A year ago, cottonheaded Washington Post heartthrob Richard Cohen wrote a column on the contentious issue of "stop and frisk" that took no position whatsoever. That column was absolutely worthless. Amazingly, his writing on the issue has gotten worse since then.

At least Cohen's worthless column last year was merely a waste of time; now, he has decided to go ahead and issue his full-throated support for NYC's racial profiling-driven stop-and-frisk system, probably on the theory that, since he's already revealed himself to be an unreconstructed bigot, what's the point of vacillating? Here is Richard Cohen, statistical policing expert, explaining his rationale for supporting the stop-and-frisk program, which was recently declared illegal:

Yes, crime has fallen across America, but nowhere has the drop approached New York City’s. Some of that is due to whiz-bang policing, computers and all that jazz. But some of it is due to stop-and-frisk.

Holy moly, we never thought of it that way. It's not just computers and all that jazz— it's stop-and-frisk too, probably, somewhat, more or less.

It's called journalistic expertise, ladies and gentlemen. Get some.

And here is how Cohen takes on the entire racial profiling issue, which is what sunk stop-and-frisk both in the courts and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of innocent black and Latino men who are stopped and frisked each year:

The same holds for racial profiling. The numbers are proof not of racism but of a lamentable fact: Black and Hispanic men are disproportionately stopped because they are disproportionally the perpetrators of gun crime. The four persons a day that have not been killed by guns are statistically not white. They are black or Hispanic.

Sure, sure. And if we could just lock all of the city's black and Hispanic residents in restraint chairs and feed them through feeding tubes, we could knock out the rest of those murders, too!

More than 90% of citizens who are stopped and frisked are completely innocent of wrongdoing. White people only make up about 10% of those stopped. And black and Latino men are stopped in great disproportion to their population— even in white neighborhoods.

Not that Richard Cohen cares. He lives in DC. And he's white!

[Washington Post]