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>Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people I infer from your belittling description of his activities as his "little

by Cadsby 13y ago

>Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people I infer from your belittling description of his activities as his "little game" and putting "prove" in skeptical quotes that you don't see the value in this particular piece of journalism and aren't swayed by the evidence presented therein. So while I doubt you can swayed otherwise, I will say that I did find it to be valuable and his experience adds another anecdote on the collective pile of evidence that the cops and prosecutors treat brown and black people vastly different for comparable infractions of the law. And both as a native New Yorker, and moreover as a citizen of the United States, I think this is a very big problems worth paying attention to. >I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling. Yeah, but you kind of are; in your very next paragraph in fact. > Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader. We really need to get over the cops-jobs-are-so-dangerous-we-can't-question-anything-they-do mantra. The statistics show, in fact, it isn't nearly as dangerous as they'd like us to believe, and even if it were, it still wouldn't justify the kind of double standards the article was shining a spotlight on. And for those that, quite frankly, don't really care one way of the other about racial profiling (I imagine because it won't ever affect them), I'd argue that everyone should care when the justice system clearly retaliates against a citizen for exposing problems in it's institutions. It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off.

blisterpeanuts 13y ago
>It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off. I think you missed my meaning. Cops, prosecutors, and judges are only human and they're going to react emotionally because that's what we humans are, hormonal emotional creatures. In the case of the OP, he deliberately set out to test the system by committing a misdemeanor to see what they would do. It was so out of context for a white male in a nice suit to be doing graffiti that the first responders couldn't believe their eyes. They literally just tried to wave him off. Shouldn't have, but did. I imagine that you or I would have reacted similarly in those circumstances -- or are you perfectly rational in all your decisionmaking and split-second reactions? Highly doubtful. I don't think it was embarrassment that he had exposed racism or profiling behavior or whatever he was obviously digging for. It was just that he was "one of them" and had betrayed their trust. They gave him the benefit of the doubt that he was not actually behaving like a 19-year-old gang banger, when in fact that was precisely what he was doing. Thus, they ultimately had to book him, take him downtown, fingerprint him, write up the charges etc. By the way, that's work. Lots of paperwork. And knowing that he's a criminal lawyer, they probably had to be extra fastidious -- the slightest little mistake or omission and for all they knew he was going to taking them to court. I think it's perfectly natural that they reacted angrily to this guy, and threw the book at him, because it was as if he was trying to provoke an angry reaction. Thus as I said, he made his bed and now must sleep in it. If you want to term this "retaliation", I suppose technically you're right, but your characterization disregards the fact that they're human, with human emotions. I think one of the great mistakes people make when debating the flaws of the justice system is to assume that its people are somehow on a higher ethical pedestal than the rest of society, that somehow they should and must behave more correctly. Unfortunately, they don't, and so it's easy to find biases and injustices in the system.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > If you want to term this "retaliation", I suppose technically you're right, but your characterization disregards the fact that they're human, with human emotions. I think one of the great mistakes people make when debating the flaws of the justice system is to assume that its people are somehow on a higher ethical pedestal than the rest of society, that somehow they should and must behave more correctly. Unfortunately, they don't, and so it's easy to find biases and injustices in the system. Which is why there should be an accounting when someone reveals these humans letting their emotions get the best of them. To act like everyone has the same emotional control is absurd -- put people with better emotional control in power and not these people.

by Cadsby 13y ago

blisterpeanuts 13y ago

>It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off. I think you missed my meaning. Cops, prosecutors, and judges are only human and they're going to react emotionally because that's what we humans are, hormonal emotional creatures. In the case of the OP, he deliberately set out to test the system by committing a misdemeanor to see what they would do. It was so out of context for a white male in a nice suit to be doing graffiti that the first responders couldn't believe their eyes. They literally just tried to wave him off. Shouldn't have, but did. I imagine that you or I would have reacted similarly in those circumstances -- or are you perfectly rational in all your decisionmaking and split-second reactions? Highly doubtful. I don't think it was embarrassment that he had exposed racism or profiling behavior or whatever he was obviously digging for. It was just that he was "one of them" and had betrayed their trust. They gave him the benefit of the doubt that he was not actually behaving like a 19-year-old gang banger, when in fact that was precisely what he was doing. Thus, they ultimately had to book him, take him downtown, fingerprint him, write up the charges etc. By the way, that's work. Lots of paperwork. And knowing that he's a criminal lawyer, they probably had to be extra fastidious -- the slightest little mistake or omission and for all they knew he was going to taking them to court. I think it's perfectly natural that they reacted angrily to this guy, and threw the book at him, because it was as if he was trying to provoke an angry reaction. Thus as I said, he made his bed and now must sleep in it. If you want to term this "retaliation", I suppose technically you're right, but your characterization disregards the fact that they're human, with human emotions. I think one of the great mistakes people make when debating the flaws of the justice system is to assume that its people are somehow on a higher ethical pedestal than the rest of society, that somehow they should and must behave more correctly. Unfortunately, they don't, and so it's easy to find biases and injustices in the system.

darkarmani 13y ago
> If you want to term this "retaliation", I suppose technically you're right, but your characterization disregards the fact that they're human, with human emotions. I think one of the great mistakes people make when debating the flaws of the justice system is to assume that its people are somehow on a higher ethical pedestal than the rest of society, that somehow they should and must behave more correctly. Unfortunately, they don't, and so it's easy to find biases and injustices in the system. Which is why there should be an accounting when someone reveals these humans letting their emotions get the best of them. To act like everyone has the same emotional control is absurd -- put people with better emotional control in power and not these people.