"Why It Won’t Stop With Statues." Article on why it can be expected that the mayhem will get worse

[Rubee]

I can’t read that article. I refuse to give the NYT my information, so I can’t verify if they include those statistics or not. If they don’t, then they’re ignoring a crucial detail.

In their book “Suspect Citizens,” Frank R. Baumgartner, Derek A. Epp and Kelsey Shoub reviewed 20 million traffic stops. In an interview with The Post, they shared what they found: “Blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average,” “blacks are more likely to be searched following a stop,” and “just by getting in a car, a black driver has about twice the odds of being pulled over, and about four times the odds of being searched.” They found that blacks were more likely to be searched despite the fact they’re less likely to be found with contraband as a result of those searches.

A study of police activity between 2012 and 2016 in Springfield, Mo., commissioned by the city’s police chief, found “substantial disparities in the rate at which African-Americans were stopped, and that the disparities increased, from 2012 to 2016 in Springfield. Some of this disparity is attributable to the fact that African-Americans are stopped for investigative purposes than would be predicted given their overall proportion of stops.” The report also found that “when African-Americans are stopped they are more likely to be searched and arrested than would be predicted given their proportion of stops and searches,” and that “it does not appear that the disparity in searches for African-Americans is attributable to a greater propensity to be in possession of contraband."

In March of 2019, researchers compiled and analyzed data from more than 100 million traffic stops in the United States. What they found: Police were more likely to pull over black drivers. The researchers were able to confirm racial bias by measuring daytime stops against nighttime stops, when darkness would make it more difficult to ascertain a driver’s race. As with previous studies, they also found that black and Latino drivers are more likely to be searched for contraband — even though white drivers are consistently more likely to be found with contraband. They also found that legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington has caused fewer drivers to be searched during a stop, but that it did not alter the increased frequency with which black and Latino drivers are searched.

 

[vz71]

Maybe you should understand it first before making claims of discrediting studies and then failing to do that.

That you cannot understand is not my fault.
I have explained my position.

Perhaps you can explain how a study that excludes dark skinned people can claim to explain things about a society that has a pretty good percentage of such.

 

[vz71]

A 2020 report on 1.8 million police stops by the eight largest law enforcement agencies in California found that blacks were stopped at a rate 2.5 times higher than the per capita rate of whites.

Quick question about this.
Most officers I have talked to have no idea the race of a traffic stop before they are actually pulled over.
So how could there be a race issue there?

 

[vz71]

A 2017 study of interactions between officers and citizens taken from footage captured by police-officer body cameras found that “officers speak with consistently less respect…

They did a study on a subjective thing.
Tell us all…what exactly is respect? Is it different from one officer to the next? How about the individuals?

I think this study to be suspicious.

 

[VonDerTann]

I took a break to look at some of these studies that are linked.

Comprehensively, I do not find them compelling as to alleged systemic racism against blacks.

Why not?

Many reasons. First, as vz71 notes, many seem to track subjective events; exclude groups; or have gaps in reasoning (i.e. How can you blame who gets pulled over when the cops can’t see the person beforehand?)

Second, the entire thrust of many of them is very narrow, i.e. Traffic stops. The study of other areas of racism - such as educational and employment affirmative action, etc., is obviously never discussed.

Third, as another commenter noted, the presenters seem to assume racist motivations when other causes could be present: for example, one “study” tracked violations for what appeared to be “equipment violations,” when cars with such violations would have to be observed in the first place to create probable cause for the stops.

For that matter, “poverty” could be just as easily the cause as could “racism.” the point is that racism cannot be assumed.

So too could be “cultural differences.” For example, black males statistically pay more for the same kinds of new cars than do other demographics. Can we assume blacks are overcharged and hence are targets of racism? Some would - but to many black males a new car is a status symbol that it may not be to other demographics (note: the demographic that paid the least was black females; by contrast black men boast of how MUCH they paid!) Similarly, the authors do not appear in many studies to have focused on mere cultural differences.

Sixth, along the same lines, the studies I looked at didn’t appear to take into consideration a very key factor in why people get stopped: their AGE.
Young people get stopped much more than older drivers - because young people speed more. Obviously i didn’t read every word of every study but I didnt see age discussed.

My conclusion is that a lot of the surveyors set out to find racism. If they hadn’t…would anyone care? Framed differently, the researchers wanted to find “racism” and appear to have done so, without seriously contemplating other causes. Find racism? Your study is great! Find no racism? No one cares - So you try to find racism, and you don’t stop till you find some somewhere, anywhere.

I also found the demeanor of some of those advocating for these studies to be completely obnoxious - particularly galling as this is a Catholic site - but hey, maybe that’s just me.

 

[Rubee]

Perhaps you can explain how a study that excludes dark skinned people can claim to explain things about a society that has a pretty good percentage of such.

It does not exclude dark-skinned people. You simply jumped to conclusions with your assumptions that everyone not Black is equally fair-complexioned and so cannot provide a basis for comparison. It’s not my fault that you can make leaps then imagine you’ve found a smoking gun discrediting a study comparing different treatment of people based on differences in complexions.

Many reasons. First, as vz71 notes, many seem to track subjective events; exclude groups; or have gaps in reasoning (i.e. How can you blame who gets pulled over when the cops can’t see the person beforehand?)

There are no gaps You just don’t like the miniscule studies I listed. Oh, and by the way, the interracial disparities in stop-pulling-over vanish at night when cops can’t tell the race of the driver.

"
In March of 2019, researchers compiled and analyzed data from more than 100 million traffic stops in the United States. What they found: Police were more likely to pull over black drivers. The researchers were able to confirm racial bias by measuring daytime stops against nighttime stops, when darkness would make it more difficult to ascertain a driver’s race. As with previous studies, they also found that black and Latino drivers are more likely to be searched for contraband — even though white drivers are consistently more likely to be found with contraband. They also found that legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington has caused fewer drivers to be searched during a stop, but that it did not alter the increased frequency with which black and Latino drivers are searched."

I also found the demeanor of some of those advocating for these studies to be completely obnoxious - particularly galling as this is a Catholic site - but hey, maybe that’s just me.

I find the attitude of those desperate to dismiss studies that don’t support their beloved ideologies straight . . . disappointing. . . Particularly galling on a Catholic site to expect no push back for siting the inability to insult a historically oppressed demographic with racial slurs as an example of being victimized. Imagine that: thinking at the same time that being profiled, given harsher sentences, excluded or have excluded your race from your trials, etc are nothing-buggers but that being unable to call Black people names is the biiig cahuna of victimization. . .

 

[VonDerTann]

Another thing Dad taught me: a person who always needs to use sarcasm isn’t worth listening to.

Good night all.

 

[Rubee]

Another thing Dad taught me: a person who always needs to use sarcasm isn’t worth listening to.

Good night all.

Did he say something about people needing to misrepresent?

Good night.

 

[StudentMI]

Did he say something about people needing to misrepresent?

Why do you continue to insist people are being disingenuous when they don’t agree with you?

 

[StudentMI]

The poster has consistently misrepresented my posts.

No he has disagreed with your posts. Big difference.

 

[VonDerTann]

The amusing thing is, she can’t actually point to anything I’ve “misrepresented.”
She’s decided that my belief that her opinion piece, masquerading as studies, is flawed, is basis to engage in endless sarcasm.

 

[Rubee]

The amusing thing is, she can’t actually point to anything I’ve “misrepresented.”

Except I pointed it out every time you mispresented me

 

[VonDerTann]

Im sorry i don’t know what an upside down emoticon means.

Is It related to being sarcastic?

Want to hate on me? I’m a big boy. But studentmi has been polite and you’re being very unkind to him.

 

[StudentMI]

? Apparently I’m a quarterback now? I have no idea what you’re trying to say. Can you reword it?

 

[VonDerTann]

You may be a quarterback…but I’m a king!

 

[Rubee]

I can’t read that article. I refuse to give the NYT my information, so I can’t verify if they include those statistics or not. If they don’t, then they’re ignoring a crucial detail.

In the 2017 study on respect by cops, I found this. You may find it interesting.

• “In study 1, human participants rated officer utterances on several overlapping dimensions of respect. With a high degree of agreement, participants inferred these dimensions from officer language. Even though they were not told the race of the stopped driver, participants judged officer language directed toward black motorists to be less respectful than language directed toward whites.”
• “In study 2, we build statistical models capable of predicting aspects of respect based on linguistic features derived from theories of politeness, power, and social distance. We discuss the linguistic features that contribute to each model, finding that particular forms of politeness are implicated in perceptions of respect. In study 3, we apply these models to all vehicle stop interactions between officers of the Oakland Police Department and black/white community members during the month of April 2014. We find strong evidence that utterances spoken to white community members are consistently more respectful, even after controlling for contextual factors such as the severity of the offense or the outcome of the stop.”

And here are a few others you’ll find linked if you click the blue parts:

• A 2007 Harvard study found sentencing discrepancies among black people, depending on the darkness of their skin. The study looked at 67,000 first-time felons in Georgia from 1995 to 2002. The average sentence for white men was 2,689 days. The average for black men was 378 days longer. But light-skinned blacks received sentences of about three and a half months longer than whites. Medium-skinned blacks received a sentence of about a year longer. Dark-skinned blacks received sentences of a year and a half longer.
• A survey of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2017 found that when black men and white men commit the same crime, black men on average receive a sentence almost 20 percent longer. The research controlled for variables such as age and prior criminal history.
• A study published in May 2018 found that when a white person and a black person are convicted of similar crimes, Republican-appointed judges sentence the black person to three months longer in prison.

 

[Rubee]

That is an admission that there is an issue in one particular area.

" The Sentencing Project further estimates that mass incarceration combined with felon disenfranchisement laws have led to severe underrepresentation of black Americans in the voting electorate.

• From the group’s 2016 study: “One in 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than four times greater than that of non-African Americans. Over 7.4 percent of the adult African American population is disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of the non-African American population . . . In four states — Florida (21 percent), Kentucky (26 percent), Tennessee (21 percent), and Virginia (22 percent) — more than one in five African Americans is disenfranchised.” This means that black candidates may get less support than they otherwise would, candidates of all races may pay less attention to issues values by black voters, and black interests in general may be underrepresented in electoral politics."

"

School suspensions and the school-to-prison pipeline​

• A 2011 study of school discipline in Texas found that after isolating race by adjusting for 83 other variables, a black student had a 31 percent greater chance of being disciplined than an identical white or Hispanic student.
• A study of suspensions in Chicago schools from 2013 to 2014 found that black male students were more than five times more likely to be suspended than white and Asian male students. Black female students were seven times more likely than white and Asian female students. After adjusting for academic level and social disadvantages, black males were still five times more likely to be suspended, while the disparity for black females grew to 13 times more likely.
• A Brown Center on Education Policy study released in 2017 found that suspension rates of black students begin to escalate during middle school, and that the racial disparity in suspensions increases dramatically once black students comprise 16 percent or more of a school’s student population.
• Data released in 2016 from the Department of Education found that black students were nearly four times more likely to be suspended than white students.
  "

 

[Rubee]

Do they cite how often either group responds with force? If one group is more likely to respond violently (not sure if they are, don’t have those statistics on hand), then the number of violent police incidents would also be higher among that group.

Another interesting article is here for you: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/04/another-excuse-police-bias-bites-dust/

Some excerpts, quoting another study:

All of which brings us to the new data from Chicago about police and the use of force. As in other areas of the criminal-justice system where we find racial disparities, defenders of the status quo sometimes claim that cops are more aggressive with black people because black people are more likely to resist. Data journalist Rob Arthur crunched the numbers and reported what he found at Slate:

• A new cache of data released by the Chicago Police Department, however, shows that the claim that black people are more likely to face police violence because of noncompliance is itself a dreadful myth. According to the new numbers, Chicago police officers used more force against black citizens, on average, than any other race—even though black citizens tended to exercise less resistance than whites. Under the same circumstances and faced with the same level of danger, cops tended to resolve the situation without firing their weapons much more often for white citizens than black citizens. This analysis was based on Chicago PD’s own descriptions of the incidents in question …
• Using the data acquired by the Invisible Institute, I quantified the level of resistance along a simple scale, ranging from passive resistance to attacking an officer with a deadly weapon. I also measured level of force along a range from physical restraint to shooting at the subject. I converted these levels to a simple scale … Ultimately, comparing the two scales, officers tended to use more force against black subjects even though they presented less resistance than white subjects.

Arthur found that the disparity was most pronounced with respect to lethal force:

• According to the analysis of the police reports, black subjects were deemed to present a deadly threat to police officers slightly more often than whites. But when faced with a white subject deemed to present a deadly threat, officers used lethal force in just 28 percent of cases. Meanwhile, officers fired upon black subjects in 43 percent of similar situations."

As Arthur points out, this is all based on a given police officer’s own assessment of the threat. Presumably, to the extent that officer reports are inaccurate, they would err on the side of downplaying their own biases. So the disparity is, if anything, likely even higher."

 

[vz71]

It does not exclude dark-skinned people.

Right… perhaps I was unclear.

From the study…“Study participants came from several different ethnic backgrounds.
Twenty-five participants were Japanese American, eighteen were European
American, and five were Chinese American. Other participants were Native
Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Korean American and Latino. Nineteen of the
participants were male and forty-seven were female.”

Where exactly are the African American people in the group of participants?

How can one claim any knowledge of the society as a whole while leaving them out?

 

[vz71]

Ah. You talked to some police, you claim.

Yes, I have. Are you implying that I lied to you?

They can’t tell the race of drivers in daylight, you claim

When they set a speed trap, they look for cars going too fast, not drivers.
One would be very hard pressed to tell what the driver looks like at the range they can clearly see the car and cover it with radar.
Likewise police following a car may not be able to see the driver at all.

Try it some time.
It is much harder to make out many details about the driver on the highway then you would think.
Watch the cars in front of you. See if you can make out who is male…it female…or Asian…or anything.