Almalieque wrote:
You say crime in general, but the focus is on contraband.
No. You're mixing up cases. My post was in response to the video about the guy saying that drug sweeps were focused on poor neighborhoods instead of wealthier ones, with the correlation that "poor==black" and "wealthy==white".
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Are you saying that unless a city is full of violence, then the police shouldn't check for other violations, e.g, traffic violations, drugs, theft, etc?
No. I'm saying that poor neighborhoods are much better targets for drug sweeps than the suburbs. I thought I gave a pretty detailed explanation as to why.
But, for the sake of fairness, I'll address the contraband issue (again). There are a number of possible explanations. The first is simply statistical. There's going to be more police presence per person in a high crime area versus low, thus more stops per person even if every cop on patrol does the same number of stops per shift. Thus, a higher rate per persons of a search that results in no contraband, even if the "contraband found per search" was exactly the same.
As to why the "contraband found per search" rate might be higher in a lower crime neighborhood? Again, there could be a number of possible explanations. The easiest here is to note that the stats in the report don't mention whether other crimes were being committed at the time of the searches. As you point out, if one has already stopped a person for one reason, it seems reasonable at that point to decide to search his person/car for contraband. So if I see someone assault someone else, and I arrest that person, I'm also going to search him, right? If I find no contraband, it's going to show up as a search that resulted in no contraband in the stats. But I still arrested him for assault. In a low crime area, I'm more likely to be stopping someone for something less serious (like traffic stops). Which means I'm only going to search that person if I have a strong suspicion that there's contraband as opposed to searching it because I'm arresting the person for some other reason anyway. Which will account for a higher percentage of successful searches, but does *not* support the idea that this results from police bias.
Another factor is something I call "criminal camouflage". It's something that tends to happen more in high crime areas than low crime. People tend to act as though they are breaking the law even when they are not. The classic scenario is a cop rolling up on a couple dozen people hanging out in a park. A small number of them are dealing/using drugs, the rest are just hanging out and not breaking the law at all. But they all scatter as soon as they see the cop. This is camouflage in that it make it very hard for the cops to figure out who is actually breaking the law plus it increases the odds of the cops chasing someone who hasn't done anything wrong. Usually prompting the stereotypical "I didn't do nothing!" followed by "then why did you run?" conversation. And yeah, this frustrates the heck out of cops because it means that the citizens of the area are effectively helping to conceal the criminals in their own neighborhoods from the law. Intentional or not, it makes the area worse for those very citizens as a result.
And this also results in increased searches that reveal nothing. I could probably list several more factors if you want. Point being that you can't conclude police bias from the stats.
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Do you or do you not think there was malice done by the police? Please be advised of the report that you claimed have read before answering.
First off "malice" is not something that is done. It's a reason for doing something. If you do something out of malice, it's out of a desire to do evil/harm. And no, I don't think than when the cops pull people over and search their cars, they are doing so out of malice. I'm not precluding the possibility of any one cop being an evil guy who likes to hurt people, of course, but I don't buy that "the police" as a group are doing their jobs maliciously. They are doing their jobs. This requires that they pull people over and search them. It requires that they try to arrest that guy selling drugs on the corner. It requires that they deal with the drunk guy wandering down the street, or the group of gang bangers harassing people. To label their actions as malice is absurd.
Malice is not just "doing things people don't like, or that harms them". It's the intent behind the act. I've known a number of cops, and none of them want to get into a fight with someone, or pull their guns, or shoot someone. Most of them would love to not have to arrest anyone on a shift. But they want that to happen because the people they encounter aren't breaking the law, not because they're worried that someone will second guess their motives for acting based in their skin color in relation to the other person.
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Gbaji wrote:
Just passing a law requiring that blacks not be arrested at a rate greater than whites is a pretty darn stupid way to address the disparate impact of our criminal justice system on blacks.
Holy crap! How is it, after all of this discussion your interpretation is this nonsense? I've said it before and I'll say it again, NO ONE IS MAKING THAT ARGUMENT. Stop with the straw man. People are wanting fairness. If the statistics show that the people that are being targeted are less likely to have contraband, then you need to change your targeting tactics.
Again, I made that post in response to the drug sweeps, not the contraband stats. You police most where there's the most crime. This will always affect other secondary stats related to increased police presence. You can't *not* have that effect unless you actively choose to focus your police efforts on the areas with less crime. Which seems pretty counter productive.
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Read above. Poverty does not increase crime.
I did not say that poverty increases (or causes) crime. I said that areas with high poverty tend to also have high crime. There is a
correlation between them. And cops have to police most where crime is highest. Thus, they will also police most where poverty is the highest. This means that if one racial group is disproportionately poor, they are going to be disproportionately affected by police actions.
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And you wonder why the poor doesn't like Republicans. Drug Lords and gang leaders are not poor.
Outside of the Hollywood version of drug lords living in penthouses uptown, most drug lords and gang leaders in the real world live in poor neighborhoods. More importantly, the work they do most interacts with poor neighborhoods. The gang members they use to do their dirty work are poor and live in poor neighborhoods. The people they prey on are poor and live in poor neighborhoods. They mix and warehouse their drugs in poor neighborhoods. They control turf in poor neighborhoods. They recruit new members in poor neighborhoods. They distribute their drugs out of houses in poor neighborhoods. They commit a whole range of crime, mostly in poor neighborhoods.
That's why the police tend to operate drug sweeps in poor neighborhoods. While I'm sure they could capture Rod and his friend Brad doing a couple lines on the glass dining room table in their parents house in the burbs, if they want to confiscate a large quantity of drugs, they're going to go to the rundown abandoned apartment building in the projects where the local gang is cutting the stuff up prior to distribution. Arguing that they should bash 500 doors down in the burbs to collect a half pound of coke, with no single person having more than a misdemeanor amount on them rather than go to the source because the source happens to be in a poor neighborhood where there happen to be more black people is ridiculous.
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Let me try this again. If twice the contraband was found on demographic x than demographic y, but demographic y was 10 times more likely to be searched, do you not see anything wrong with this? Say yes so I can go back to countering your previous post...
That's not what the stats said though. And I'm not even talking about you exaggerating the numbers (26% more likely is not remotely close to 10 times more likely). Not all contraband is equal. Counting up cases where contraband was found does not tell us what kind, or how much, during any particular search. If I'm 26% less likely to find contraband in a car I search in area A, but the contraband is more likely to be a pound of meth versus an ounce of pot, then there's nothing wrong there at all. The problem with broad stats like the ones in the report, is that they can't account for other variables. That particular stat talks about the reasons for a stop being initiated, but does not reflect (as I touched on earlier, but in a more broad way) other aspects that occur after the stop occurs. I may pull two people over for running a stop sign (identical reason for initiating the stop). If one of them has warrants for his arrest, I may arrest him. And whilst doing that, I'm going to search his car. Which means I'm less likely to find contraband in his car than the other guy, who has no warrants or other reason for arrest, but I smell pot coming from inside and decide to search his car.
When assessing stats like that, you have to look not just at what conditions are stated, but what
are not stated. The report makes a point of saying that "even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated", but doesn't make mention of other factors which might result in a search. Given the earlier stat about blacks making up 93% of arrests, but only 67% of the population, we can reasonably conclude that everything else being equal a black motorist is more likely to be arrested after a traffic stop than a white motorist in Ferguson. Now, we can certainly argue that *this* could represent bias (although I've already given several arguments as to why we can't assume that given the stats we have), but searches tend to happen automatically in conjunction with arrests. Ergo, more searches even if the arrest has nothing to do with contraband. Ergo, more searches that will not turn up contraband.
The broader point I'm trying to make here is that the old adage about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" really seems to hold true for the DoJ report. They've cherry picked stats in such a way as to support a narrative, but the stats themselves aren't sufficient to prove that narrative. You have to ask what the stats don't tell us and what factors aren't explicitly defined within the data itself. It's really easy to make something appear to be something it's not by playing with stats. And I really think that's what's going on here.