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You have to be careful about coming to fast conclusions based on these statistics. I can imagine these numbers being sucked up by various ill-informed political
by abstractbarista 6y ago
You have to be careful about coming to fast conclusions based on these statistics. I can imagine these numbers being sucked up by various ill-informed political commentators to mislead the public on what police departments are doing. (Regardless, I love this work and would love to see it done nationwide!)
-It could be that some cops are assigned to densely white areas, while others must work in mostly black areas. This does not necessitate racism on behalf of the officers or management. (Perhaps it does in the overall local culture, as indicated by the self-segregation? To police an entire area, you must distribute resources to various portions of that area.) Racist cops might even prefer the dominant race of the area they work in, yet still mostly cite that dominant race, simply because there are so few disliked-race targets to look for.
-Certain violations cited to predominantly one race may simply indicate a reality in which people of that race break that law more often. This does not necessitate racist targeting on behalf of the officers. At that point, maybe a discussion about how seriously this law needs to be enforced should be had. Window tint? Dime bag of weed? Is that really such a big deal? (Ideally, these laws would just be removed. But politically this seems harder than using officer discretion.)
- kristintynski 6y agoI agree with you, and that's why the officer names are redacted. Things we might at first glance think are because of biased/racist/sexist cops might have good explanations. That said, visualizing this data does surface outliers really well, and each outlier should be further investigated IMO. It all starts with getting all this data into one place, scraped from the thousands of county court records sites. It's a big task, but this data is priceless.
- abstractbarista 6y agoDefinitely agree, and hey this is really cool work. :) Wouldn't it be beautiful to have a nationwide map, where users could zoom to their county/city/town level, and immediately look at various outliers?
- kristintynski 6y agoI'm beginning to think it might be the start to a more just society. Is that thinking this is bigger than it is? The implications just seem big to me. I don't think we are going to get privacy back, but if we can at least have transparency into things like policing, we stand a much better chance at holding our government accountable.
- LorenPechtel 6y agoDark window tinting is a nuisance to other drivers and poses a hazard at night (it limits what you will see when you look in your mirror.) I have no problem with it being enforced. I definitely agree that you can't draw much of a conclusion from those numbers. They address some of the causes--some officers will be in areas with more of one race. This is even done deliberately as a supposedly race-friendly measure--assigning officers that match the predominant racial group of an area so they don't feel it's the white man imposing the law on them. I can see other possible patterns, though--industrial area, expect to cite more men. Suburban area during working hours--expect a lot of soccer moms.
- diob 6y agoYou should read The New Jim Crow.
- duxup 6y agoYeah and the perverse incentive here would be to avoid these kinds of stats by....not actually policing much.