For Black Motorists, a Never-Ending Fear of Being Stopped
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwwkaa/the-democratic-soc...
https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=11-99+foundation+licens...
I live in an upper middle class neighborhood. But I drive a shitty old car, because I grew up poor, and have some fixed ideas about how much you should spend on a car.
I get pulled over at least 4 times a year. No tickets from it, ever. Had to perform and pass several sobreity tests. My wife, who drives a somewhat nicer car...never.
It so happens I'm white, but perhaps identified as "white trash" because of my old crappy cars.
All anecdotal, of course, but the cops do seem to target "car status / area status mismatch".
The first thing I noticed when I went to South Africa was the older cars on the road. Some cars that I remember from my childhood but had completely forgotten about until that point. I never realised the turnover in the UK was so high until I came back.
As an example my sister lives in a county in Colorado that doesn't do emissions testing. I bought a car - 2001 Subaru Legacy - from her several years ago and had to pass emissions as I do live in a county that requires it. It failed spectacularly. The car was not 'seriously ailing' either. The forward O2 sensor needed to be replaced and then it passed just fine.
Granted from what I hear California has pretty strict emissions requirements, but it's not necessarily a cake walk outside of California either, although sometimes it is. It's highly variable.
Cops will pull you over if your brake/head lights are out.
You are delusional if you think your police force isn't racist. ESPECIALLY the customs officers, but also regular police.
I was watching some mental health videos online just last weekend, and I watched some from britain. And ... firstly minorities and the very poor are obviously overrepresented in these "groups". Second the "patients" are terrified of these mental health professionals. Utterly terrified. Thirdly, there is a clear difference in reaction patterns between white and black patients, and between muslim and non-muslim ones.
So just stop. Your police, and many other parts of the British state is explicitly attacking these people, on racist motives.
Just stop claiming otherwise. This is not incredible, this is normal.
When I was a kid I was always told that it was the people in fancy sports cars that got pulled over all the time, so by driving a modest cheap car you were taking yourself off the radar.
But that's the problem with anecdotal experience. It's hard to extrapolate trends without proper science and analysis.
EDIT: I didn't mean to target this only at the parent. The article suffers a lot of the same issues. They base a large part of their argument over a single statistic (amount of people being pulled over vs. race) and then fail to dive any deeper into the data.
We even have full on Stasi style checkpoints occasionally, where everyone is pulled over.
> cops do seem to target "car status / area status mismatch"
Can you blame them?
This is the problem with over-regulation. Of course nobody will follow the speed limit all the time, or never jaywalk or loiter or crack a beer in public or to obey any of the other silly laws that don't actually reflect societal values or public behaviour. But those laws still exist, and if a police force decides they want to abuse their power they get to start selectively enforcing them.
- "You were driving suspiciously" (a little below the speed limit)
- "Saw you yesterday at this time (1 AM) and wanted to see what you were up to" (driving home from work)
- "You looked too young to be out after curfew" (was 19)
I've also been stopped and searched while walking for:
- "Walking in front of closed businesses" (walking down the sidewalk at 10 PM)
- "I caught a whiff of marijuana" (I had never even seen marijuana in real life)
And several more that escape my memory at the moment. I'm pretty sure those were all illegal stops, and that's what bothers me - not that the cop would look twice and take note of me, but that he would blatantly break the law himself with no consequences.
That was 20+ years ago, and although I'm white, I used to wear a lot of black, so I probably did fit one of the cop's "troublemaker" stereotypes. I think being a young male of any race, especially at night, accounts for most police profiling and brazenly illegal stops, but I have no doubt that young minority males experience more of it.
This has always happened when I'm driving in a rich neighborhood.
Targeting definitely does happen. I'm not the only person with stories like this.
For the record I'm in Pennsylvania.
My guess is that you would choose the red gumball. Even though the vast majority of green gumballs are perfectly fine, the color of the green gumball is still a predictor for poison.
on the other hand, traffic stop -> suspected intoxication -> field sobriety test / drug dogs seems like a very common routine.
The net net of this is that I'm often running errands in public, during the middle of the day, with a scruffy beard, wearing sweatpants or other grubby clothes, scowling to some degree, and sometimes smelling of sweat and BO (if the store I'm going to is on the way home from the gym)
I will get plenty of suspicious looks from store proprietors and other customers. Oftentimes cashiers are surprised when I address them pleasantly. Obviously they are judging me by my appearance. Most likely they've had other interactions with people who looked like me that did not go well.
The thing is - I don't blame them. I know I look "suspicious" by the usual definitions. It's not really fair of course, but I believe this "pattern matching" behavior was probably part of our evolution. An ability to perform quick judgments based on past experience was probably useful historically. It still is in many cases not involving discriminatory practices. I guess my point is - cops are humans too. They should be held to higher standards, but if the people who commit crimes are often driving shabby cars, they are going to start putting those things together (fairly or not)
Your argument is that there’s nothing that can be done about police racism, because of your theory of evolutionary psychology, based on your reluctance to shower after the gym?
My wife and I had just left a movie theater around 9:00pm, and to the best of our recollection violated no traffic laws. We were actually stopped two blocks from the theater.
I've definitely felt like I've been targeted before. However, in this instance it felt more like a fishing expedition. I wonder how much of any citation resulting in a fine ends up back in the local PD's coffers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/us/before-philando-castil...
I can’t even remember the last time I’ve been pulled over. Maybe 10-15 years ago. I’m a decent driver but I’ll go on the record that I occasionally go over the speed limit and forget to signal.
I had to do a field sobriety test, but the cops let me go with a warning because it was my friend's car. He hadn't said anything about the registration being expired when I offered to be the sober driver. They had quite obviously staked out the car. This was in downtown Plymouth, MI, which from what I understand, the police have a reputation for being strict there.
For example, Montana has a huge discrepancy in black people being stopped more when only .5% of the people in Montana are black.
Further, in states like Colorado and Texas, where the chart shows white people are stopped more, they also have high latino populations (maybe a racial mis-profiling by the police?).
These were just two circumstances off the top of my head that would be interesting to explore more as to why they occur.
"Hispanic or Latino" is a separate question from race in most US government statistics. As far as I know, it's usually the case that lighter-skinned Hispanic people are categorized as "white" and darker-skinned Hispanic people are categorized as "other".
I am white, and perhaps not the most cautious driver. I was in the military for 8 years and never got a ticket. I had a big AFG sticker on the back of my car. A month or so after I got out I received three tickets in the space of a week for speeding and illegal uturns, one on an abandoned road (except for that invisible cop) late at night.
So, while cops do profile, it is a little bit more nuanced than white/black.
genuine question: do you think this would still be okay if you were driving a car?
Countrywide, it's a very small difference:
> When it came to traffic stops in 2011, black drivers (13 percent) were stopped more frequently than white (10 percent) or Hispanic (10 percent) drivers. That is hardly a damning finding. Moreover, while blacks (7 percent) were slightly more likely than Hispanics (6 percent) or whites (5 percent) to be ticketed, they were also slightly more likely than whites to be let go with no enforcement action (2 percent versus 1 percent).
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/12/dojs-policing-statist... https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp08.pdf
Also:
> findings suggest that citizen risk for specific police behavior is partially attributable to differential behavior prior to the encounter....officer decision-making and behavior requires consideration of other factors beyond a citizen's race.
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/PIJPSM-06-201...
Not to say there's not a problem but it helps to have more info.
For example, one of my friends is African and high up at Google. He tells me he get stopped monthly driving his Lexus SUV while driving around Silicon Valley. They always ask him if that’s his car, and when he says yes, they will follow with “are you sure?” I would never get such a question.
While I appreciate trying to dig into stats, but the question is what statistic is exactly relevant here? If you live in the US long enough I think the inequality of treatment and prejudice in society should become pretty self evident without needing various surveys for evidence, as those all will take a different slice rather than look at the whole pie.
The first is that poor whites have much the same relationship with authority as people of color, but are almost completely excluded when it comes to any kind of social advocacy.
This is the essence of racism: it separates people. Those poor white people would be great allies, but no one dealing with issue of race cares about them or enough about their allegiance to approach them in a way that does not alienate them.
The second thought is on the nature of white privilege. All white people have privilege, but the privilege is this: We do not wear our status on our skin. So a black person can have high status but remain effectively low status while a low status white person can earn high status and be treated the way we should be treating everyone.
But, people being people, we show our status in many other ways, and so for a lot of white people, white privilege is irrelevant because they have no capacity to capitalize on it.
Hence, we get a bifurcated low status populace half of which believes prejudice==racism and that is the root cause of the issues; and a second half which believes those prejudices do not exist because they experience the same issues and incorrectly conclude that racism==prejudice does not exist (or is overblown) and/or feel oppressed themselves (which, of course, they are, but not by the people they think are oppressing them).
Sadly, the reality is that racism is this system of bifurcation. As long as they are disunited, the system will not change. At best, the system will flip; and it is this flip that people like the GP seem to fear.
Thanks for that -- I'll tell you what I tell anyone who tells me that. Move to SA.
And then comments that show statistics critical of the oppression narrative will get downvoted. And told "we don't need evidence to support our beliefs."
I know my father started to get pulled over a lot after the push against drunk driving. Because he worked late hours. And the cops were on edge looking for drunks driving home from bars. And cop to car ratio was much higher at that time.
For every crime category we have data on, blacks are about as likely as whites to be arrested. In some cases like robbery, much less likely. https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... The traffic stop data is anomalous if true. And may very well be explainable by other factors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarce...
Brietbart/Buzzfeed actively push not looking at actual complex reasons in favor of inflammatory headlines that lead to clicks. For them it is race 100% of the time. If you see this everyday it isn't surprising that people start to believe everything is due to race.
The only part of the system that shows any possible racial bias at all is sentencing. And it's only 19%, much smaller than claimed elsewhere. It's well within the margin of error in this stuff as well, given they can't possibly control for every relevant factor (e.g. if their crimes actually are 20% worse. In fact I can't see in this study they even controlled for region, and some states have harsher sentencing than others.)
It's worth noting that ugly people get sentences twice as long as attractive people (but are also not more likely to be convicted.) That's 10 times the disparity observed for blacks. Judges give much harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungry.
Sentencing is just a shitty system that should be replaced. Some states have tried to replace it with statistical algorithms that predict recidivism. And people like you are the first to protest that.
Take the recent shooting of a young black man in his grandmother’s yard. The narrative is now that he was unarmed, and shot in the back. While true, both points are deceptive. He was unarmed, but he ran from the cops, at night, didn’t follow commands, and had a metallic object in his hands when he turned to face the officers. This was all caught on FLIR. He was shot in the back, after the first shot to his front spun him around. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Comply with commands and argue your case in court. Your odds of being shot go down to near zero when you’re not running away or acting like a lunatic. Even in cases of obvious abuse like that poor bastardized NYPD cops strangled to death, were predicated on resisting arrest.
As long as people fleeing and resisting gets conflated with cases of compliant people being abused, not much will change. As long as cases of disproportionate arrests rates are conflated with wrongful arrests and convictions, not much will change. The two major predictors of have a bad time in the system are socioeconomic class, and how you act with officers. Race is a factor in sentencing, but that seems to rarely be the issue talked about in popular cases.
While you can blame America for the inequality, you can hardly blame the cops or society for the prejudice your friend experienced. How often would the cop stop a black engineer in a lexus who didn't turn out to be a carjacker?
Also, of course there are other factors than race, but the stats show that race is a non-trivial bias.
> A disproportionate share of the estimated 20 million police traffic stops in the United States each year involve black drivers, even though they are no more likely to break traffic laws than whites.
In response -- how do you know? In rebuttal:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/nyregion/study-suggests-r...
Edit: I gave up trying to read that article.
https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/data/
Opening the Montana dataset in Pandas you can see:
df.driver_race.value_counts()
White 752032
Other 38782
Hispanic 16055
Black 8805
Asian 6699
Native American 2
58 1
60 1
Asian / Pacific Islander 1
25 1
How much of this article can be trusted? It seems to be filled with a lot of appeals to emotion, and misleading charts.
Because if it is, the white people should be pulled over at least 3x times more.
Another thing I dot understand: when a cop pulls over a vehicle, how is it possible for the cop to know if the car is being driven by a black person or not? so, it is possible that of all those pulled over, a greater %age of black drivers get ticketed for smaller infractions.
Kind of drives home the point.
No it's not. The chart says that a black driver has approximately a 3x greater chance of being stopped than a white driver, which seems consistent with your numbers.
I'm not sure that going by overall population is useful. There are at least two problems with it, when looking at being pulled over while driving.
1. Age distributions need to be taken into account. I don't know if this applies to Montana, but I believe that in some states there are noticeable differences in age distribution between races. At the very least, you want to limit it to just people who are old enough drive.
2. Wealth distribution needs to be taken into account. In most states blacks are on average less wealthy than whites. I would expect that means that white families are more likely than black families to have more than one car. I would expect that to result in disproportionately more white driven car trips than black driven car trips.
You really need to go by what police are seeing on the roads: what percent of the cars that a police officer sees are white driven and what percent are black driven? That's loosely correlated with general population race distribution, but there are several filters including those described above between that and cars on the road that change the distribution.
Do you think this isn't true? I don't know one way or another, but I think if National Geographic is going to make such a claim they'd have made some effort to verify it.
How is someone who is not able (or maybe not bothered) to assess this claim themselves from raw data, supposed to know what to believe?
Is there a good way to compare these claims?
(For the record I did check the numbers in the parent post myself)