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August 18, 2005

Now, when I say "Hello, Mr Thompson," and press down on your foot, you smile and nod.

Toronto City Councillor Michael Thompson seems to have been born and raised under a large, soundproof rock. The usual suspects have latched onto the controversy that surrounded his original remarks (regarding young black men and random spot-checks thereof) as further proof of PC-obsessed Big City Canada refusing to acknowledge the nose on its face, but I am forced to conclude that they haven't actually read what Thompson was proposing. It makes absolutely no sense:

My view is we ought now to put the full-court press on, where we should encourage the police to stop young black men in the problem areas in order to discern whether or not they have weapons.

Forget for now namby-pamby ideas like "free society". If say 85 percent of young black men were known to be packing heat, then Thompson might have a point. Maybe. But that's obviously not the case. Quite apart from the nightmare such a policy would create between police and the black community — the young black male community, anyway — and the resentment it would even further entrench therein, it's a wildly inefficient proposal for places where, at worst, a quarter of one percent of young black men might be carrying a weapon.

Only stop the suspicious ones, then? Right you are, Ken — that's how it works now. I'm not a lawyer, but you can't just shake someone down on the street for no reason and prosecute them for possession of whatever it is you find, and no new policy is going to change that. Thompson looked foolish from the get-go.

In retracting his statements, however, he went all-in. Here's what he told the National Post:

I said, given what's going on in the city of Toronto, I think that we should be looking at or supporting targeting young black men, because the people being killed are black, the shooters are black, and so we need to get the guns off the street. It wasn't me thinking, geez, you know, let me do this in terms of racial profiling. That wasn't the case at all.

Baffling. But that's nothing compared to this:

[People] have said, "Look Michael, it's actually racial profiling." I'm learning that now. If it's racial profiling, it's a bad thing.

Lord have mercy. Allow me to summarize: Michael Thompson knows racial profiling is bad, because he overheard it somewhere or it came in the City Councillor's orientation handbook, or something, but he never bothered to learn what it was. He then came out and advocated a policy that was textbook racial profiling, but didn't realize it. And then, days later, he decided that he was wrong to have advocated the policy — but not because the policy was wrong, necessarily, but because it fell under the definition of this thing that he knew he wasn't allowed to support. And then he admitted it!

Spineless, apparently stupid, and bursting at the seams with non-sequitors. You're going far in this game, Mr Thompson.

Posted by Chris Selley at August 18, 2005 11:25 PM

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Posted by: DCardno at August 19, 2005 01:31 PM