4 ms·

God forbid we might get associated with SJWs and actually admit that black people are treated fundamentally worse and more suspicious by authorities in the Unit

God forbid we might get associated with SJWs and actually admit that black people are treated fundamentally worse and more suspicious by authorities in the United States. And it's being encouraged from the top.

lopmotr 7y ago
There isn't an easy balance. Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately represented as crime victims because they live around other blacks or Hispanics. How can the police protect them without the focusing on the most likely perpetrators? If they were to treat everyone equally, it would make things worse for the victims. The beneficiaries of that change would be richer white people who would get more policing in their already safer neighborhoods, as well as black criminals who could evade justice more easily.
- antonvs 7y ago
  Your argument is undermined by a flawed assumption: > How can the police protect them The goal of the kind of policing described here is not to protect the population they're harassing members of. It is to harass them to help maintain a racist status quo. > There isn't an easy balance This kind of enlightened centrism serves a similar purpose. Don't defend bad practices if you don't support them.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    Cocaine causes serious problems for black people. You're surely not proposing ignoring it? > It is to harass them to help maintain a racist status quo. Have you got some evidence for that? The idea of systemic racism is not that. It's an emergent phenomenon that isn't driven by anyone's desire to harass people or be racist.
- stefco_ 7y ago
  That explanation only makes sense if the police are already targeting black or hispanic neighborhoods at higher rates, which they do—but it's often blatantly for reasons other than the residents' wellbeing. The Department of Justice's official report [0] on the Ferguson police department after their killing of Michael Brown concluded unambiguously (see page 9) that the Ferguson PD aggressively fined poor black neighborhoods to make up budget shortfalls, and they coordinated with the city council on this. This is no lefty, prison-abolitionist organization; it's the US DOJ concluding unambiguously that this police department overpoliced its citizens to extract money from them. The racial and economic bias makes sense in this context: black communities know they are overpoliced and have been talking about it for ages, but nobody listens to them, so the Ferguson police knew they could get away with the exact same extortion tactics used by the mob to rob the poor and downtrodden. There are many other conflicts of interest and lacks of oversight that incentivize police departments to literally rob their citizens; civil asset forfeiture [1] allows police to confiscate, hold, and liquidate assets that they believe are related to crimes, often without trial or other due process; this mechanism is also frequently abused. Police departments also often have quotas (though they outwardly deny it) on how many arrests/stops they need to make or tickets they need to issue; again, this incentivizes cops to go to neighborhoods that are marginalized and abuse their inhabitants (as happens in NYC, where stop-and-frisk quotas mostly impact black and hispanic citizens [2], as revealed by actual NYPD officers and corroborated by the huge number of non-rich, non-white men who are predominantly targetted by this policy). And all of this forms a feedback cycle: cops abuse the marginalized, building criminal records for the disenfranchised citizens in specific neighborhoods; those neighborhoods become "high crime" because our metrics of crime are based on police activity, which is deliberately higher in those places; and the police then justify continuing their interference in those communities by claiming that they are "high crime" and therefore in need of extra policing. [0] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas... [1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/asset-forfeiture-abuse https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po... [2] https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174941454/at-stop-and-frisk-trial-cops-describe-quota-driven-nypd https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174941454/at-stop-and-frisk-t...
- pixelbash 7y ago
  If the police were to treat everyone equally you would see a lot more police hanging around at offices and work parties.

lopmotr 7y ago

There isn't an easy balance. Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately represented as crime victims because they live around other blacks or Hispanics. How can the police protect them without the focusing on the most likely perpetrators? If they were to treat everyone equally, it would make things worse for the victims. The beneficiaries of that change would be richer white people who would get more policing in their already safer neighborhoods, as well as black criminals who could evade justice more easily.

antonvs 7y ago
Your argument is undermined by a flawed assumption: > How can the police protect them The goal of the kind of policing described here is not to protect the population they're harassing members of. It is to harass them to help maintain a racist status quo. > There isn't an easy balance This kind of enlightened centrism serves a similar purpose. Don't defend bad practices if you don't support them.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Cocaine causes serious problems for black people. You're surely not proposing ignoring it? > It is to harass them to help maintain a racist status quo. Have you got some evidence for that? The idea of systemic racism is not that. It's an emergent phenomenon that isn't driven by anyone's desire to harass people or be racist.
stefco_ 7y ago
That explanation only makes sense if the police are already targeting black or hispanic neighborhoods at higher rates, which they do—but it's often blatantly for reasons other than the residents' wellbeing. The Department of Justice's official report [0] on the Ferguson police department after their killing of Michael Brown concluded unambiguously (see page 9) that the Ferguson PD aggressively fined poor black neighborhoods to make up budget shortfalls, and they coordinated with the city council on this. This is no lefty, prison-abolitionist organization; it's the US DOJ concluding unambiguously that this police department overpoliced its citizens to extract money from them. The racial and economic bias makes sense in this context: black communities know they are overpoliced and have been talking about it for ages, but nobody listens to them, so the Ferguson police knew they could get away with the exact same extortion tactics used by the mob to rob the poor and downtrodden. There are many other conflicts of interest and lacks of oversight that incentivize police departments to literally rob their citizens; civil asset forfeiture [1] allows police to confiscate, hold, and liquidate assets that they believe are related to crimes, often without trial or other due process; this mechanism is also frequently abused. Police departments also often have quotas (though they outwardly deny it) on how many arrests/stops they need to make or tickets they need to issue; again, this incentivizes cops to go to neighborhoods that are marginalized and abuse their inhabitants (as happens in NYC, where stop-and-frisk quotas mostly impact black and hispanic citizens [2], as revealed by actual NYPD officers and corroborated by the huge number of non-rich, non-white men who are predominantly targetted by this policy). And all of this forms a feedback cycle: cops abuse the marginalized, building criminal records for the disenfranchised citizens in specific neighborhoods; those neighborhoods become "high crime" because our metrics of crime are based on police activity, which is deliberately higher in those places; and the police then justify continuing their interference in those communities by claiming that they are "high crime" and therefore in need of extra policing. [0] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas... [1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/asset-forfeiture-abuse https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po... [2] https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174941454/at-stop-and-frisk-trial-cops-describe-quota-driven-nypd https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174941454/at-stop-and-frisk-t...
pixelbash 7y ago
If the police were to treat everyone equally you would see a lot more police hanging around at offices and work parties.