The facial hair grows upwards. The mouth is more of a straight line and the eyes look bewildered.

Matty's smiling

edit: deleted; stupid

Sigh. A complete void. A Nothingness of living, mere existence.

Empty eyes. Not even a smile.

Isn't that the face of Matty Orchard in the bottom left-hand corner?

that much is true. But "the arrest rate in the US, which scoops up an outsized proportion of this same constituency" is just another myth.

See this post I made on 7/25/2009:

"Black people being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately is evidence of racism, because racism is the best explanation of black people being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately." [Goode]

Is it? Here are some statistics.

"Obama then decided he was going to give us a history lesson: “What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

This statement has many possible meanings, all of them untrue.

The ACLU and other anti-police activists have alleged for years that blacks are the victims of disproportionate and unjustified traffic stops, a charge that has become received wisdom among large swathes of the population. It happens to be contradicted by drivers themselves. The Bureau of Justice Statistics regularly polls tens of thousands of civilians about their contacts with the police. Virtually identical proportions of white, black, and Hispanic drivers — 9 percent — report being stopped by the police, though in 2005, the self-reported black stop rate — 8.1 percent — was nearly a percentage point lower than the self-reported white stop rate (8.9 percent). The stop rate for blacks is lower during the day, when officers can more readily see a driver’s race.

As for urban policing — where the police have victim identifications and contextual and behavioral cues to work with — blacks are stopped more, but only in comparison with their proportion of the entire population. Measured against their crime rate, they are understopped. New York City is perfectly typical of the black police-stop and crime rates. In the first three months of 2009, 52 percent of all people stopped for questioning by the police in New York City were black, though blacks are just 24 percent of the population. But according to the victims of and witnesses to crime, blacks commit about 68 percent of all violent crime in the city. Blacks commit 82 percent of all shootings and 72 percent of all robberies, whereas whites, who make up 35 percent of the city's population, commit about 5 percent of all violent crimes, 1 percent of shootings, and about 4 percent of robberies.

These figures are not police-generated; they come from the overwhelmingly minority victims of crime in their reports to the police. Such crime reports mean that when the police respond to community demands for protection against crime, information-based police deployment will send officers to minority neighborhoods where crime is highest. When the police respond to a call about a shooting, they will almost never be told that the shooter was white, and thus will not be searching for a white suspect.

National crime patterns are the same. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Such vastly disproportionate crime rates must lead, if the police are going after crime in a color-blind fashion, to disproportionate stop and arrest rates. To criticize the police for crime-determined enforcement activity is to blame the messenger."

[From a Heather MacDonald article at NRO, based on her book.]

In other words, it would be racist (of the reverse variety) if blacks were not stopped disproportionately.

Glenn's photo montage originally ran (sans Orchard) on The Smoking Gun site, in a post called "2008 Mug Shots of the Year." '20 booking photos selected from among the tens of thousands reviewed this year by TSG's staff' reads the copy on the first page of 20.

Here's another from the series -- a young Tennesseean booked for disorderly conduct on the night of Obama's election.

Underscores a couple of statistics, the near-total support of Obama among Americans with darker-style complexions, and the arrest rate in the US, which scoops up an outsized proportion of this same constituency every day. I wondered how many disorderly blacks weren't wearing similar outfits in the post-election period?

The Obama pics aren't the only humourous snaps. Here's a father and son pair.

Also featured on TSG is this luminary, who tends to wear his allegiances more permanently -- the before and after shots from 2003 and 2008.

[click images to go to accompanying stories]

WSS