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 fo

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...