Why is Eric Holder going after Ferguson when I’ve shown that there are much bigger cities with much worse statistics than Ferguson? A black man in San Francisco or Portland has more to fear from the local police than a black man in Ferguson. Is Holder threatening to take over the SFPD or the Portland Police? Why not?
This ignores the many other points of evidence as to bad practices and racial bias by the Ferguson PD… but is this supposed to be a defense of bad police practices? It certainly doesn’t surprised me in the least that at least some of the Ferguson issues might be present in many other cities, whatever the political leanings of the population.
Do you watch the news? Assuming you don’t there was a big case that may have attracted a lot of national attention in Ferguson, it is not like they were tossing darts at a map.
But I do agree, why didn’t Eric Holder go after other racist police policies in other places, like in his home state of Washington
:rolleyes:
This isn’t the first, nor the last police department the DOJ has investigated. Do you really think they aren’t looking into any other cities? If they are looking into other cities, does this line of “criticism” (if it can even be called that) go away?
I think you have to make four assumptions for your argument to work. They are (1) the Ferguson police have a profile for “reasonable suspicion” searches that just-so-happens to correspond with race–something like, a young man who makes furtive gestures in a high crime area; (2) the police will also search anyone, white or black who have more overt evidence of contraband, but there aren’t enough such people to focus on exclusively; (3) the search profile could not be improved in a way that would make it less race-correlative; and (4) the profile is not accurate enough to successfully offset the higher hit rate from the overt evidence cases. In terms of using this argument to dispute the DOJ conclusion, you also have to assume that the DOJ did not control for searches when the stated reason was some overt evidence of contraband (and I’m not clear on whether they did or not).
That’s all theoretically sound, as far as I can see. But it seems to me that the practical question is whether those assumptions and suppositions are all likely to apply in Ferguson, based on the other information we know. What is the likelihood that the Ferguson police have constructed a profile of who to search that is both (1) optimal in terms of maximizing hit rates for non-overt evidence searches; and (2) just-so-happens to correlate to race but isn’t race-based?
[QUOTE=astorian]
Gannett News Service is making things easy for us. Click below and you can find out how often your local police force arrests black citizens, and whether that number corresponds to the percentage of blacks in the general population:
http://www.gannett-cdn.com/experimen...s-interactive/
[/QUOTE]
I looked up my community (of course) and it was something like four times the black arrest rate vs. the white arrest rate. There are, however, about fourteen times as many whites as blacks in my town. I suppose this means Eric Holder is going to investigate us for black privilege.
Regards,
Shodan
That is not even on the agenda. Possibly letting the county take it over is on the agenda.
I meant “in his home state or a liberal one like the state of Washington”
Here is the DOJ PDF covering the Seattle Police Department, if anyone wants to make the “But Billie did it too and didn’t get in trouble” defense, it is now dead without some cite.
Warning PDF
In the context of arrests for directing abusive language at an officer? It’s in the report:
It’s unconstitutional to arrest someone for verbal criticism. There is no discretion in this area.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Ferguson’s system seems to have a few novelties, though: refusing to accept partial payments (p.4), a bevy of novel court fees (p.14), unlawful stops for the purpose of determining if a pedestrian had outstanding warrents (p.17), and not having a correctable violation (“fix-it ticket”) program (p. 12, which even my conservative Kentucky hometown has had for years).
IANALEO, but I don’t see probable cause in the descriptions given.
He wasn’t arrested for verbal criticism. He was arrested for dancing in the street. The “discretion” part comes in when they decide whether or not to arrest him for the offense. They tried not to, but he changed their minds.
Regards,
Shodan
You don’t understand the law here. If the arrest is motivated by the protected conduct–even if an arrest could otherwise have been made validly–it is still a constitutional violation.
What that paper argues is that if blacks are more likely to carry drugs than police officers will search more black people at stops. Black people will then respond to this by carrying fewer drugs. Police officers will then respond by searching more white people and eventually an equilibrium is reached where whites and blacks carry drugs at the same rate and there is no reason for police to search one group more than the other.
The reason this is not correct is one of economic theory’s blind spots, reinforcement schedules. Different types of reinforcement schedules have different effects on behavior. The chances of a person with drugs being pulled over is small even in a ticket happy town like Ferguson. If your black and carrying then the chance of being searched is 11% of whatever that small number is. This slight chance of being caught with drugs is not enough incentive to change people’s behavior so they no longer carry drugs. Thus the feedback mechanism is ineffective and the equilibrium is never reached.
- is the key here. Remember: the context here is that the report is using these stats to prove that the higher level of searches is not the result of higher crime levels in the black population. This is where the argument falls short. Because if there are in fact higher levels of crime in the black community, then the fact that the profile correlates to race is not “just-so-happens” - it’s just the results of the higher level of crime. (For example, suppose that wearing gang-related clothing is part of the profile. If a higher percentage of blacks are in gangs than whites, then you would naturally have a higher percentage of blacks wearing gang-related clothing, and fitting that part of the profile - it’s not “just so happens”.) If it’s not true that blacks in Ferguson have a higher level of crime, then that wouldn’t be true. But since the report is using these stats to prove that disparate crime rates are not the cause, it can’t be assumed.
I’m not sure what the second half of your second clause means.
I don’t agree that my point rests at all on 3), unless I’ve misunderstood you.
I think 4) is trivial. Few if any profiles will be accurate enough to overcome a rate driven by overt evidence.
The “just-so-happens” applies to the creation and use of the profile, not the correlation. If police officers believe that black people commit more crimes, but know they aren’t allowed to profile by race, and so create a profile that allows them to target black people, that isn’t a “just-so-happens” profile.
If they genuinely notice that criminals tend to use “furtive gestures,” and genuinely profile everyone–black and white–who use “furtive gestures”, and this leads to more black searches, that would be a “just-so-happens” profile.
The most effective profile is one where you search people who are openly holding contraband. Presumably, you need other profiles because you can search 100% of such people and still have a lot of time on your hands. But as the “sure fire” search criteria gets less overt (bulges, say), it becomes less and less obvious why the police don’t just focus on searching those guaranteed hits instead of their less-successful profile. Your model assumes that there aren’t enough of the people showing higher-reliability indicators for contraband to simply focus all searches on them. I think that’s probably true, but can imagine a world in which it were false.
If the search profile has a disparate impact on race, and the police know that it has that impact, and the search profile could be improved but the police choose not to, then the police are likely acting out of racial bias.
I think you misunderstand me on (4). Your assumption is that the profile is tracking some real underlying crime rate, however closely or loosely. If it were a really excellent heuristic, then it would not be the case that the profile hit rate would be lower than the non-profile hit rate. Your model rests on the assumption that the profile is good but not great.
OMG never mind, why would I even bother to post here.
How many race riots were in San Francisco or Portland last year?
OK.
But “furtive gestures” wouldn’t really be a good example of what I’m talking about, because even if blacks committed crimes at higher rates than whites, there shouldn’t be more blacks who are not in the process of committing crimes who are using furtive gestures than there are whites in that situation, so you shouldn’t be getting a higher rate of misses for blacks if that was what you were using.
That’s why I chose the gang insignia example. Because if the police decided that gang insignias were part of a profile that they tended to search (presumably in combination with other things), then they would still be coming up empty more often on those searches than on searches of people based on suspicious bulges or bags of white powder, since while gang insignias are undoubtedly correlated with criminal activity, there are probably many many gang members who don’t happen to be carrying contraband at a given time - probably more than the number of suspicious bulges which turn out to be false alarms. But that would still mean that the higher rate of initial searches was ultimately based on higher crime rates, since the correlation is legit, if weaker than overt evidence.
Possibly, or maybe it’s just institutional inertia and/or incompetance.
Right. I’m saying that virtually all profiles are “good but not great”.
“Institutional inertia” or “incompetence” that leads to racial bias and mistreatment seems to be functionally the same thing as racism – the three possibilities together (when paired with disparate impacts on race) seem like the perfect definition of “institutional discrimination”.
Then by all means show that the arrest was motivated by the person screaming profanities at the cops, rather than because he made it clear by his conduct that he was not likely to stop doing what he was originally stopped for.
If you notice that there is no way to prove this, then [list=a][li]that’s why we have police discretion, and [*]de minimis non curat lex.[/list][/li]Regards,
Shodan