His Hoodie Was Ralph Lauren, Who Knew?
link Taxi advocate to hacks: profile your passengers – am New York.
Boy this should be fun party conversation. This is interesting because the issue is exactly the flip side of the TSA grope and feel regimen being employed at airports today.
The head of the NY taxi union, Fernando Mateo, is taking the outspoken position of publicly declaring that cab drivers should profile in picking up their fares.
“…Profile your passengers,” that’s the surprising message that a top taxi advocate is sending hacks after a livery cab driver was shot by a Hispanic suspect. You know sometimes it’s good that we are racially profiled because the God’s-honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics,” said Fernando Mateo, president of Hispanics Across America and the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers…”
Naturally, the politically correct knee jerk uproar ensues, including of course the canned outrage from Mr. Fair Play himself, the articulate ‘Reverend” Al Sharpton. Actually if anyone cared to listen closely to what Mr. Mateo had to say, he wasn’t advocating racial profiling per se, he was advocating for drivers to be alert and aware of fares that were potentially dangerous. It’s purely a coincidence that, “99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing drivers are blacks and Hispanics”. The key point is:
“…so if you see suspicious activity, you know what, don’t pick that person up…”
Apparently this advice is too radical and extreme for the PC world. As usual, people who have no stake in the game are telling people on the front lines what to do because of fanciful theories. It’s reminiscent of idiots criticizing soldiers who shoot before being absolutely certain that the target was an enemy. In doing a google search, I am unable to find the following headlines:
“Well dressed middle aged woman holds up cabbie at gunpoint for $20”
“Businessmen force cabbie to drive at gunpoint to Waldorf Hotel”
“Tourists in Hawaiian shirts rough up cabdriver in Midtown”
“Grandmothers beat up helpless cabdriver in Queens”
One of the oldest cliches is “you can’t tell a book by it’s cover” which is mostly starry eyed delusion, especially when it comes to sizing up people in an urban setting. They’ve obviously never been to the south side of Chicago trying to ask for directions from some fine looking young men in hoodies, baggy jeans and over-sized sneakers. Very few gangsta wannabes run around in khakis and polo shirts for some reason. So the PC crowd insists that cabbies expose their lives to pick up a $20 fare in satisfaction of some PC principle. Cabbies are not allowed to be leery of shady looking characters because feelings would be hurt.
This presumption of innocence only works in the safe confines of the streets. If you enter the gritty world of airports, that’s different. In this bizarro world the assumptions are turned upside down. If you happened to be the middle aged woman, the well dressed businessman or the gaggle of grandmothers, you would be subject to the scrutiny of the beady eyed TSA agents ever alert for signs of nefarious intent. In fact you would be treated with gloves, not kid gloves, but the blue latex kind. Here, profiling is reversed: you are actually singled out for extra scrutiny the more innocent you look. If you are old and in a wheelchair, good luck catching your flight. You really can’t make this up.