According to the Palm Beach Post:
Police will be targeting young blacks and hispanics because they are most likely not to wear a seat belt!
Unbelievable!
A second question. In Florida, seat belt laws are still secondary enforcement. How would a click it or ticket type program work here? If you have a checkpoint, you can’t ticket the driver because he hasn’t been stopped for suspicion of another violation. Am I missing something??
That was printed in a newspaper? Wow. Just… wow.
I’ve been pulled over in New Mexico several times for not wearing a seatbelt. Here, I guess it would be a primary enforcement, if you will, because that was the express reason I was pulled over in two cities.
I think the article means to say that the ad campaign targets young black and Hispanic men, and not the individual cops giving citations.
Yes, that was the impression I got, too, although it is not very clear.
Enforcing a law requiring seat belt use is not ethnic profiling. If blacks and hispanics choose to ignore the law, they’re profiling themselves. All they have to do is buckle up, and they won’t be targets.
The Click it or ticket program is a combination of ads and increased enforcement. If you’re seeing the ads, there will be cops looking for no-belters.
The seat belt law, like the lowered limits for alcohol content in DUI, is federal hocus-pocus. Rather than make a traffic law themselves, congress makes it a catch in the highway funding law. Pass this law, and you get this carload of highway money. Get up to 85% usage, and you get more. :rolleyes:
By this line of reasoning, race-based profiling doesn’t exist, and there’s no problem with selecting certain group of people for greater attention from law enforcement. Am I wrong?
Well kinda. The fact is that profiling works. Racial profiling is the most prevalent of the types because the media and politicans can demonize it and use it to their respective advantages, but the truth is that LE profiles are prevalent in every set and subset of every possible classification you can imagine, with very effective results. I can provide examples if you’d like. Certian groups of people are routinely selected for greater LE attention, to the benefit of all of us.
I’d like to see some examples.
Okee dokee.
Here are three.
Serial Killers (Almost always white males between 25 and 40, in fact, Eric Hickey’s assessment is that 88% of serial killers are male, 85% are Caucasian. This would lead most investigators in the direction of a white male, depending on the kind of killing that took place. Taking the DC snipers into consideration, if the killer’s method is hacking his victims to bits, the odds are good -and the goods are odd- that the killer is a male white)
Drug Offenders (using statistics easily obtainable from the DOJ: Of the 249,400 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses at yearend 2004, 112,500 (45.1%) were black, 51,800 (20.8%) were Hispanic, and 65,900 (26.4%) were white. ) Does this mean that all drug offenders are black? No, does it give LE an opportunity to focus their attentions on a specific group based on the population of a specific area? Yes.
Murderers (90% of murders are committed by males, nearly 75% of the victims are also males. Most males commit murders between 17 years of age and 30 years of age. We’re less likely to murder as we get older. Therefore you can focus your attentions as an investigator on males, between 17 and 30 as the predominant factor of the profile, coupled with the largest percentage of the demographic makeup of the area in which the offense was committed as the subordinate factor)
These are tools, simple as that. They are not the ONLY reason to initiate a traffic stop or effect an arrest, but they are factors that will allow, and in fact SHOULD allow LE to focus their attention and efforts where they will do the most good.
Heh, you might consider rephrasing that to “most males who murder are between 17 and 30 years of age.”
Well, they changed the article since the OP, but it still says:
"For this year’s Click It or Ticket wave, young Hispanic and black males will be targeted. Statistics show they are less likely to buckle up than others once they get behind the wheel.
What if it said that this year’s anti-drug campaign targets blacks because stats show that they use more drugs than whites?
And they updated the article to state that Florida has a secondary-offense only law, and said that cops will ticket those under 18 for not wearing a belt (which is a primary offense), but how does “Click It or Ticket” and all of the scary TV commercials with big burly cops handing out belt tickets work in a secondary enforcement state?
Unless they can show another violation, I can roll through a checkpoint without a seat belt while waiving to the cop and he can’t do anything. How do I “ticket” if I don’t “click it” if you will?
a bit late now, but ya. 
While this one is probably true, it begs the question, how do you know? Just cause they catch mostly White males doesn’t mean they are the only serial killers out there. Honestly, unlike most crimes, we don’t get a great idea of how many individuals are out there committing them, or what they look like.
As I have cited in many a thread, Whites and Blacks use and sell almost all types of drugs at roughly the same frequency. The disparity in sentencing and arrest is proof positive that profiling doesn’t always have just outcomes, nor is it effective in catching law breakers. If we break the law at roughly equal rates, why are is there such a disparity? Don’t you think if LE is trained, officially or unofficially, to target Black males, they are gonna find more offenders by chance?
This profile is so broad it is practically meaningless.
But they don’t “do the most good” when you are the one being unfairly targeted. You have not given any good argument as to why profiling is a good idea, how effective it is, or how it’s better than the other things LE does.
Maryland used to do it but it just cost them, after 10 years. Go, Tarheels!
http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20080403/NEWS/804030349/-1/xml
First, it’s not ‘probably’ true, it is true. Even a cursory glance at the hall of serial killer fame will lead you right to the front door of this conclusion, though it’s not 100 %, which is why i mentioned the DC Sniper case. Second, we don’t KNOW, if we KNEW everything before we went hunting for the bad guy, the justice system would be perfect. It isn’t. We cannot approach criminal justice from an academic standpoint, it simply doesn’t work. Over analysis is just as deadly as complacency or under analysis. It’s the reason also that any investigator worth his sodium uses the ‘profile’ as a very small part of a larger toolbox.
I would ask for a cite on that first sentence, my experience does not bear that out. Whites tend to migrate toward heroin, cocaine (powder is making a huge comeback) and X. Blacks tend toward crack, crank and laced reefers. Use of weed is, I will admit, fairly static across all racial lines. Meth is anomaly, it’s made in rural america and sold in the urban centers. It, like weed, tends to have similar tendencies in relation to the race of the user. The so-called disparity in sentencing you refer to is, by and large, false. Here’s why. Especially in this area, S. Side/Chicago, a random sampling of any 50 cars on the road, and in less affluent areas will net you between 20 and 25 cars that are in violation of any number of rules from equipment violations to suspended licenses and registrations. This creates probable cause for the stop, which creates the cause to search, which finds the dope, which causes the arrest, which leads to a conviction. Now, I don’t know whether or not you’re familiar with the South Side, but this area is a predominantly black one, which means that by and large, those arrested will indeed be black. Now, if you move into a predominantly white community, with the same amount of people and use the same number of cars in a random sampling, there will be significantly fewer violations that will allow an officer to effect a traffic stop than there would be in the black area. Now even if your previous thread cites are true, and everyone uses drugs the same no matter what, and my experience has led me astray, the obvious problem is one of three within the black community. 1) A blatant ignorance of the rules and regulations that exist for drivers and vehicle owners. 2) A blatant disregard for those same rules and regulations or 3) Extreme economic hardship that prevents rules and regulations from being followed. The outer extreme of number 3 however is those that cannot afford to follow the rules about driving, and decide to buy some weed. When your car has no front plate, a shattered back window replaced with sheet plastic, no exterior mirrors and $2000 worth of wheels and tires, you’re asking to be stopped. If you have weed, crack or anything else you know damn well you shouldn’t, especially when your car is jacked up, that’s just stupid on your part.
On the contrary, in a city of 50,000 people, there’s a 90% chance that the person who committed the murder is male, I go from 50,000 suspects right down to 25,000. Still, if you let that be your only investigative tool, then you’re worthless as an investigator.
Yes and no. We try to stop the flow of drugs in and out of the cities but we can’t. The war on drugs is about as meaningless as the war on terror. May as well wage a war on farts, you’d have as much luck. Again, the facts are that profiling works. It works because it’s accurate, it is not, I repeat NOT 100% accurate, but nothing is. As far as being unfairly targeted, well, I know there are some piece of shite cops who play the DWB game, and that hurts everybody, and if I had my way, those douchebags would be strung up by their toenails, but the fact remains when that white kid in the luxury SUV is cruising the dope spot in the black neighborhood at 2 in the morning, the cop that does nothing is almost as bad as the cop who pulls the black guy over just, y’know, cause he was suspiciously black in a white area.
How can you say it is true if we don’t know for sure? Isn’t that contradictory. Yes, almost all the serial killers we’ve caught are White, but that doesn’t mean they all are. In fact, we have no direct proof of what percentage match that profile at all. If you would like to cite something that is more than just arrest figures, please do. That’s the problem with profiling, if you only look for one type of person, you are more likely to find more of them. Although not conclusive, the Wiki page on serial killers lists about 90 or so that have been caught. The FBI estimates that between 35 and 50 are active out there. Let’s just say we’ve caught 75% of the serial killers out there, how sure are you that the rest match the “profile”? Honestly, I don’t see how one can be so sure when we have such little direct corroborative evidence.
Here :
Here:
Another here .
So allow me to correct myself. Many studies show some differences in usage rates with certain types of drugs. However, most show Whites using MORE drugs than Blacks in both real numbers and a percentage of their total. Either way the point obtains, profiling in this regard has not led to anything positive for Blacks or society as a whole.
No, it is not. From the above cite. “In 1986, before mandatory minimums for crack offenses became effective, the average federal drug offense sentence for blacks was 11% higher than for whites. Four years later following the implementation of harsher drug sentencing laws, the average federal drug offense sentence was 49% higher for blacks.” That’s in addition to disparities in the number of people arrested.
Got a cite for any of that? Cite for the percentages of expired tags, etc. in those respective areas? Cite that people in the suburbs break the traffic laws less often. I can make up numbers to prove my point too.
I will grant you that LE may find more reasons to pull over people in an urban area, but that doesn’t mean that profiling is good, or effective. I like to think the law applies to everyone equally. Just because you can’t afford to live in the burbs doesn’t mean you should be under greater scrutiny. I doubt you are naive enough to think that LE can’t find a reason to pull most people over wherever they are.
Do you have any evident to explain why you harbor such ignorant and blatant racial biases? Honestly, give some evidence that any of this is true. Give me ONE example of a person with a shattered back window, no mirrors, and $2k wheels and rims. These people, by and large, don’t exist. They are boogie men created by people who find it easier to justify racial prejudice under the guise of utility and effectiveness. I’s something lazy/racist cops tell themselves to make it ok to harass people because they fit a crudely drawn profile. Sorry, but the facts don’t support that kind of thinking in this case. In my home state of NJ, the cops got called on their bullshit a while back, and it made most fair people realize that profiling often does more harm than good.
That is not an investigative tool; it is worthless.
What do you base this on? Do you honestly think we are trying very hard to stop drugs from entering this country? Do you think most beat cops don’t know many of the people selling drugs in their city? Do you think the DEA has no idea who is running the drug cartels? The reason we have the amount of drugs in this country that we do is because of corruption and lazy thinking of the type that brought us profiling. We’d rather go after low-hanging fruit, fairly or unfairly, because it produces “results”. It’s easier to arrest an urban Black street dealer, than it is a White kid in the suburbs doing the same thing, or the guy who sells the Black dealer his dope. I don’t consider what we are doing actually trying. It’s doing just enough to put a few bodies in jail, make people feel safe, and avoid having questions asked.
Got a cite for that?
I believe you are being purposely obtuse here. I said, over and over, that profiling is not, and again NOT a 100% it-works-everytime-without-fail solution and that profiling should not be the only single tool in an investigators toolbox. In fact, the cops chasing the DC snipers assumed them in the begninning to be white. Obviously they were not. This is proof of my own statement that profiling, while effective is not 100%. The truth of the matter is that the academic study of the issue and the practical application of the information and tactics are not always, if ever, compatible. We can only know what we know, we can’t know what we don’t know. You cannot create a report inclusive of data you do not possess.
Here :
Here:
Another here .
I think you’re weighing apples and oranges here.
To begin, the second link tells us that…
And then it tells us that…
Federally, the numbers exist in the other direction. The problem is the variables between both the enforcement jurisdiction and the degree of criminality. You may be, as a driver on the street, in possession of 2 or 3 crack rocks, a joint or two, or a pill of X. That’s going to, most likely, land you a state arrest and if the cops are lucky a conviction. You don’t get the DEA involved until the amount of drugs gets up to distributable levels. This tells us that the white male is more likely to be higher up the sales food chain as opposed to a user, which is demonstrable on the street.
Again, the links on the pages of your own cites tell a different story, and for honest comparisons, the American Indian/Alaskan native should hardly be a factor, despite the percentages, they are mostly centered geographically within a few states and not in urban centers. The use of their statistics, while facutally inclusive, skew the results of the study and make simplistac and incorrect assumptions.
23 year old data? Seriously? The crack ‘epidemic’ was in fact curtailed by these laws. It no longer has the same power it did in 1986, and generally speaking it’s used far less than it was because people don’t want to go to jail because they want to get high. The laws, as slanted as they may seem, were incentive enough to reduce the influx of cocaine and slow the manucature and distribution of crack, which has been replaced, in an on-the-spot example of push-down/pop-up theory, by meth. Crack was cheap, easy to make and distribute and flooded the poorest areas of the country, where the predominant demographic is black people. It stands to reason then that the sentences were doled out more often to people who lived in those areas. If you have a group of people that are apt, by economic, social or personal condition(s) to commit a drug crime, that group will suffer then the increased implementation of any sentencing increases, unless of course there is medical or social intervention, which this country absolutely SUCKS at. There is far too much enforcement and far too little treatment, IMO. So the “disparities” while real in the abstract sense, do not survive deconstruction.
Just 17 years dealing with, in every aspect and on every level, the follks I’m talking about. However I will do a study on the data I have access to and I will post it when I have it. This should be interesting.
I’d like to think that too, but it’s simply not the case. In fact, practical application of the laws and rules of our cities, counties, states and nation is slanted in several different directions, depending on the content of the law, and the content of the law is directly related to who can lobby the hardest for it. I agree about the 'burbs comment in general, however the truth is that the enforcement is where the crime is. Here in Chicago, the cops have clamped down so hard on the dealers and sellers that they have fled to the South Suburbs where cops aren’t yet wise to the tactics and strategies of the effective drug dealer. Soon the enforcement will catch up with the move, and the 'burbs will have the same enforcement needs as the city. You can use any one of a hundred obscure and hardly known laws/regulations to effect a traffic stop, I agree, but much of LE tactic is subjective. In your line of work, whatever that is, you can, I’m sure, take a guess at what’s coming based on your experience. If you’re a retail clerk, you can tell who’s going to rip you off. If you’re an Architect, you can tell the client is going to be picky about a certain part of the plans, if you’re a mechanic, you can tell, because of your experience that your customer has read one too many time-life books and is going to be a pain in the ass. LE is no different from any of those examples, except for the after effects, which are huge, but there is no practically perfect system.
You’re trying to equate policy with street-level enforcement. There are only anecdotal cites that can be provided, and that’s all I ever intended to provide. Nobody does studies like that, because the beater car owners society of greater Chicagoland doesn’t have a great deal of lobbying power to change the laws. I didn’t read or remember where you’re from, but cousin, take a ride around the South or West Side of Chicago for a few days, “these people” you refer to are everywhere, especially in summer. No department is going to say, and no officer should either that; “Hey, he’s black, that’s suspicious, pull him over, and that goes for all of 'em” There are factors you’re conveniently glancing over, not the least of which is that the examples provided by the Counterpunch article (which again, what is it with the old data anyway? This is coyrighted 1999) are what, five examples of bullshit behavior against HOW many fair and decent stops? Plus, most states have programs to determine PC reasons which are considered mandatory reporting items for police departments. I’m not saying it never happens, I’m saying it happens far less than that 9 year old article suggests it does.
Unless you have to investigate.
Oh please. I have never supported pissing money away on this exercise in futility. We know everything about our drug trade. If we wanted to shut it down in earnest, we would, but it creates far too many funding opportunities for our governments. All the locals CAN do is go after the low hanging fruit, as you put it, because it’s all they have resources for, and all their jurisdiction allows them to do. There is no more or less simplicity in arresting the white dealer as opposed to the black dealer. Your case has to be solid either way, and in fact, we arrest the white guy who sells the black dealer his dope more often, according to your cite.
Safety in this nation, and indeed the world, is a relative illusion propped up by governments who prevent the ordinary citizen from fighting back, then keep their hands in our pockets to maintain the illusion.
Got a cite for that?
[/QUOTE]
I believe you are being purposely obtuse here. I said, over and over, that profiling is not, and again NOT a 100% it-works-everytime-without-fail solution and that profiling should not be the only single tool in an investigators toolbox. In fact, the cops chasing the DC snipers assumed them in the begninning to be white. Obviously they were not. This is proof of my own statement that profiling, while effective is not 100%. The truth of the matter is that the academic study of the issue and the practical application of the information and tactics are not always, if ever, compatible. We can only know what we know, we can’t know what we don’t know. You cannot create a report inclusive of data you do not possess.
Here :
Here:
Another here .
I think you’re weighing apples and oranges here.
To begin, the second link tells us that…
And then it tells us that Federally, the numbers exist in the other direction. The problem is the variables between both the enforcement jurisdiction and the degree of criminality. You may be, as a driver on the street, in possession of 2 or 3 crack rocks, a joint or two, or a pill of X. That’s going to, most likely, land you a state arrest and if the cops are lucky a conviction. You don’t get the DEA involved until the amount of drugs gets up to distributable levels. This tells us that the white male is more likely to be higher up the sales food chain as opposed to a user, which is demonstrable on the street.
Again, the links on the pages of your own cites tell a different story, and for honest comparisons, the American Indian/Alaskan native should hardly be a factor, despite the percentages, they are mostly centered geographically within a few states and not in urban centers. The use of their statistics, while facutally inclusive, skew the results of the study and make simplistac and incorrect assumptions.
23 year old data? Seriously? The crack ‘epidemic’ was in fact curtailed by these laws. It no longer has the same power it did in 1986, and generally speaking it’s used far less than it was because people don’t want to go to jail because they want to get high. The laws, as slanted as they may seem, were incentive enough to reduce the influx of cocaine and slow the manucature and distribution of crack, which has been replaced, in an on-the-spot example of push-down/pop-up theory, by meth. Crack was cheap, easy to make and distribute and flooded the poorest areas of the country, where the predominant demographic is black people. It stands to reason then that the sentences were doled out more often to people who lived in those areas. If you have a group of people that are apt, by economic, social or personal condition(s) to commit a drug crime, that group will suffer then the increased implementation of any sentencing increases, unless of course there is medical or social intervention, which this country absolutely SUCKS at. There is far too much enforcement and far too little treatment, IMO. So the “disparities” while real in the abstract sense, do not survive deconstruction.
Just 17 years dealing with, in every aspect and on every level, the follks I’m talking about. However I will do a study on the data I have access to and I will post it when I have it. This should be interesting.
I’d like to think that too, but it’s simply not the case. In fact, practical application of the laws and rules of our cities, counties, states and nation is slanted in several different directions, depending on the content of the law, and the content of the law is directly related to who can lobby the hardest for it. I agree about the 'burbs comment in general, however the truth is that the enforcement is where the crime is. Here in Chicago, the cops have clamped down so hard on the dealers and sellers that they have fled to the South Suburbs where cops aren’t yet wise to the tactics and strategies of the effective drug dealer. Soon the enforcement will catch up with the move, and the 'burbs will have the same enforcement needs as the city. You can use any one of a hundred obscure and hardly known laws/regulations to effect a traffic stop, I agree, but much of LE tactic is subjective. In your line of work, whatever that is, you can, I’m sure, take a guess at what’s coming based on your experience. If you’re a retail clerk, you can tell who’s going to rip you off. If you’re an Architect, you can tell the client is going to be picky about a certain part of the plans, if you’re a mechanic, you can tell, because of your experience that your customer has read one too many time-life books and is going to be a pain in the ass. LE is no different from any of those examples, except for the after effects, which are huge, but there is no practically perfect system.
You’re trying to equate policy with street-level enforcement. There are only anecdotal cites that can be provided, and that’s all I ever intended to provide. Nobody does studies like that, because the beater car owners society of greater Chicagoland doesn’t have a great deal of lobbying power to change the laws. I didn’t read or remember where you’re from, but cousin, take a ride around the South or West Side of Chicago for a few days, “these people” you refer to are everywhere, especially in summer. No department is going to say, and no officer should either that; “Hey, he’s black, that’s suspicious, pull him over, and that goes for all of 'em” There are factors you’re conveniently glancing over, not the least of which is that the examples provided by the Counterpunch article (which again, what is it with the old data anyway? This is coyrighted 1999) are what, five examples of bullshit behavior against HOW many fair and decent stops? Plus, most states have programs to determine PC reasons which are considered mandatory reporting items for police departments. I’m not saying it never happens, I’m saying it happens far less than that 9 year old article suggests it does.
Unless you have to investigate.
Oh please. I have never supported pissing money away on this exercise in futility. We know everything about our drug trade. If we wanted to shut it down in earnest, we would, but it creates far too many funding opportunities for our governments. All the locals CAN do is go after the low hanging fruit, as you put it, because it’s all they have resources for, and all their jurisdiction allows them to do. There is no more or less simplicity in arresting the white dealer as opposed to the black dealer. Your case has to be solid either way, and in fact, we arrest the white guy who sells the black dealer his dope more often, according to your cite.
Safety in this nation, and indeed the world, is a relative illusion propped up by governments who prevent the ordinary citizen from fighting back, then keep their hands in our pockets to maintain the illusion.
It may well be that, even with entirely race neutral enforcement, diproportionatley more black people would be arrested and convicted on drug crimes. You are, in some way, arguing against what you suspect brickabacon sees as the implicit racism of the system with some facility, but what you haven’t done is demonstrated the actual utility of racial profiling in this example. In fact, it seems just the opposite. You’re failing to enforce the drug laws in the racial demographic where there is the largest offending rate and catching the group where there is the least. So, you haven’t really supported your arguement for profiling in this example.
No I am not. I am calling into question your assumption that a profile is effective when we have little evidence that that is the case. If you have evidence that it is effective, please present it.
As far as I can tell, it does not say that. Please show me where it says that.
WRONG! Did you just make this up off the top of your head? From here:
So your quaint little theory has been proved false.
What are you talking about? This makes absolutely no sense.
Cite?
I’ll take a cite on that too. Show many any proof that harsh laws on crack had any demonstrable effect on its use.
Bullshit. I have already shown that Blacks often receive more time for the same crime. Additionally, Blacks ARE NOT MORE APT TO COMMIT A DRUG CRIME RELATIVE TO WHITES. Your premise is flawed. White people in both real numbers and as a percentage of their total break the law more often and yet more Blacks end up in prison more often. How do you explain this? How can you defend this system, or defend the predominate profile of a drug user that exists in the minds of most people? Even if you assume, Blacks use crack more than Whites, the cite I posted earlier showed the sentencing discrepancies existed BEFORE THE CRACK EPIDEMIC. You can’t blame those laws, they didn’t exist at the time.
So you have no evidence.
No. Once again, enforcement is NOT where the crime is. That is the point. The crime is using or selling drugs. Whites do this more than Blacks, in general, yet the law is not enforced equally. If enforcement were truly where the crime is, you would see far more Whites being arrested. Unless the crime is not being rich enough to live in the suburbs or be above the law, I don’t see how you can pretend there is an actually effort to enforce the law equally.
I highly doubt this will ever happen.
Except that ideally, we are all equal under the law. LE is held to a higher standard that a retail clerk. The biases of that retail clerk may result is someone being followed around a store, LE biases ruin peoples lives, and undermine the law. LE doesn’t have the right to be lazy, to make unfair assumptions, or conduct themselves that way. A store clerk doesn’t either (for the record), but the stakes are very different.
I am trying to point out that you have not demonstrated your “anecdotes” are grounded in reality. It’ s easy to just make stuff up, but until you have some evidence, it carries no weight in a discussion of this type.
Then there should be some proof of these people who can afford $2k rims, but can’t afford to fix their back window. :dubious: Does that even seem logical to you? How do you even know this just by looking at someone. Do you memorize tire and rim prices? And why would a person, who cares enough to buy said rim/tires, and who clearly cares about their car and their image, fail to fix their windows?
But they have. See DWB cite. Your entire premise is based on the reliability of a profile that had been proven to lack any predictive value.
Based on what?
Here was your initial statement:
You are arguing the logic of focusing on Blacks despite the fact that:
Despite all of this, Blacks are in prison at far higher rates, and receive stiffer sentences based in part on this profile. How do you defend this?