On NOW with Alex Wagner Tuesday, Salon senior staff writer Brian Beutler discussed his new article “What I learned from getting shot,” in which he details his near-fatal mugging in 2008 at the hands of two black teens in hoodies.
“It happens to be the case that if they had been stopped and frisked, the police would have found a gun and I probably would have been OK,” Beutler said. “But I’m the one in a thousand that the policy would have–I hate to use the word, but ‘worked for’–it would have protected me but that doesn’t mean it’s a reasonable price to ask a community to pay.”
In the article, Beutler says that “being a victim of gun violence doesn’t have to turn you into a supporter of racial profiling.”
Beutler was joined in the debate by Business Insider’s Josh Barro and theGrio.com’s Joy Reid.
“What I find very strange is that the Bloomberg administration understands these objections, but they say, ‘Look, this saves lives and prevents crimes and that’s why we need to do it,’” Barro said, adding that their statistical research had yet to prove it. “This is just not an effective policy for preventing violent crime.” Reid said a similar policy targeting young, white males because they fit the profile of mass shooters would never be accepted in society. Alex guided the discussion using excerpts from The Huffington Post’s Robert Koehler on why ‘Stop and Frisk’ is similar to an occupation, from The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson on the difference between how whites and minorities are treated, and from The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on just what blacks are being asked to surrender.
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