Is it racial profiling or common-sense police work?

I found this NY Daily News article linked on Drudge: NYPD frisked blacks at 5 times rate of whites. To the uninformed eye, one could look at that headline and think, why those racist bastards. The reality of this statistic is not as... ahem... black and white as one might think.

I admittedly don't have crime statistics for New York City broken down by race.

UPDATE 2/12/07: I just happened upon those statistics. Here is a description from Heather MacDonald of City Journal:

In New York City, blacks committed 62 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults from 1998 to 2000, according to victim and witness identification, even though they make up only 25 percent of the city’s population. Whites committed 8 percent of those crimes over that period, though they are 28 percent of New York residents. These proportions have been stable for years and remain so today.

However, I do have murder statistics for the nation as a whole from the United States government. If you look at those numbers, blacks in New York are getting off easy, since in the entire country, blacks are 7 times more likely to commit murder than whites. Here is the graph:

But that is only half the equation. The real irony is that the vast majority of the victims of these black murderers are black themselves. If the "critics" who are railing against the police in the article would spend half their energy badmouthing these criminals instead of the police, maybe we would see some progress in reducing crime. Here is a graphic breakdown of who is more likely to be a victim:

As you can see from the graphs, the reason for the disproportionate number of contacts between the NYPD and black citizens is because it is a most unfortunate fact that blacks in this country commit a disproportionate amount of the crime.

Now, this is where I usually get one of my troll commenters telling me that I have a problem with black people, like has happened in the past. I have previously answered those ad hominem attacks and I won't waste my typing on it again. I will say this - judging by those numbers, the people who do seem to have a problem with black people... are other black people.

Good Day to You, Sir