Racial debate swirls around Philadelphia indictments

Seven of 12 people indicted last month in a so-called "pay-to-play" scam of awarding city contracts are black.  One of the men charged, a church aide, is Latino."They can monitor racial profiling in traffic stops," yet don't study whether there's racial profiling of politicians, said Kenneth Meier, a Texas A&M political scientist. "The federal government should apply its own rules to its own house." Two separate academic studies - one by the United Council of Churches and the other by Texas A&M researchers - found that during the late 1970s and through much of the 1980s, black elected officials were more likely to be prosecuted than their white counterparts. [more]