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According to the police officers who practice racial profiling, or the civilians who support it, there is good reason to single out African Americans, Latinos, and certain other racial and ethnic groups for searches: They commit more crimes than whites do. "The Color of Crime," a 1999 report by the conservative New Century Foundation, makes such an argument. It uses arrest statistics to show that whites are most often the victims of crime than African Americans are, and that 90 percent of interracial crimes are committed by black people against white people. "Blacks are so much more likely than Americans of other races to commit crimes that police may be justified in stopping and questioning them more frequently," the report states, adding that such discriminatory tactics are no worse than scrutinizing men more closely than women, or young people more closely than old people. Harris, however, disputes the claim that African Americans are more likely perpetrator of crimes. Arrest and prison records measure only who was caught for committing crimes; if African Americans are arrested in large numbers, it doesn't mean that whites are not committing an equal or greater number of crimes. Unfortunately, those arrest statistics become a self-fulfilling prophecy for law enforcement agents immersed in the drug war, who believe that the discrepancy in numbers proves that minorities have a greater tendency to commit crimes. They support racial profiling based on that premise. They don't realize that if more black people are stopped, it's likely that more black people will be arrested. If more African Americans are arrested, Harris points out, they have their "proof": "You say, of course [racial profiling] works."
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