4 ms·

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 a

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-content/uploads/2016/03/Fig-4.jpg https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... The traffic stop data is anomalous if true. And may very well be explainable by other factors.

Cenk 9y ago
In fact, black people are way, way more likely to be incarcerated, and get harsher prison sentences, than white people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black... https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/#III.%20The%20Scale%20of%20Disparity https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarceration-black-americans-higher-rates-disparities-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarce... http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
- Houshalter 9y ago
  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.
  - psyc 9y ago
    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.
    - Houshalter 9y ago
      And my comment has been flagged too. The political censorship on HN is ridiculous.
- bruceb 9y ago
  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.
charlescearl 9y ago
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.
ExcelSaga 9y ago
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.
- tptacek 9y ago
  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.

Cenk 9y ago

In fact, black people are way, way more likely to be incarcerated, and get harsher prison sentences, than white people. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black... https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/#III.%20The%20Scale%20of%20Disparity https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarceration-black-americans-higher-rates-disparities-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarce... http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

Houshalter 9y ago
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.
- psyc 9y ago
  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.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    And my comment has been flagged too. The political censorship on HN is ridiculous.
bruceb 9y ago
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.

charlescearl 9y ago

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.

ExcelSaga 9y ago

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.

tptacek 9y ago
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.