Almalieque wrote:
Are you saying that these admitted racists were concerned about the safety of the people that they are bigoted against?
Wait? So the cops actually said "we're racists and this is why we're stopping Blacks and Latinos more than Whites?". I'd love to get a cite for that one.
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The answer is "no".
Yeah. Because you made up the starting assumption. The reality is that there is higher police presence in neighborhoods with higher crime rates. And that police patrol these neighborhoods with the intent of protecting the law abiding citizens living there. I'm not a huge fan of stop and frisk, but the issue should be the concept of unwarranted search and not so much the race of those being searched. One of those is an actual issue of liberty, while the other is more likely to be the very sort of statistical misinterpretation you were talking about.
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The statistics (what you live by) of stop and frisk in New York clearly demonstrated that more contraband was found on white people than minorities, yet minorities were stopped nearly 80%(?) of the time.
And why do you suppose that was? Your immediate assumption seems to be "racism on the part of the police", but aren't there other, more likely explanations? Like, and I'm just spit balling here, the fact that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be members of gangs, wearing gang colors, signs, and tattoos, and thus more likely to be targeted for a stop and frisk action than the random white guy walking by in the same neighborhood, not wearing any specific gang associated clothing, despite having pockets loaded with drugs. Or maybe it's that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to congregate in groups in high crime neighborhoods where these tactics are being used. So if there's one person in a group of 10 who is holding the contraband, that's a lower rate of "searches to contraband", than the one guy out of a group of 5, right? Or one guy on his own.
It could also be an element of what I sometimes refer to as urban camouflage. Blacks and Latinos who are not themselves involved in any criminal behavior are more likely to dress and act similarly to those in their neighborhoods who are than Whites do. I could speculate about why this is, but the fact is that law abiding White people tend to do everything they can to distance themselves from anything remotely looking or sounding like criminal behavior when they're not actually involved in said. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to glorify the style of the street gangster and emulate it. So yeah. If a cop is looking at clothing style, body language, behavior, etc, he's going to tend to pick up on those who are intentionally emulating the clothing style, body language, and behavior of the criminal element and target them for stop and frisk.
All of which are possible explanations for the resulting statistics that don't require any racism on the part of the cop at all. I get that you want it to all be about race, but the reality is that cops look at behavior more than anything else. If they think you're acting strangely, they're going to take a second look at you. And yes, part of this is even self perpetuating. A black teen who believes that the cops are racists who are going to target him for no good reason is more likely to act nervously when cops approach, and perhaps make an effort to get away from them, despite not actually doing anything wrong at all. The cop picks up on that nervousness, and his movement away, and furtive looks, and decides to investigate that teen because of the behavior.
There is a cultural issue here, but IMO one of the biggest problems is that black youth are taught to fear and hate the police. We can speculate about actual rates of racism among cops (and I'm not saying at all that rate is zero), but what's being taught to young black men is far far far more dangerous for them than any amount of racist cops. When you perpetuate this idea, you're basically guaranteeing that the next generation of black teens will suffer the same disproportionate police interactions that this generation is. You can never ever solve the problem that way.
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So, no, this wasn't about helping victims, but targeting victims who are least likely able to defend themselves. Secondly, people are conflating killers with drug dealers and drug users. No one is complaining about taking killers off the streets. The problem is the assumption that everyone in the neighborhood is guilty till proven innocent.
It's Bloomberg. He's a liberal, and thus thinks that less guns equals less crime. The primary objective of stop and frisk was to confiscate guns being carried around on the street. We can debate the effectiveness of that part of the process, but that is the objective, and they have confiscated a decent amount of illegal weapons along the way. How many of those would have been used to commit a crime? Don't know. But that's the theory that this program operates under. So if you don't like it, maybe blame the Democrats and their nutty liberal ideas about gun crime.
Remember. This is the same guy who banned sodas above a certain size. He clearly is of the mindset that the broad social end outweighs and justifies infringements on individual liberty. That's the real problem here.
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P.S. I didn't say that I don't believe in statistics, but I'm biased against statistics because I'm smart enough not to take information at face value without seeing the bigger picture.
Which is strange, because that's exactly what you appear to be doing with the stop and frisk stats. As your earlier quote shows, what can make stats misleading is when assumptions are applied to them that aren't themselves supported by the stats themselves. As in your assumption that a difference in contraband rates found by stops of blacks versus whites must be the result of racism. The stat only shows that a higher percentage of whites searched had contraband on them. Again, there's a whole set of reasonable explanations for why cops might more accurately be able to profile white people for such searches than black people, so leaping to "they just like to waste their time stopping and searching people they know aren't doing anything because they're racist" just seems somewhat silly.
Edited, Mar 4th 2016 6:58pm by gbaji