Statistical Bias  Journalists find 'comfort' after the Diallo
killing  When New Yorkers went into shock over the 41 bullets
fired at Amadou Diallo, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert found
“comfort”--her word--by recalling the sodomizing of Abner
Louima. The business with the broomstick, she explained in the
New Yorker (3/29/99), was not what we hire the police to do,
whereas we do pay them to accost characters who fit a certain
pattern. That fusillade, she said, “may not be racism at all but
something new, a form of racial bias that is statistically
driven and officially sanctioned.”  She meant, of course,
profiling, and it’s hardly new. Nor was there anything new in
the thought that bias backed by statistics is not racism. It was
a notion that she shared with her former colleagues at the New
York Times, such as Malcolm Browne and Peter Passell, whose
reviews helped make a bestseller of The Bell Curve (New York
Times, 10/16/94, 10/27/94; see Extra! Update, 12/94). It’s not
racism, stupid, it’s the stats.  The Dial