"I expect this from the guy that we get out of the hood."

Said Sgt. Dave Karsnia to Larry Craig -- yes, it's another Craig-tagged post -- and Dale Carpenter, at Volokh Conspiracy, penned a crisp post accusing Karsnia of racism:

It seems to me that the phrase, “the guy that we get out of the hood,” is an implied racial reference. It refers specifically to blacks, though one could say the officer meant to refer only to young black men from the ghetto who, in the officer's view, are prone to commit crimes.

Either way, it’s still race-specific in a case that otherwise has no obvious racial dimension. To shame Craig into telling the truth, the officer could have used a different example, like, “I expect this from some punk we get off the street.” Or, “I expect this from some low-life, but not a Senator.” It’s also fairly clear from the context that the officer is not associating blacks with bathroom cruising, but with dishonesty and "disrespect" toward the police.

This leads to a fascinating comments thread about the word "hood," including this from "anonymous":

How many of you VC posters listen to rap? For nearly twenty years, most rap / hip-hop music has been sold to white males under the age of 25. In the same way that so many of them appropriated the baggy pants of "the hood" (without having any idea why baggy pants have an advantage in the hood but not in the suburbs), they also appropriated the language, and refer to their neighborhoods as "the hood" and their friends as "homies" or "homeboys".

Just because in your rarified [sic] pseudo academic imaginations the phrase "the hood" has racist connotations, it does not follow that most users of the phrase (who are white and use the phrase self-referentially) also use it with racist overtones. Get out of the ivory tower and talk to people who live real lives.

And Sarah says:

.. I think the cop meant "you're lying in the way that lower-class people -- the sort of people you probably think commit most crimes -- do." I'm sure he was trying to conjure generic, Jerry Springer-esque, "40 of our high schools now offer daycare to teen moms," bars-on-the-windows, stolen shopping carts, 'this is why we wrote that 3-strikes law,' high school dropout images. Whether they were black (or whatever) people in the Senator's mind wasn't as important as the social and economic trappings surrounding them -- and the cop got a "I'm not that kind of guy!!" response, just as he'd hoped. The message was "fine, upstanding, non-criminal citizens such as yourself would do themselves credit by Acting Like A Man and admitting to everything." It's another version of the "if you've got nothing to hide, you'll let us do X" tactic, which only works on people who think of themselves as decent.

Much more at the link, including some puzzling over whether the cop might deliberately use a racial term not because he is racist, but because he assumes the person he's talking to -- here, a white, conservative Idahoan -- is racist.