I think this is a tacit acknowledgement that there are at least two possibilities: 1) that the police are just trying to fight crime in the best way they know how, or 2) that the police are racist a**holes. Am I reading that right?
I think you’re conflating two ideas here. While I may not fully know how to tease out the nuances of different rates of criminal behavior among white and blacks and how that plays into police practices and their ‘disparate impact’ on races, I know enough to see that there are, in fact, differences between the races’ rates of criminal behaviors and I understand that that may be at least part of the explanation for police focusing their police activity in certain neighborhoods, which may be populated mostly by a certain race.
The DoJ’s report seems to focus almost exclusively on the ‘disparate impact’ and (disclaimer: I’m only on page 69, so it’s possible the goods are still to come) doesn’t seem to take into consideration the different rates of crime among races. Given the little bit I’ve seen from the DoJ’s civil rights division, such analysis might be entirely anathema to their worldview. The parts of the DoJ’s report that I’ve read so far appear to amount to an expanded version of the last sentence of my post #252, with about as much logic behind it as that sentence had.
There’s an old statistics example given that ice cream sales correlate with homicides: they both go up in the summer and down in the winter. I may not be able to pinpoint the exact true causes of homicides, but if a statistician (or the DoJ’s civil rights division) tried to tell me that they’ve got strong statistical evidence that ice cream sales correlate with homicides, and therefore that damnable ice cream is to blame for murders, I’d be skeptical, despite (possibly) my inability to tease out the true motives for homicide from the #'s. I don’t think I have to be an expert statistician to see the weakness in the approach they’ve take so far (‘X is different from the proportion of the population, so racism’). Does that make more sense?
Getting back to my Chicago example: how would you distribute your police force among the various Chicago neighborhoods, and what activities would you ask them to perform while they were deployed there?
If you’re on page 69 and you haven’t found sufficient evidence that the Ferguson police targeted blacks then I don’t know what the fuck to tell you. You are willfully ignorant beyond my ability or desire to help you.
Through page 69 you would have had to ignore, among other things, the following evidence:
[ul]
[li]With respect to speeding offenses for all roads, African Americans account for 72% of citations based on radar or laser, but 80% of citations based on other or unspecified methods. Thus, as evaluated by radar, African Americans violate the law at lower rates than as evaluated by FPD officers. Indeed, controlling for other factors, the disparity in speeding tickets between African Americans and non-African Americans is 48% larger when citations are issued not on the basis of radar or laser, but by some other method, such as the officer’s own visual assessment. This difference is statistically significant.[/li]
[li]These disparities in the outcomes that result from traffic stops remain even after regression analysis is used to control for non-race-based variables, including driver age; gender; the assignment of the officer making the stop; disparities in officer behavior; and the stated reason the stop was initiated. Upon accounting for differences in those variables, African Americans remained 2.07 times more likely to be searched; 2.00 times more likely to receive a citation; and 2.37. Each of these disparities is statistically significant and would occur by chance less than one time in 1,000. The odds of these disparities occurring by chance together are significantly lower still.[/li]
[li]Despite being searched at higher rates, African Americans are 26% less likely to have contraband found on them than whites…This disparity exists even after controlling for the type of search conducted, whether a search incident to arrest, a consent search, or a search predicated on reasonable suspicion. Assessing contraband or “hit rates” is a generally accepted practice in the field of criminology to “operationaliz[e] the concept of ‘intent to discriminate.’” [/li]
[li]FPD records show that once a warrant issues, racial disparities in FPD’s warrant[/li]execution practices make it exceedingly more likely for a black individual with an outstanding warrant to be arrested than a white individual with an outstanding warrant. … Based upon that data, from October 2012 to October 2014, FPD arrested 460 individuals exclusively because the person had an outstanding arrest warrant. Of those 460 people arrested, 443, or 96%, were black.
[/ul]
Because I don’t think it’s a particularly interesting question. If you really must know, I would assign my officers proportionately to where the crime occurs. Not sure what other answer you were expecting.
That’s exactly the answer I was expecting. It’s really the only logical choice I can see. And if you were to assign a significant portion of your force to patrol Austin (85% black) and Englewood (97% black), and they did normal cop stuff there like pull people over, cite them, perform searches, arrest people with warrants, etc. And if the DoJ were to do an investigation and issue a report on your department, they’d find exactly what they did with the Ferguson PD: that your ‘patterns and practices’ have had a ‘disparate impact’ on the black residents of Chicago (33% black). And then you’d be branded a racist, just like the chief of police in GreenBlueLandia and the rest of the Ferguson PD. And I’d still be unconvinced.
Wow, you really haven’t understood a single thing anyone has told you.
Let me try this again; no one has any problem with blacks being stopped in proportion to the possibility that they commit crimes. If 97% of shootings happen in Englewood and 97% of the police force is there, and 97% of the people pulled over are black, that’s fine.
“Title VI and the Safe Streets Act prohibit law enforcement agencies …from engaging in
law enforcement activities that have an **unnecessary **disparate impact based on race, color, or national origin.” Notice the bolded word?
What specifically is necessary in disproportionately issuing speeding tickets to black people, as in my bullet point 1 above? What’s necessary in arresting blacks out of proportion to whites for the same offenses, as in my bullet point 4 above?
If you’re on page 69, you’ve read the following: “among the 53 Failure to Obey charges brought in 2013 that did not lead to added Failure to Appear fines—44 of which involved an African-American defendant—African Americans were assessed an average fine of $206, whereas the average fine for others was $147. The magnitude of racial disparities in fine amounts varied across the 30 yearly offense averages analyzed, but those disparities consistently disfavored African Americans.” Explain that with your model.
Even if we were to assume that blacks and whites had the exact same % of outstanding warrants (which is highly unlikely), by virtue of the fact that more of your officers are patrolling in predominately black neighborhoods like Englewood and Austin, they’re going to encounter more of the black individuals with outstanding warrants than the white ones, and shockingly, more black individuals with outstanding warrants will get arrested than white individuals with outstanding warrants.
If you’ve actually read through page 69 you would know that blacks accounted for 85% of arrests. But as I mentioned earlier, 96% of arrests solely for outstanding warrants.
But let’s ignore that for a second. I’m really interested how you’ll explain away blacks receiving higher fines than whites for the exact same charges?
Also the speeding ticket thing, don’t forget that.
There are a few posts here I could warn you on, HD. I’ll just warn you for this one and tell you to knock it off with the personal insults. Don’t do it again.
What is your point with this sentence? It sounds like you’re supporting my point that there are racial differences in crime rates.
Look, I haven’t the time, or the interest, to refute the whole report point-by-point as you copypasta it here. I generally find the thing unconvincing of evidence of racism-driven-policing. If you feel otherwise, bravo, good for you. For just one example: pages 74 and 75 of the report detail how the police and court officials get tickets dismissed for themselves / friends & family. They title that section “Evidence of racial stereotyping”, but it’s NOT evidence of racial stereotyping, at least to me. Police here, and just about everywhere, do essentially the same thing by not writing fellow officers tickets, and it’s get fuck-all-of-nothing to do with race. They call it “professional courtesy”. It’s annoying as hell, but not racist.
OH MY GOD, NO ONE IS DISPUTING THERE ARE RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES!
And with that, I broke my desk with my forehead, so I’m out (but first, as for the dismissal thing):
City officials’ application of the stereotype that African Americans lack “personal responsibility” to explain why Ferguson’s practices harm African Americans, even as these same City officials exhibit a lack of personal—and professional—responsibility in handling their own and their friends’ code violations, is further evidence of discriminatory bias on the part of decision makers central to the direction of law enforcement in Ferguson
His point is that the numbers go beyond disparate crime rates to the point of disparate treatment based on race. For example: why did black people in Ferguson get larger fines for the same violations?
Without having access to the data, my answer is just speculation, but it’s possible that the disparate fines are for repeated offenses or different facts. I could imagine that a city might assess increasing fines for multiple offenses. For example, $100 for the first jaywalking offense, $200 for the second, and $300 for the third. If black criminals, on average, had more jaywalking convictions than white criminals, their fines would be higher under such a system, even though their cited offense (jaywalking) was the same.
Is it really that hard to believe that they just might have treated black people worse? For most of American history, that was the norm. Why would it be so hard to accept that this still goes on in some communities?
It’s certainly a possibility. In all likelihood, it’s at least part of the explanation. But the DoJ report focuses on racism as if it were the sole motive, excluding possibilities like the one I mentioned. It’s not unlike how some politicians still push the idea that women get paid $0.70 for every $1 men get paid. It’s disingenuous to claim it’s because of rampant sexism, but they do it anyways, and people eat it up as if it were gospel.
The DOJ report has a mountain of evidence that racism is involved. They don’t claim that every single digit and fraction of every single disparity is entirely due to racism, but rather that the overwhelming amount of data suggests that racism is involved and a significant problem for this department.
With this in mind, along with the long history of such mistreatment, it seems rather reasonable that many black people see police officers with great fear and distrust.