percent of the people killed did.