Selective outrage over profiling...

Dan Abrams has a must-read column on profiling.

Where is the outrage over 46 members of the Duke University Lacrosse team being asked to provide DNA samples to the local police? All but one player provided samples after a dancer, hired by certain members of the team for a party, claimed she was sexually assaulted, sodomized, and beaten in the bathroom. Why did only 46 of the 47 players offer up samples? Because one wasn't asked. The alleged victim told police she was positive the suspect or suspects were white, so the sole black member of the team was exempt. That makes perfect sense to me.

The alleged perpetrator was definitely white, why bother asking for DNA from someone who wasn't responsible? When police put together a lineup and the suspect is a white man, white men are included in the lineup. It's a race-based decision, but in my mind not simply profiling. But that's not how some civil liberties groups have seen it when black men have been asked voluntarily for samples.

In Omaha, Nebraska, efforts to find a serial rapist where the victims claimed he was black met with public outrage when police asked nearly two dozen black men to give DNA. In Charlottesville, Virginia, efforts to find a different serial rapist led police to swab the cheeks of 187 black men. In those cases, the American Civil Liberties Union called the DNA sweep racial profiling. Where is the same ACLU that decried profiling when random men in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, were asked for DNA in connection with the murder of former fashion writer Christa Worthington?

Look, sometimes the police are wrong.

Back in 2002 in Baton Rouge, they took DNA swabs from over 1,000 white men, believing a serial killer stalking the area was white. When the suspect was finally arrested, he was black.