Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
So you think blacks and whites in Ferguson maintain their vehicles and license information at the same rate? That seems unlikely, if only for economic reasons.
If it were possible to isolate all of these factors, I'd still expect to see some kind of disparity. Because there's no reason all officers are totally immune form biases that Americans broadly hold. (I actually think they're probably better than average, but a racist advertising executive isn't going to do as much damage as the racist cop, so we don't hear much about them). But even with that, I don't think it's fair to assume individual officers are racists, or that any particular decision is racist. Once you get to that mindset, you don't want solutions, you don't want to improve things, you just want to fight, to look down on people, to proclaim yourself as superior and enlightened. When the good cops is viewed the same as the bad cop (because hey, look what happened in Denver, and look what this other Ferguson cop did once), the struggle is lost and there's no point to try to have more good cops. I don't think it's appropriate to act in a hostile way to officers, under the assumption that the officer is probably racist and hostile. Just like I don't think it's appropriate to make those assumptions about urban blacks, despite anecdotal experience evidence and statistics involving violent crime in these areas.
|
I'll stay with the null hypothesis of "it's about the same" and will be closer to the truth than "there's a greater than 10:1 disparity." Not to mention that something like driving with expired tags is something that takes a much keener eye than catching somebody speeding (unless you're just pulling people over for DWB and, would you look at that, they hadn't renewed their license. Aw, shucks.)
Median income in Ferguson is $36,000, so it's not like anyone there is doing particularly well - we already saw that the white people stopped are even more likely to have contraband on them. That's the beauty of small government; when a place like St. Louis is divided into however many municipalities the rich people don't have to move far to take their tax dollars out of the redlined neighborhood. Then the cycle continues where the PDs of police departments have to do what they can to get revenues up.
That's the thing - it's all covered up in so many layers of BS that at the bottom of it all, sure, you can say "An individual police officer/department isn't racist for pulling black people over at a disproportionate rate because the department doesn't have enough funding and they're statistically more likely to get some citation $$ for pulling over a black person."