What do you call a 1985 Pontiac with bad brakes, rust cancer, a busted taillight and a muffler that barfs a James Bond smoke screen at every stoplight?

If you're white, you probably call it a "beater."

If you're black, it's a "hooptie."

If you're a cop, it's a "moving violation."

And if you're a University of Cincinnati social science researcher hired to do a $146,000 study of police stops, you call it "possible profiling."

The first three answers are right. But the UC report blows smoke like a 1985 Rustbucket.

In 56 pages of charts, graphs and more numbers than a week on Wall Street, it reports a "greater chance of African-Americans being stopped for equipment violations" than whites.

"This may be due to racial disparities in income," it says.

OK so far. But then the report says it might be profiling, because black drivers are more likely than whites to get away without a ticket.

"Here's why officers are not writing those tickets,'' said Cincinnati Police spokesman Lt. Kurt Byrd. "Think about the word compassion."

Of course. As the proud owner of a fleet of beaters and hoopties in high school and college, I know what he means. Drive 15 over the limit, and you will get a ticket - black or white. But drive a rolling wreck and get stopped for a busted headlight, and most cops give you a warning because they would rather have you spend your last $25 on auto parts instead of a fine.

And that's what's wrong with the profiling witch-hunt.

Underlying all that sophisticated social scientific folderol is an ugly little hypothesis that racist cops are cruising around looking for excuses to terrorize minorities.

Now that sounds like profiling. What the social scientists found does not.

For all their hard work analyzing more than 7,000 traffic stop reports, they found nothing to back up the extravagant claims by some that Cincinnati is a racist police state. Nothing to back up accusations that cops are harassing blacks.

What they did find was ambiguous, hazy, iffy conjecture dressed up in thick glasses and slide-rule percentages to look more important. Even the guesses are mostly meaningless because they left out the most important number of all.

The number is 68. Cincinnati Police records say that's the percentage of major crime perpetrated by blacks in Cincinnati, compared to a Census population of 40 percent. African-Americans also make up 44 percent of crime victims.

That means police are far more likely to stop black motorists who may be suspects of crime, and cops get more calls in black neighborhoods.

To even pretend to measure "profiling" without putting it into the context of crime statistics is as pointless as taking your pulse on a roller coaster.

The UC report brushes against the crime elephant on the elevator, saying it is "controversial'' but should be discussed. It concludes that blacks are more likely to be stopped for crime-related reasons: "That is, the disproportionate stopping of African-Americans may be due to officers reacting to behaviors they observe rather than officers seeking to stop African-American drivers in preference to white drivers."

I'm no social scientist, but I have a response to that:

"Well, duh."

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.