Ferguson’s fines (which were mostly for incredibly mundane activities that threatened no one) were overwhelmingly hoisted upon their black citizenry (far, far more than their population representation), and the byzantine court system meant that many of these multiplied over and over again, proving once again how expensive it is to be poor (and black) in many parts of America.
It really doesn’t bother you that the Ferguson PD spent a huge amount of its effort in generating revenue, and not protecting or serving their people, by taking money from its black citizenry?
I’ll ask again – when do you believe police departments like the Birmingham AL PD, or the Ferguson PD, stopped being white supremacist organizations that exercised casual brutality against black people? I showed you that Bull Connor’s Birmingham police force was very clearly a brutal and white supremacist operation in 1963… do you think it stopped right after that? If not, when?
Sorry for not being clear. In my eyes, this whole thread of the discussion started with post #211, and yes, I can certainly agree that civil rights violations will create a divide between communities and police. The point I was making (badly, it seems) was that other things will also create a divide between communities and police. One of those is just the nature of modern police work, and I think it’s a much larger factor than the relatively-few civil rights violations. The traffic stops, tickets, searches, etc. all make people dislike police. They create a “divide” to use your word.
Even though Michael Brown’s shooter were determined to have been justified, the community still felt a rift with the police. It wasn’t because of a civil rights violation, but because of a natural outgrowth of police work (bad guys get shot sometimes).
Well, I’m going to be a dick again, because your willful ignorance is pretty fucking aggravating. Go read the fucking report. Not “a summary,” read the fucking report. Because it addresses these issues. It would take you less time to read the fucking report than it would to make all these posts, plus, bonus, you’d be less fucking publicly ignorant.
"Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement both reflects and reinforces racial bias, including stereotyping. The harms of Ferguson’s police and court practices are borne disproportionately by African Americans, and there is evidence that this is due in part to intentional discrimination on the basis of race.
…**Our investigation indicates that this disproportionate burden on African Americans cannot be explained by any difference in the rate at which people of different races violate the law. **
… We have found substantial evidence of racial bias among police and court staff in Ferguson.
…Our investigation has found that the practices about which area residents have complained are in fact unconstitutional and unduly harsh.
…African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers, suggesting officers are impermissibly considering race as a factor when determining whether to search.
All that fucking water, and we got ourselves a horse that won’t fucking drink.
Of course it bothers me, but like I said, I don’t think it’s a flaw unique to Ferguson, and in many cases I don’t think it has much of anything to do with race. I suspect my city PD and court largely does the same thing (focusing much more on generating revenue than trying to protect people or prevent crime). It pisses me off.
My first reacion was “Fuck off. I’m not going to read a 102-page report just because some dick on the internet says to.” but I think maybe I need to clarify a bit: I read the first 5.5 pages of the report you linked, titled “Report Summary”. And I’ll read an additional 5 pages of your choosing. I’m looking for the strongest evidence they have that the Ferguson PD is rife with racism and that the reason they stop / arrest / fine / convict blacks at a higher rate than whites is because they’re racist SOBs, and not because blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites. To give you some hints, I don’t find ‘someone said something mean in an email’ to be compelling evidence, and I don’t find sentences starting with “We have found …” or “Our investigation indicates …”. Show me where they did an actual statistical analysis of the white vs black crime rate and how they controlled for it when measuring ‘disparate impact’.
“African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers …” <— that’s exactly the sort of statistics I’d expect if the police decided to focus their policing on high-crime areas.
Problem 1: you don’t understand statistics. If police are stopping groups of people proportional to their tendency to, lets say, hold contraband, the proportion of people found with contraband will be the same between those groups. For example, if greens are twice as likely to hold contraband as blues, and police stop twice as many greens as blues, the percentage of greens and blues found to be holding contraband will be the same.
By definition, if greens are found to be holding contraband less frequently than blues, it must be the case that police are stopping greens OUT OF PROPORTION to their tendency to hold contraband.
Do you understand this?
Also, I’m not sure why emails admitting to being racist aren’t evidence of racism. That’s a weird position to take.
But as the Ferguson report shows, black people were disproportionately stopped and searched – more black people were stopped and searched, but fewer black people actually had contraband. The percentages didn’t match. A higher likelihood of having contraband doesn’t explain the higher level of searches, since fewer of the black people that were searched had contraband.
There is nothing good to be said about the Ferguson Police department. The report itself (worth the read) is incredibly damning and a solid fact and evidence based example of terrible policing and racist bullshit. HD - you should read all of it.
You didn’t answer my question on which pages to read.
As for your greens and blues example, let’s forget about the colors of the people for a moment and talk about where they live. Let’s say there’s a particular neighborhood in green-blue-land’s capital city that has a lot of drive-by shootings. In fact, it’s the worst neighborhood in GreenBlueLandia’s capital, and 90% of the drive-by shootings in the last year happened in this one neighborhood of the city. GreenBlueLandia’s mayor is sick of the bad press from all the drive-by shootings, so he tells the chief of police to do something to make them stop. The chief of police says, “ok, we’re going to blitz this neighborhood with police activity. We’re going to put 90% of our cops in this one neighborhood, have them pull over every driver they can for every infraction, and ask for consent or try to generate Probable Cause to search the vehicles, in the hopes of finding the guys doing the drive-by shootings in a car with an illegal gun, and then we can then arrest and prosecute them and the shootings will go down.” He puts his plan into place, and his police go to work. They pull people over, they ask for consent, sometimes they get it, sometimes they have other PC for searching the vehicle. Most of the searches they do in this neighborhood come up empty, because most people in the neighborhood aren’t drive-by shooters, but occasionally they get a lucky break and nab one or two of the really bad guys who happen to have an illegal gun in the car with them. As the year wears on, they start to notice a real decline in drive-by shootings. The chief’s plan appears to be working. But then, at the end of the year, GreenBlueLandia’s DoJ does an investigation. It turns out that the police did 3,000 vehicle searches during the year, and 2,900 of them were in that one particular neighborhood. Most of those searches turned up no contraband. And the really damning figure here: this particular neighborhood is made up of 95% greens. That racist police chief just wants to harass greens!
Read starting on page 62, section titled “Ferguson Law Enforcement Practices disproportionately Harm Ferguson’s African-American Residents and Are Driven in Part by Racial Bias.” It’s unfortunately longer than 5 pages but it contains the information you’re looking for.
In this scenario, would you take data that 100% of the arrests were of African Americans to be evidence that 100% of the crime was perpetrated by African Americans?
I don’t really have much good to say about most police departments. Like I’ve said, I think most of them are in it for the money, and that traffic court, or municipal misdemeanor court, isn’t really interested in justice. They don’t really operate with a presumption of innocence. They’re looking to make a buck for the city and make sure there’s enough money in the coffers so they get paid at the end of next week. This is likely true of the cities in which all of you live.
As for the racism stuff, I don’t know, maybe this guy will fix it. I’ll go read starting on Page 62.
I don’t think it is valuable to sweep Ferguson Police with the broad brush of all police departments given what we know about how that particular department acted. Even if everything you say is true, Ferguson was still likely an outlier in its racist behavior and the fact that we have clear and convincing evidence of that behavior.
The bank charged me an extra $1M in erroneous fees!
All banks make mistakes.
Let’s reverse this: How would you distinguish between a police force that took short-term measures to fight a specific crime that might have a temporary effect on the proportion of greens searched, and a police force that was anti-green run by a police chief that legitimately wanted to harass greens? How would it show in the data?
I don’t know that I’ve got enough statistical knowledge to answer that, but I’d want to start by knowing if there were actual differences in the proportion of crimes committed by greens and blues.
Let’s try to bring this into a real-world example, if you don’t mind. Here are the 2016 homicides in Chicago, broken down by neighborhood. If you’re the Chicago police chief, how are you going to distribute your officers to try to tamp down on the # of murders? What sort of activities might you ask them to engage in while deployed to those locations?
OK, but then why are you challenging the DOJ findings in Ferguson? You asked for the statistical analysis portion of the report, which is fine, but now you’re saying you don’t have the expertise to understand it? But you disbelieve it?
I can see relying on the findings of experts, such as the DOJ investigators. And I can see challenging the finding of experts based on your own expertise. And I can see challenging the findings of experts based on different findings by other experts. But you’re challenging the findings of experts despite not having the knowledge to distinguish correct results from incorrect results, because it differs from your, frankly, uninformed opinion? You understand why I was annoyed earlier, right?