Lori Lightfoot Quotes
When you're walking down a street and you are a brown-skinned person or you're a person that lives in an immigrant community, there's no differentiating on - solely on the basis of what you look like. They don't walk down the street saying, hi, I'm an immigrant; I'm here legally or not.
Lightfoot, Lori. Press Conference on ICE Raids. Chicago, IL, 12 Jul. 2019.
The Congressman was a rabid foe of immigration in general and possible illegal immigration in particular (See {614687}). As his colleagues were trying to improve the methods of identifying illegal workers at the job hiring stage, they were very concerned that law enforcment and some employers would make judgments about the likely criminal status of a person based on his/her ethnicity, race or other general superficial characteristics.
This is a very important quotation because it is an excellent example of the statement of the logic that advocates of racial profiling use. Wording may be different but the essence of the argument is always the same. The problem with the argument is twofold. First even if the statistical predictability is true, such statistical correlations were known by the Founding Fathers who nevertheless believed that it was better for the nation for the Government to follow due process and not base decisions on officials views of statistical tendencies regardless of how valid. However, even the statistics application is flawed. The problem is that there are many statistical relationships in our complex society. The vast majority of the use of racial profiling tends to only use those relationships which tend to reinforce the discriminatory biases. For example, the vast majority and proportion of the Americans who embezzle money are white males who have a college education. Yet there are few law enforcement officials who would say that we should pick white males with college emblems on their windshield, out and stop them as they might have stolen checks, business forms or other items associated with embezzlement. But those same people will advocate stopping Black males on highways under the likelihood that they are more likely to have illicit drugs. So if society profiled on EVERY characteristic that statistically related to crime, it would not be as unfair as when society picks and chooses those characteristics as this is where racism or other prejudice come into play. However, it is NEVER a good idea because it is so inefficient as a law enforcement method. Even though people of Irish extraction tend to be alcoholics more than other groups, once you start picking up Irish people to stop impaired driving, you find that most Irish are NOT alcoholics. Last there is usually huge variability within any ethnic or other group. Native Americans have an alcoholism succeptability that is even greater than the Irish. However, if one looks at each of the many Indian Reservations in Indian Country (Oklahoma), we find some reservations where almost every adult is an alcoholic and other reservations where there is no alcoholism at all. For the power of the state to generalize, that power is brought to bear on those Indians who would not be likely to be drunk as those which are.
Lori Elaine Lightfoot is an American attorney and politician who serves as the 56th and current mayor of Chicago. She has served since 2019. Before becoming mayor, Lightfoot worked in private legal practice as a partner at Mayer Brown and held various government positions in the City of Chicago. Most notably, she served as president of the Chicago Police Board and chair of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force. Lightfoot ran for Mayor of Chicago in 2019, advancing to a runoff election against Toni Preckwinkle in the February 2019 election. She defeated Preckwinkle in the runoff on April 2, 2019. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
