I can vouch for this phrase "worry about being stopped if they are driving a nice car in a modest or upscale community, a raggedy car in a mostly white one".
I live in an upper middle class neighborhood. But I drive a shitty old car, because I grew up poor, and have some fixed ideas about how much you should spend on a car.
I get pulled over at least 4 times a year. No tickets from it, ever. Had to perform and pass several sobreity tests. My wife, who drives a somewhat nicer car...never.
It so happens I'm white, but perhaps identified as "white trash" because of my old crappy cars.
All anecdotal, of course, but the cops do seem to target "car status / area status mismatch".
Maybe. It's clear to you that you have found a correlation. Have you explored many other causes to see what their impact might be? When you are pulled over, what is commonly the reason/excuse the officers give? How do your driving habits compare to your wife? Do you drive at similar times of day? Are you both really cautious drivers?
When I was a kid I was always told that it was the people in fancy sports cars that got pulled over all the time, so by driving a modest cheap car you were taking yourself off the radar.
But that's the problem with anecdotal experience. It's hard to extrapolate trends without proper science and analysis.
EDIT: I didn't mean to target this only at the parent. The article suffers a lot of the same issues. They base a large part of their argument over a single statistic (amount of people being pulled over vs. race) and then fail to dive any deeper into the data.
Find some documented case where a US police officer was punished, in any way, for pulling someone over arbitrarily. There are too many loopholes. "Crossed center line", "erradic manuevers", "tint seemed dark", "appeared to see open alcohol container", "did not come to a full and complete stop", and so on.
We even have full on Stasi style checkpoints occasionally, where everyone is pulled over.
Hot rods and beaters both get pulled over, expensive but slow-looking cars like Lexus minivans go under the radar. That's been the anecdote passed down to me, and it includes both of the cases we're discussing.
No, it's clearly not. By an overwhelming margin, most people driving "the wrong car" are not criminals; "wrong car" is not a real predictor for criminality.
First part of your sentence, about most people, is obviously correct, but has no relation to the second part of your sentence about it not being a predictor for criminality.
High socioeconomic status is a predictor for white collar criminality, as well as a predictor for car type owned. Thus car type is correlated with criminality.
sure, but how often does a traffic stop lead to the discovery of evidence that justifies a charge for a white collar crime? the person would have to be driving around with incriminating (likely very technical) documents and do something that gives the officer probably cause to search the vehicle. the papers won't even look bad unless the officer already knows what to look for.
on the other hand, traffic stop -> suspected intoxication -> field sobriety test / drug dogs seems like a very common routine.
Imagine a jar with two colors of gumballs: red and green. Now imagine you knew that 1 out of 1000 green gumballs were poisoned and 1 out of 10000 red gumballs were poisoned. Which gumball would you choose to chew if you had to choose? Why?
My guess is that you would choose the red gumball. Even though the vast majority of green gumballs are perfectly fine, the color of the green gumball is still a predictor for poison.
but they do have probable cause. cause to execute a traffic stop is dead easy, because nobody follows the rules of the road to the letter all the time. They never pull anybody over for "being black" or "driving a shitty car in a nice neighborhood", they pull you over for driving 5km/h over the speed limit, or rolling a stop sign, or because they think your window tint might be too dark. Things they would ignore if you were driving a nicer car. It's all perfectly legal.
This is the problem with over-regulation. Of course nobody will follow the speed limit all the time, or never jaywalk or loiter or crack a beer in public or to obey any of the other silly laws that don't actually reflect societal values or public behaviour. But those laws still exist, and if a police force decides they want to abuse their power they get to start selectively enforcing them.
- "You were driving suspiciously" (a little below the speed limit)
- "Saw you yesterday at this time (1 AM) and wanted to see what you were up to" (driving home from work)
- "You looked too young to be out after curfew" (was 19)
I've also been stopped and searched while walking for:
- "Walking in front of closed businesses" (walking down the sidewalk at 10 PM)
- "I caught a whiff of marijuana" (I had never even seen marijuana in real life)
And several more that escape my memory at the moment. I'm pretty sure those were all illegal stops, and that's what bothers me - not that the cop would look twice and take note of me, but that he would blatantly break the law himself with no consequences.
That was 20+ years ago, and although I'm white, I used to wear a lot of black, so I probably did fit one of the cop's "troublemaker" stereotypes. I think being a young male of any race, especially at night, accounts for most police profiling and brazenly illegal stops, but I have no doubt that young minority males experience more of it.
One was a 99 Monte Carlo. Another was a 97 Civic. Others were similar. Early 2000s Hyundai. All similar in that they were low mileage, but ugly because of paint issues or hail damage, etc.
I'm British and this sounds unbelievable. How "shitty" and "old" are we talking, though? I also didn't spend much on my car (2005 model, bought outright after saving for roughly two months) but it doesn't look anywhere near out of place on the road here.
We do, but outside of California, it's a cakewalk. Mostly checks for functional brake lights, turn signals, wipers, etc. And, again, outside of California, some minimal emissions tests you'll pass unless your car is seriously ailing.
Not exactly. This is highly dependent upon not only state but county as well. The type of vehicle and its age and even things like a vehicle with collectors plates can factor into emissions and testing requirements.
As an example my sister lives in a county in Colorado that doesn't do emissions testing. I bought a car - 2001 Subaru Legacy - from her several years ago and had to pass emissions as I do live in a county that requires it. It failed spectacularly. The car was not 'seriously ailing' either. The forward O2 sensor needed to be replaced and then it passed just fine.
Granted from what I hear California has pretty strict emissions requirements, but it's not necessarily a cake walk outside of California either, although sometimes it is. It's highly variable.
We've also had several government scrappage schemes in the UK so you pretty much don't see anything older than 15 years on the road. In addition our cars rust more due to weather and salt used on the road.
The first thing I noticed when I went to South Africa was the older cars on the road. Some cars that I remember from my childhood but had completely forgotten about until that point. I never realised the turnover in the UK was so high until I came back.
As someone who travels into Britain on a regular basis and interacting with British police and customs officers:
You are delusional if you think your police force isn't racist. ESPECIALLY the customs officers, but also regular police.
I was watching some mental health videos online just last weekend, and I watched some from britain. And ... firstly minorities and the very poor are obviously overrepresented in these "groups". Second the "patients" are terrified of these mental health professionals. Utterly terrified. Thirdly, there is a clear difference in reaction patterns between white and black patients, and between muslim and non-muslim ones.
So just stop. Your police, and many other parts of the British state is explicitly attacking these people, on racist motives.
Just stop claiming otherwise. This is not incredible, this is normal.
I work from home a lot. I don't like shaving. I enjoy comfortable clothes. I go to the gym on the days I work from home. I also have what has been described to me as the male version of "resting bitch face" - which I take to mean I look angry, even when I'm not.
The net net of this is that I'm often running errands in public, during the middle of the day, with a scruffy beard, wearing sweatpants or other grubby clothes, scowling to some degree, and sometimes smelling of sweat and BO (if the store I'm going to is on the way home from the gym)
I will get plenty of suspicious looks from store proprietors and other customers. Oftentimes cashiers are surprised when I address them pleasantly. Obviously they are judging me by my appearance. Most likely they've had other interactions with people who looked like me that did not go well.
The thing is - I don't blame them. I know I look "suspicious" by the usual definitions. It's not really fair of course, but I believe this "pattern matching" behavior was probably part of our evolution. An ability to perform quick judgments based on past experience was probably useful historically. It still is in many cases not involving discriminatory practices. I guess my point is - cops are humans too. They should be held to higher standards, but if the people who commit crimes are often driving shabby cars, they are going to start putting those things together (fairly or not)
> I guess my point is - cops are humans too. They should be held to higher standards, but if the people who commit crimes are often driving shabby cars, they are going to start putting those things together (fairly or not)
Your argument is that there’s nothing that can be done about police racism, because of your theory of evolutionary psychology, based on your reluctance to shower after the gym?
This propaganda worked so much better when there was a place to retreat from it.
When everyone with power and influence unquestioningly pushes pro-black politics—from major tech conferences to perennial nature magazines—it becomes impossible to view blacks as the underdogs.
You've taken us into generic ideological fog again. Please stop doing this and instead comment civilly and substantively, especially on controversial topics.
> A disproportionate share of the estimated 20 million police traffic stops in the United States each year involve black drivers, even though they are no more likely to break traffic laws than whites.
Countrywide, it's a very small difference:
> When it came to traffic stops in 2011, black drivers (13 percent) were stopped more frequently than white (10 percent) or Hispanic (10 percent) drivers. That is hardly a damning finding. Moreover, while blacks (7 percent) were slightly more likely than Hispanics (6 percent) or whites (5 percent) to be ticketed, they were also slightly more likely than whites to be let go with no enforcement action (2 percent versus 1 percent).
> findings suggest that citizen risk for specific police behavior is partially attributable to differential behavior prior to the encounter....officer decision-making and behavior requires consideration of other factors beyond a citizen's race.
While I’m white, I have heard enough shocking anecdotes from my friends of color that confirms that if you’re not white you have a different relationship with authority.
For example, one of my friends is African and high up at Google. He tells me he get stopped monthly driving his Lexus SUV while driving around Silicon Valley. They always ask him if that’s his car, and when he says yes, they will follow with “are you sure?” I would never get such a question.
While I appreciate trying to dig into stats, but the question is what statistic is exactly relevant here? If you live in the US long enough I think the inequality of treatment and prejudice in society should become pretty self evident without needing various surveys for evidence, as those all will take a different slice rather than look at the whole pie.
If you tell people constantly that they are being oppressed, they will start seeing it everywhere. When a white person is treated badly by cops, which happens all the time, they will just assume the cops were general assholes. When a minority gets treated bad by cops they assume it's racism. Do you know anyone that DOESN'T have some kind of bad story about cops?
And then comments that show statistics critical of the oppression narrative will get downvoted. And told "we don't need evidence to support our beliefs."
I know my father started to get pulled over a lot after the push against drunk driving. Because he worked late hours. And the cops were on edge looking for drunks driving home from bars. And cop to car ratio was much higher at that time.
For every crime category we have data on, blacks are about as likely as whites to be arrested. In some cases like robbery, much less likely. https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... The traffic stop data is anomalous if true. And may very well be explainable by other factors.
Because they commit more and worse crimes. They are not more likely to be arrested and convicted than a white person. And we know this because of surveys of victims and crime reports that record the race. Like that chart I posted.
The only part of the system that shows any possible racial bias at all is sentencing. And it's only 19%, much smaller than claimed elsewhere. It's well within the margin of error in this stuff as well, given they can't possibly control for every relevant factor (e.g. if their crimes actually are 20% worse. In fact I can't see in this study they even controlled for region, and some states have harsher sentencing than others.)
It's worth noting that ugly people get sentences twice as long as attractive people (but are also not more likely to be convicted.) That's 10 times the disparity observed for blacks. Judges give much harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungry.
Sentencing is just a shitty system that should be replaced. Some states have tried to replace it with statistical algorithms that predict recidivism. And people like you are the first to protest that.
It's a shame you're being downvoted. I fear people get married to their preferred explanations about causes, even when you basically agree about the effects.
both can be true. you can have discrimination and also have people who think every negative outcome is due to racism when it is not.
Brietbart/Buzzfeed actively push not looking at actual complex reasons in favor of inflammatory headlines that lead to clicks. For them it is race 100% of the time. If you see this everyday it isn't surprising that people start to believe everything is due to race.
From the personal experience of being harassed by campus police as a The Black CS student, in addition to all the straight racist traffic pullovers, I can affirm that it really really sucks. I can also state that having the first hand accounts of uncles and aunts and parents and grandparents subject to the state sponsored racialized attacks of the US South West North and MidWest that yes, it was a thing, it continues to be a thing. When you’ve heard officers with weapons issue racial insults , you don’t need articles with stats to be convinced.
I grew up in a place where the racial bias narrative of policing was just something I knew to be true. It took a long time, and a lot of statistics from a ton of sources to realize that aside from sentencing, it’s mostly that the system as a whole sucks. The problem is the correlation between race and poverty, and poverty and crime. It’s fair to point to the history of mistreatment of black people in the US as a root driver of poverty, and therefore crime, but that’s often lost in the noise.
Take the recent shooting of a young black man in his grandmother’s yard. The narrative is now that he was unarmed, and shot in the back. While true, both points are deceptive. He was unarmed, but he ran from the cops, at night, didn’t follow commands, and had a metallic object in his hands when he turned to face the officers. This was all caught on FLIR. He was shot in the back, after the first shot to his front spun him around. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Comply with commands and argue your case in court. Your odds of being shot go down to near zero when you’re not running away or acting like a lunatic. Even in cases of obvious abuse like that poor bastardized NYPD cops strangled to death, were predicated on resisting arrest.
As long as people fleeing and resisting gets conflated with cases of compliant people being abused, not much will change. As long as cases of disproportionate arrests rates are conflated with wrongful arrests and convictions, not much will change. The two major predictors of have a bad time in the system are socioeconomic class, and how you act with officers. Race is a factor in sentencing, but that seems to rarely be the issue talked about in popular cases.
WThe narrative is that an unarmed young black man was shot in his grandmother's yard because the police did, in fact, shoot an unarmed young black man in his grandmother's yard. That narrative isn't "deceptive". It is what in fact happened.
People of African descent are rarely found high up at google. When I worked there a decade ago, you wouldn't notice a black engineer roaming around for months on end. Not counting the chefs or the security staff of-course.
While you can blame America for the inequality, you can hardly blame the cops or society for the prejudice your friend experienced. How often would the cop stop a black engineer in a lexus who didn't turn out to be a carjacker?
Yes, you can. You can literally blame the cops. If they want to verify the ownership of the car, they can easily check the papers. It’s also about making the driver aware of the fact that they don’t think he could possibly be driving this car.
The first is that poor whites have much the same relationship with authority as people of color, but are almost completely excluded when it comes to any kind of social advocacy.
This is the essence of racism: it separates people. Those poor white people would be great allies, but no one dealing with issue of race cares about them or enough about their allegiance to approach them in a way that does not alienate them.
The second thought is on the nature of white privilege. All white people have privilege, but the privilege is this: We do not wear our status on our skin. So a black person can have high status but remain effectively low status while a low status white person can earn high status and be treated the way we should be treating everyone.
But, people being people, we show our status in many other ways, and so for a lot of white people, white privilege is irrelevant because they have no capacity to capitalize on it.
Hence, we get a bifurcated low status populace half of which believes prejudice==racism and that is the root cause of the issues; and a second half which believes those prejudices do not exist because they experience the same issues and incorrectly conclude that racism==prejudice does not exist (or is overblown) and/or feel oppressed themselves (which, of course, they are, but not by the people they think are oppressing them).
Sadly, the reality is that racism is this system of bifurcation. As long as they are disunited, the system will not change. At best, the system will flip; and it is this flip that people like the GP seem to fear.
What you're saying, it's all effed up. The whole "white privilege" thing is bs. I grew up kinda poor and I can tell you that the cops treat poor whites the same as they do poor blacks. It's the system of domination that is the problem, not skin color. Sure, there are racist cops, I've known plenty of them. But overall, the system does not care what color you are, only that you are part of the underclass that needs to be kept under control/dominated/coerced. That's what the police exist for. They sure as hell aren't there to uphold the law when we see every day how the elite break major laws and get away with it constantly.
The US is a dramatically unjust country, but it's not because of racism, it is due to elitism and oligarchy, the same old song. They keep us divided in order to dominate us, keep watering down the currency, causing distractions, and on and on. It's not racism, it's control. We need to bring our elites under control before they start yet another war to whittle us down.
"Flag me" -- um... hold on. The comment I replied to was rac ist. That was the most polite response. Now, please dang, or whoever, delete my account. Thanks in advance. I am out.
Poor whites do not in fact have much the same relationship with "authority" as poor blacks. There is abundant evidence that the criminal justice system treats black people more harshly than it does white people. It is also not the case that concern about this disparity has to be abandoned in favor of "unity" with poor whites in order to rectify it.
Countrywide stats don't indicate the lack of a problem. It just means profiling is unevenly distributed. While it's not a big issue in some places, it can be a big problem in others.
Also, of course there are other factors than race, but the stats show that race is a non-trivial bias.
> A disproportionate share of the estimated 20 million police traffic stops in the United States each year involve black drivers, even though they are no more likely to break traffic laws than whites.
For example, Montana has a huge discrepancy in black people being stopped more when only .5% of the people in Montana are black.
Further, in states like Colorado and Texas, where the chart shows white people are stopped more, they also have high latino populations (maybe a racial mis-profiling by the police?).
These were just two circumstances off the top of my head that would be interesting to explore more as to why they occur.
> Further, in states like Colorado and Texas, where the chart shows white people are stopped more, they also have high latino populations (maybe a racial mis-profiling by the police?).
"Hispanic or Latino" is a separate question from race in most US government statistics. As far as I know, it's usually the case that lighter-skinned Hispanic people are categorized as "white" and darker-skinned Hispanic people are categorized as "other".
I believe it. I'm an old white guy, the cops never pay any attention to me, but my black friends have long talked of driving while black, which, they explained to me, is the frequent stops they get from cops. Yes, it's anecdotal, but given everything else I hear about the cops, and the fact that I know these friends well and trust them, I believe them. One more thing: these friends live in the SF bay area (one is a retired HP VP) and drive new-ish German cars.
Is this still a thing? I thought people were selling counterfeit license plate frames on ebay and had diluted the effectiveness of buying off the police with a "charitable" donation.
Something seems off about these graphs. Montana's data looks particularly suspicious. The author claims to have gotten the data from Stanford's open policing dataset which can be found here:
Opening the Montana dataset in Pandas you can see:
df.driver_race.value_counts()
White 752032
Other 38782
Hispanic 16055
Black 8805
Asian 6699
Native American 2
58 1
60 1
Asian / Pacific Islander 1
25 1
So we can already see that there were 85x more whites being pulled over than blacks, which is the opposite of what their chart was suggesting. That is not very surprising since according to the census, whites made up 87.8% of the Montana population while blacks made up 0.4%. When accounting for population difference, you get numbers similar to what they claimed, though they fail to mention this in the presentation. "Traffic stops for white and black Americans per 100 driving-age people, 2015 (where data is available)"
How much of this article can be trusted? It seems to be filled with a lot of appeals to emotion, and misleading charts.
"Black motorists are pulled over by police at rates exceeding those for whites"
Do you think this isn't true? I don't know one way or another, but I think if National Geographic is going to make such a claim they'd have made some effort to verify it.
How is someone who is not able (or maybe not bothered) to assess this claim themselves from raw data, supposed to know what to believe?
Is there a good way to compare these claims?
(For the record I did check the numbers in the parent post myself)
There are ~220x more whites than blacks in Montana, yet only 85x more whites are pulled over. How is it your conclusion that whites are 4x more likely to be stopped when accounting for population? Just from those numbers it looks like blacks are 2-3x more likely to be stopped.
I wonder if the %age of infractions (across a range of severities) tend to be the same across all races.
Because if it is, the white people should be pulled over at least 3x times more.
Another thing I dot understand: when a cop pulls over a vehicle, how is it possible for the cop to know if the car is being driven by a black person or not? so, it is possible that of all those pulled over, a greater %age of black drivers get ticketed for smaller infractions.
If blacks are 4 out of 1000 Montanans and whites are 878 out of 1000, then if there are 8,000 stops of blacks there should there should be 1,756,000 stops of whites.
> which is the opposite of what their chart was suggesting
No it's not. The chart says that a black driver has approximately a 3x greater chance of being stopped than a white driver, which seems consistent with your numbers.
> That is not very surprising since according to the census, whites made up 87.8% of the Montana population while blacks made up 0.4%
I'm not sure that going by overall population is useful. There are at least two problems with it, when looking at being pulled over while driving.
1. Age distributions need to be taken into account. I don't know if this applies to Montana, but I believe that in some states there are noticeable differences in age distribution between races. At the very least, you want to limit it to just people who are old enough drive.
2. Wealth distribution needs to be taken into account. In most states blacks are on average less wealthy than whites. I would expect that means that white families are more likely than black families to have more than one car. I would expect that to result in disproportionately more white driven car trips than black driven car trips.
You really need to go by what police are seeing on the roads: what percent of the cars that a police officer sees are white driven and what percent are black driven? That's loosely correlated with general population race distribution, but there are several filters including those described above between that and cars on the road that change the distribution.
i was riding my bike last night and was almost home when i came upon the four way stop in front of my complex. it was very late at night and there were no cars. there was not a soul there -- totally quiet. so of course i didnt stop for the stop sign and of course a cop pulled up right as i did it. i was pulled over, questioned and given a huge fine for doing something completely safe and well-intentioned. we need to change our laws so that cops cant pull over random black people and hand out huge fines to people who arent threatening the community.
I can’t even remember the last time I’ve been pulled over. Maybe 10-15 years ago. I’m a decent driver but I’ll go on the record that I occasionally go over the speed limit and forget to signal.
The last time I got pulled over (~15 years ago) it was leaving a bar in a vehicle with expired plates.
I had to do a field sobriety test, but the cops let me go with a warning because it was my friend's car. He hadn't said anything about the registration being expired when I offered to be the sober driver. They had quite obviously staked out the car. This was in downtown Plymouth, MI, which from what I understand, the police have a reputation for being strict there.
When I see these stats, I start trying to analyze the variables. How does a police officer know whether a driver is white or black? I find it quite hard to see into people's windows unless you're driving right next to them during the day, and it's nearly impossible at night.
It's pretty easy to see. You park on the side of the road during the day, and you can see every car that passes by. You get plenty of time to see the driver as they approach you.
My wife is black, speeds a fair amount, always tailgating, and sometimes gets pulled over. But, she never gets a ticket. Cops always let her off with a warning.
I am white, and perhaps not the most cautious driver. I was in the military for 8 years and never got a ticket. I had a big AFG sticker on the back of my car. A month or so after I got out I received three tickets in the space of a week for speeding and illegal uturns, one on an abandoned road (except for that invisible cop) late at night.
So, while cops do profile, it is a little bit more nuanced than white/black.
Is it fair to demand that whites and blacks be pulled over at the same rate, when whites and blacks do not commit crimes at the same rate? For example, African Americans make up 12.6% of the US population, but commit:
- 52.6% of all murders [0]
- 29.1% of all rapes [0]
- 54.5% of all robberies [0]
In fact, when it comes to almost every single violent crime category, blacks commit them at a rate that's at least twice that of whites. [0]
So statistically speaking, being black is a stronger indicator of being a criminal than being white. Similarly, being male (white or black) is a stronger indicator of being a criminal than being a female. Even more so if you're a male in your 20s.
If your intention is to reduce crime, and you have the choice between pulling over a 55 year old white lady to see if she's got any outstanding warrants, or a 20 year old black male, are you really going to pick the older white woman?
Or how about if you're a young female driving to a convenience store at 11PM. As you pull into the otherwise empty parking lot, you see a group of people in hoodies standing outside of the store. Are you more likely to keep on driving if you notice the people are all white males in their 20s, or if they all turn out to be white females in their 20s? Is it wrong to be more comfortable walking into the store if they're females? Why or why not?
I'm of mixed race. I just got pulled over last week. I drive a modestly nice late model car in a modestly nice neighborhood. I politely asked the cop why I was stopped and he said "one of your license plate lamps is out" He took my driver license and registration and after 10 minutes or so handed them back and said "Be a little more careful..." and sent us on our way. Got home and my license plate lamps are both working.
My wife and I had just left a movie theater around 9:00pm, and to the best of our recollection violated no traffic laws. We were actually stopped two blocks from the theater.
I've definitely felt like I've been targeted before. However, in this instance it felt more like a fishing expedition. I wonder how much of any citation resulting in a fine ends up back in the local PD's coffers?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI live in an upper middle class neighborhood. But I drive a shitty old car, because I grew up poor, and have some fixed ideas about how much you should spend on a car.
I get pulled over at least 4 times a year. No tickets from it, ever. Had to perform and pass several sobreity tests. My wife, who drives a somewhat nicer car...never.
It so happens I'm white, but perhaps identified as "white trash" because of my old crappy cars.
All anecdotal, of course, but the cops do seem to target "car status / area status mismatch".
When I was a kid I was always told that it was the people in fancy sports cars that got pulled over all the time, so by driving a modest cheap car you were taking yourself off the radar.
But that's the problem with anecdotal experience. It's hard to extrapolate trends without proper science and analysis.
EDIT: I didn't mean to target this only at the parent. The article suffers a lot of the same issues. They base a large part of their argument over a single statistic (amount of people being pulled over vs. race) and then fail to dive any deeper into the data.
We even have full on Stasi style checkpoints occasionally, where everyone is pulled over.
2. In my county, hell it's Marin County; cops are nothing more than Revenue Collectors. It's all gotten so old.
3. I'm a white dude, but have seen first hand the harassement first hand.
4. I have lost all respect for the boys in blue. It's time clean up the profession, or at least make them keep those cameras on 24/7.
5. Oh yea, and by chance you are caught violating one of the cornucopia of laws out there; we need to tie that fee to rectify the incident to income.
It's just not right that a rich boy casually tells the wifey, over dinner, that he owes the government $500 for some dubious rule violation.
The poor boy gets a $500 ticket, and it could be the last straw.
It's all just wrong.
I have seen first hand, what my black friends have had to endure for years, and it's embarrassing!
Sorry for going on, but this has been my hot button since I got my license--way too many years ago.
> cops do seem to target "car status / area status mismatch"
Can you blame them?
on the other hand, traffic stop -> suspected intoxication -> field sobriety test / drug dogs seems like a very common routine.
My guess is that you would choose the red gumball. Even though the vast majority of green gumballs are perfectly fine, the color of the green gumball is still a predictor for poison.
This is the problem with over-regulation. Of course nobody will follow the speed limit all the time, or never jaywalk or loiter or crack a beer in public or to obey any of the other silly laws that don't actually reflect societal values or public behaviour. But those laws still exist, and if a police force decides they want to abuse their power they get to start selectively enforcing them.
- "You were driving suspiciously" (a little below the speed limit)
- "Saw you yesterday at this time (1 AM) and wanted to see what you were up to" (driving home from work)
- "You looked too young to be out after curfew" (was 19)
I've also been stopped and searched while walking for:
- "Walking in front of closed businesses" (walking down the sidewalk at 10 PM)
- "I caught a whiff of marijuana" (I had never even seen marijuana in real life)
And several more that escape my memory at the moment. I'm pretty sure those were all illegal stops, and that's what bothers me - not that the cop would look twice and take note of me, but that he would blatantly break the law himself with no consequences.
That was 20+ years ago, and although I'm white, I used to wear a lot of black, so I probably did fit one of the cop's "troublemaker" stereotypes. I think being a young male of any race, especially at night, accounts for most police profiling and brazenly illegal stops, but I have no doubt that young minority males experience more of it.
This has always happened when I'm driving in a rich neighborhood.
Targeting definitely does happen. I'm not the only person with stories like this.
For the record I'm in Pennsylvania.
As an example my sister lives in a county in Colorado that doesn't do emissions testing. I bought a car - 2001 Subaru Legacy - from her several years ago and had to pass emissions as I do live in a county that requires it. It failed spectacularly. The car was not 'seriously ailing' either. The forward O2 sensor needed to be replaced and then it passed just fine.
Granted from what I hear California has pretty strict emissions requirements, but it's not necessarily a cake walk outside of California either, although sometimes it is. It's highly variable.
Cops will pull you over if your brake/head lights are out.
The first thing I noticed when I went to South Africa was the older cars on the road. Some cars that I remember from my childhood but had completely forgotten about until that point. I never realised the turnover in the UK was so high until I came back.
You are delusional if you think your police force isn't racist. ESPECIALLY the customs officers, but also regular police.
I was watching some mental health videos online just last weekend, and I watched some from britain. And ... firstly minorities and the very poor are obviously overrepresented in these "groups". Second the "patients" are terrified of these mental health professionals. Utterly terrified. Thirdly, there is a clear difference in reaction patterns between white and black patients, and between muslim and non-muslim ones.
So just stop. Your police, and many other parts of the British state is explicitly attacking these people, on racist motives.
Just stop claiming otherwise. This is not incredible, this is normal.
The net net of this is that I'm often running errands in public, during the middle of the day, with a scruffy beard, wearing sweatpants or other grubby clothes, scowling to some degree, and sometimes smelling of sweat and BO (if the store I'm going to is on the way home from the gym)
I will get plenty of suspicious looks from store proprietors and other customers. Oftentimes cashiers are surprised when I address them pleasantly. Obviously they are judging me by my appearance. Most likely they've had other interactions with people who looked like me that did not go well.
The thing is - I don't blame them. I know I look "suspicious" by the usual definitions. It's not really fair of course, but I believe this "pattern matching" behavior was probably part of our evolution. An ability to perform quick judgments based on past experience was probably useful historically. It still is in many cases not involving discriminatory practices. I guess my point is - cops are humans too. They should be held to higher standards, but if the people who commit crimes are often driving shabby cars, they are going to start putting those things together (fairly or not)
Your argument is that there’s nothing that can be done about police racism, because of your theory of evolutionary psychology, based on your reluctance to shower after the gym?
When everyone with power and influence unquestioningly pushes pro-black politics—from major tech conferences to perennial nature magazines—it becomes impossible to view blacks as the underdogs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Countrywide, it's a very small difference:
> When it came to traffic stops in 2011, black drivers (13 percent) were stopped more frequently than white (10 percent) or Hispanic (10 percent) drivers. That is hardly a damning finding. Moreover, while blacks (7 percent) were slightly more likely than Hispanics (6 percent) or whites (5 percent) to be ticketed, they were also slightly more likely than whites to be let go with no enforcement action (2 percent versus 1 percent).
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/12/dojs-policing-statist... https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp08.pdf
Also:
> findings suggest that citizen risk for specific police behavior is partially attributable to differential behavior prior to the encounter....officer decision-making and behavior requires consideration of other factors beyond a citizen's race.
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/PIJPSM-06-201...
Not to say there's not a problem but it helps to have more info.
For example, one of my friends is African and high up at Google. He tells me he get stopped monthly driving his Lexus SUV while driving around Silicon Valley. They always ask him if that’s his car, and when he says yes, they will follow with “are you sure?” I would never get such a question.
While I appreciate trying to dig into stats, but the question is what statistic is exactly relevant here? If you live in the US long enough I think the inequality of treatment and prejudice in society should become pretty self evident without needing various surveys for evidence, as those all will take a different slice rather than look at the whole pie.
And then comments that show statistics critical of the oppression narrative will get downvoted. And told "we don't need evidence to support our beliefs."
I know my father started to get pulled over a lot after the push against drunk driving. Because he worked late hours. And the cops were on edge looking for drunks driving home from bars. And cop to car ratio was much higher at that time.
For every crime category we have data on, blacks are about as likely as whites to be arrested. In some cases like robbery, much less likely. https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... The traffic stop data is anomalous if true. And may very well be explainable by other factors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarce...
http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
The only part of the system that shows any possible racial bias at all is sentencing. And it's only 19%, much smaller than claimed elsewhere. It's well within the margin of error in this stuff as well, given they can't possibly control for every relevant factor (e.g. if their crimes actually are 20% worse. In fact I can't see in this study they even controlled for region, and some states have harsher sentencing than others.)
It's worth noting that ugly people get sentences twice as long as attractive people (but are also not more likely to be convicted.) That's 10 times the disparity observed for blacks. Judges give much harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungry.
Sentencing is just a shitty system that should be replaced. Some states have tried to replace it with statistical algorithms that predict recidivism. And people like you are the first to protest that.
Brietbart/Buzzfeed actively push not looking at actual complex reasons in favor of inflammatory headlines that lead to clicks. For them it is race 100% of the time. If you see this everyday it isn't surprising that people start to believe everything is due to race.
Take the recent shooting of a young black man in his grandmother’s yard. The narrative is now that he was unarmed, and shot in the back. While true, both points are deceptive. He was unarmed, but he ran from the cops, at night, didn’t follow commands, and had a metallic object in his hands when he turned to face the officers. This was all caught on FLIR. He was shot in the back, after the first shot to his front spun him around. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Comply with commands and argue your case in court. Your odds of being shot go down to near zero when you’re not running away or acting like a lunatic. Even in cases of obvious abuse like that poor bastardized NYPD cops strangled to death, were predicated on resisting arrest.
As long as people fleeing and resisting gets conflated with cases of compliant people being abused, not much will change. As long as cases of disproportionate arrests rates are conflated with wrongful arrests and convictions, not much will change. The two major predictors of have a bad time in the system are socioeconomic class, and how you act with officers. Race is a factor in sentencing, but that seems to rarely be the issue talked about in popular cases.
While you can blame America for the inequality, you can hardly blame the cops or society for the prejudice your friend experienced. How often would the cop stop a black engineer in a lexus who didn't turn out to be a carjacker?
The first is that poor whites have much the same relationship with authority as people of color, but are almost completely excluded when it comes to any kind of social advocacy.
This is the essence of racism: it separates people. Those poor white people would be great allies, but no one dealing with issue of race cares about them or enough about their allegiance to approach them in a way that does not alienate them.
The second thought is on the nature of white privilege. All white people have privilege, but the privilege is this: We do not wear our status on our skin. So a black person can have high status but remain effectively low status while a low status white person can earn high status and be treated the way we should be treating everyone.
But, people being people, we show our status in many other ways, and so for a lot of white people, white privilege is irrelevant because they have no capacity to capitalize on it.
Hence, we get a bifurcated low status populace half of which believes prejudice==racism and that is the root cause of the issues; and a second half which believes those prejudices do not exist because they experience the same issues and incorrectly conclude that racism==prejudice does not exist (or is overblown) and/or feel oppressed themselves (which, of course, they are, but not by the people they think are oppressing them).
Sadly, the reality is that racism is this system of bifurcation. As long as they are disunited, the system will not change. At best, the system will flip; and it is this flip that people like the GP seem to fear.
The US is a dramatically unjust country, but it's not because of racism, it is due to elitism and oligarchy, the same old song. They keep us divided in order to dominate us, keep watering down the currency, causing distractions, and on and on. It's not racism, it's control. We need to bring our elites under control before they start yet another war to whittle us down.
Thanks for that -- I'll tell you what I tell anyone who tells me that. Move to SA.
Also, of course there are other factors than race, but the stats show that race is a non-trivial bias.
> A disproportionate share of the estimated 20 million police traffic stops in the United States each year involve black drivers, even though they are no more likely to break traffic laws than whites.
In response -- how do you know? In rebuttal:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/nyregion/study-suggests-r...
For example, Montana has a huge discrepancy in black people being stopped more when only .5% of the people in Montana are black.
Further, in states like Colorado and Texas, where the chart shows white people are stopped more, they also have high latino populations (maybe a racial mis-profiling by the police?).
These were just two circumstances off the top of my head that would be interesting to explore more as to why they occur.
"Hispanic or Latino" is a separate question from race in most US government statistics. As far as I know, it's usually the case that lighter-skinned Hispanic people are categorized as "white" and darker-skinned Hispanic people are categorized as "other".
https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=11-99+foundation+licens...
https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/data/
Opening the Montana dataset in Pandas you can see:
So we can already see that there were 85x more whites being pulled over than blacks, which is the opposite of what their chart was suggesting. That is not very surprising since according to the census, whites made up 87.8% of the Montana population while blacks made up 0.4%. When accounting for population difference, you get numbers similar to what they claimed, though they fail to mention this in the presentation. "Traffic stops for white and black Americans per 100 driving-age people, 2015 (where data is available)"How much of this article can be trusted? It seems to be filled with a lot of appeals to emotion, and misleading charts.
Do you think this isn't true? I don't know one way or another, but I think if National Geographic is going to make such a claim they'd have made some effort to verify it.
How is someone who is not able (or maybe not bothered) to assess this claim themselves from raw data, supposed to know what to believe?
Is there a good way to compare these claims?
(For the record I did check the numbers in the parent post myself)
Because if it is, the white people should be pulled over at least 3x times more.
Another thing I dot understand: when a cop pulls over a vehicle, how is it possible for the cop to know if the car is being driven by a black person or not? so, it is possible that of all those pulled over, a greater %age of black drivers get ticketed for smaller infractions.
Kind of drives home the point.
No it's not. The chart says that a black driver has approximately a 3x greater chance of being stopped than a white driver, which seems consistent with your numbers.
You heard it minorities of America. Go back to bed, everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
I'm not sure that going by overall population is useful. There are at least two problems with it, when looking at being pulled over while driving.
1. Age distributions need to be taken into account. I don't know if this applies to Montana, but I believe that in some states there are noticeable differences in age distribution between races. At the very least, you want to limit it to just people who are old enough drive.
2. Wealth distribution needs to be taken into account. In most states blacks are on average less wealthy than whites. I would expect that means that white families are more likely than black families to have more than one car. I would expect that to result in disproportionately more white driven car trips than black driven car trips.
You really need to go by what police are seeing on the roads: what percent of the cars that a police officer sees are white driven and what percent are black driven? That's loosely correlated with general population race distribution, but there are several filters including those described above between that and cars on the road that change the distribution.
Edit: I gave up trying to read that article.
genuine question: do you think this would still be okay if you were driving a car?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/us/before-philando-castil...
I can’t even remember the last time I’ve been pulled over. Maybe 10-15 years ago. I’m a decent driver but I’ll go on the record that I occasionally go over the speed limit and forget to signal.
I had to do a field sobriety test, but the cops let me go with a warning because it was my friend's car. He hadn't said anything about the registration being expired when I offered to be the sober driver. They had quite obviously staked out the car. This was in downtown Plymouth, MI, which from what I understand, the police have a reputation for being strict there.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwwkaa/the-democratic-soc...
https://deleteyouraccount.libsyn.com/gimme-a-brake-light
I am white, and perhaps not the most cautious driver. I was in the military for 8 years and never got a ticket. I had a big AFG sticker on the back of my car. A month or so after I got out I received three tickets in the space of a week for speeding and illegal uturns, one on an abandoned road (except for that invisible cop) late at night.
So, while cops do profile, it is a little bit more nuanced than white/black.
- 52.6% of all murders [0]
- 29.1% of all rapes [0]
- 54.5% of all robberies [0]
In fact, when it comes to almost every single violent crime category, blacks commit them at a rate that's at least twice that of whites. [0]
So statistically speaking, being black is a stronger indicator of being a criminal than being white. Similarly, being male (white or black) is a stronger indicator of being a criminal than being a female. Even more so if you're a male in your 20s.
If your intention is to reduce crime, and you have the choice between pulling over a 55 year old white lady to see if she's got any outstanding warrants, or a 20 year old black male, are you really going to pick the older white woman?
Or how about if you're a young female driving to a convenience store at 11PM. As you pull into the otherwise empty parking lot, you see a group of people in hoodies standing outside of the store. Are you more likely to keep on driving if you notice the people are all white males in their 20s, or if they all turn out to be white females in their 20s? Is it wrong to be more comfortable walking into the store if they're females? Why or why not?
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
My wife and I had just left a movie theater around 9:00pm, and to the best of our recollection violated no traffic laws. We were actually stopped two blocks from the theater.
I've definitely felt like I've been targeted before. However, in this instance it felt more like a fishing expedition. I wonder how much of any citation resulting in a fine ends up back in the local PD's coffers?