does hiding contraband in your butt work when pulled over by the police?

The police are pulling over a disproportionate number of minority drivers for traffic offenses, goes the argument, in order to look for drugs. The racial profiling debate focuses primarily on highway stops. A New Jersey trooper sees a black motorist speeding in a Pathfinder and pulls him over in the hope of finding drugs. 'Soft' racial profiling is using race as one factor among others in gauging criminal suspiciousness: the highway police, for example, have intelligence that Jamaican drug posses with a fondness for Nissan Pathfinders are transporting marijuana along the northeast corridor. What we may call 'hard' profiling uses race as the only factor in assessing criminal suspiciousness: an officer sees a black person and, without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons. Two meanings of 'racial profiling' intermingle in the activists' rhetoric. Anti-profiling activists hope to make police racism an all but irrebuttable presumption whenever enforcement statistics show high rates of minority stops and arrests. The ultimate question in the profiling controversy is whether the disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics with law enforcement reflects police racism or the consequences of disproportionate minority crime. Too bad no one asked President Bush: 'What exactly do you mean by 'racial profiling,' and what evidence do you have that it exists?' For the anti-profiling crusaders have created a headlong movement without defining their central term and without providing a shred of credible evidence that 'racial profiling' is a widespread police practice. Bush joined the rush, declaring portentously: 'Racial profiling is wrong, and we will end it in America.' The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. The anti-'racial profiling' juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities.

Does hiding contraband in your butt work when pulled over by the police?