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I lived next to a reservoir that is a popular fishing spot. Police would always target black guys from the city for “routine” checks. Fishing license, car insurance, whatever.

On the way home, the sheriff or some bullshit village police would frequently pull over a black driver I recognized from fishing. You’re talking old men in their 70s.

I won’t claim the same treatment, but I would get pulled over at least monthly for various bs offenses. I found out later it was because my car was purchased and registered in a big city, and you could tell the county of registration from the plate.

I understand that this may be offensive to idealistic minds, but people from far away are socially less accountable, and therefore more likely to cause trouble than people who live nearby. Hopefully people can see why that is the case and accept it rather than being upset by it. That cop was doing his job. Always be polite and understand that you are a guest in that town, that he is sworn to protect. It sounds like you are.

I don't think you need to be very idealistic to find this offensive.

By this logic, what speed DOESN'T justify a police officer stopping a driver? Under is somehow suspicious according to your thinking, over is obviously illegal, and who can travel at precisely the speed limit all the time so they never go over or under?

> Under is somehow suspicious according to your thinking

Read my comment, where did I say this was suspicious? What I said in regards to the stop is:

> there are hundreds of thousands of stops everyday, many like this one are ridiculous

>shouldn’t have made the stop to begin with

The law on police stops is very clear you need a violation of a statute or pc...so if there is a minimum and you are under it that is a violation and a cop can stop you...just the same as if you violate the maximum speed statute the cop can stop you. In Florida they even have a “catch all statute” to pull you over if you are driving the exact speed limit if that wasn’t safe based on “conditions of the road” which of course is purely subjective.

I’m not arguing for or against the laws in any capacity and the laws are not my logic.

Your first comment said "being under the speed limit gives him the right to make the stop". Here you've followed up with "if there is a minimum and you are under it that is a violation". I agree with the latter statement, but being under the maximum is not a violation, and it was never stated that the driver was going under a minimum posted speed limit. The post you were replying to says they were doing 65 in a 70, which seems highly unlikely to be under the minimum - what would the minimum be in that case, 67? (Assuming good intent, perhaps this derives from yoir misreading of the post you originally replied to, or from some other factor I'm missing.)

This stop occurred in NC and we don’t have all the facts about the stop...but NC is 1 of 6 states to have laws on driving to slowly. While it is true most states might have a minimum sign posted and 65 in a 70 would be unusual, some of the statutes are unfortunately subjective...for example I think in NC they prohibit “driving to slowly in the passing lane on a highway” so potentially an officer might pull someone over for going the Actual speed limit in the passing lane (presuming they weren’t passing).

Anyway I think you might be missing the point where the poster stated:

>”under is suspicious according to your thinking...”

I never said driving under the speed limit is suspicious, and I specifically said I think this stop was ridiculous...still I don’t think we can say he was stopped for being black (it’s possible) but more likely due to being a rental car driving under the speed limit.

Not sure why facts are downvoted, I am not even for the law, just stating it exists...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.newsobserver.com/news/polit...

Driving the speed limit is also suspicious.

Reminds me of the Parks and Recreation episode with the delegate from the Venezuelan city

"Drive too fast" JAIL

"too slow" JAIL

There is no speed at which a black driver can proceed that isn't deemed suspicious.

There is a specific county in WA that was somewhat notorious for pulling over cars with BC plates. Before I knew to be careful in that area I got a few speeding tickets in the same spot, once on the way to Seattle and also the drive back a few days later. I met many people with similar stories. I probably was speeding slightly In each case, but no more than the other cars on the I5. Both stops required me to get out of the car and answer a ridiculous series of questions. Few people could afford the time off to attend court and contest the ticket, or even worse to have a warrant issued, so the county collected a decent amount of cash.

It was harassment and country-of-residence profiling (driving while Canadian, though admittedly it was also a major corridor for pot smuggling at the time). Crooked police cultures can set in for all sorts of reasons.

In my experience WA and OR police make up their budgets with traffic tickets, especially from out of state drivers because those generally won't be motivated to fight in court. You will find yourself targeted especially in touristy areas ( on the OR coast for example).

Additionally, all around MSFT campuses in the old days there'd be cops waiting to catch exiting employees going 36 in a 30 (exactly 5+ over) at the end of the month to fill their quota.

There used to be a host of lawyers on the Eastside who specialized in getting rid of traffic tickets for MSFT employees on technicalities. It was cheaper than having your insurance jacked up.

I got a traffic ticket every 6 months or so in WA (all of them for 6 miles above in a residential, because I drove like an old man even when I was young). Since moving to CA, in almost two decades I've gotten exactly one for rolling a stop sign. My driving habits haven't changed.

All that to say traffic enforcement is a relied-upon income stream for some places in the US.

If anyone is ever in the situation where they get a ticket every 6months, please buy a good radar detector. Your increased situational awareness will increase, and you'll usually be able to spot a cop.

Throw in waze and you're in a situation where you can basically cruise at 90 for a long distance vs. 75. Escort or V1

IIRC radar detectors were illegal in Washington in those days (for obvious reasons). Not sure if they are still.

For these kinds of stops, where they were waiting on side roads for you drive by, a radar detector might not even help much ?

I did have friends with detectors for highway driving, so your suggestion is solid. I wish cars had them as options like leather seats :-)

If they wait on the side of the road for you to drive by, while they may see you speeding, they usually have to have an official speed in order to serve a ticket - they may pull you over however. The main risk is LIDAR guns, however they must always be still and usually window has to be down (ruling out rainy days, cold days, etc. usually). They may also use "instant on" Ka Band, but in general they will key it up and you'll get the alert. I have indeed been pulled over by a cop who was sitting still while I sped by, but they will typically pull out and come up on you while keying up the radar, at that point you will be alerted and usually slow down before they can get a speed.

> labeled a racist (especially because now a days that is tantamount to being fired and losing your livelihood as well as all the targeting him and his family would endure).

The link literally said the officer faced no consequences.

I mean, if being labeled a racist was a dangerous as you seem to think, you'd really think that people in comfortable positions of power would go out of their way not to act racist. And as links like this show, they don't. So frankly I think that's an existence proof to the contrary.

What did you see that makes you conclude this cop was a racist?

>And being under the speed limit gives him the right to make the stop

I'm pretty confident that going 5 MPH under the speed limit does not endanger anyone else on the road and does not constitute reasonable suspicion to stop the driver.

Driving under can contribute to reasonable suspicion in conjunction with other factors. If you took this to traffic court, you would want to demonstrate that the slower speed wasn’t impeding traffic and that there were no other factors. You wouldn’t use endangerment as that isn’t the standard.

Probably not, I don’t know how many times I said the stop was bs and Likely for a reason Other than the slow driving.

That said you can be confident all you want in NC if you are driving slow on a highway it’s a traffic offense because driving slow impedes traffic and is dangerous (not my argument, but the rationale for the law)Z

...but it’s likely the officer didn’t know the guys race before pulling him over.

Okay. Why did this trooper then ask for reg and ID, do a background check, and issue an unexplained warning?

Back to your point: I just watched the linked video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODmT-KDfkC0

How could the trooper NOT know the driver's race before pulling him over?

Generally when you get pulled over on a highway the officer comes up from behind...not a guarantee by any means you know the drivers race.

How can you conclude the officer knew the drivers race and that’s the reason for the stop?

You're ok with the background check, insipid questions, and unexplained warning?

"How can you conclude the officer knew the drivers race"

What measure of proof do you require?

> What measure of proof do you require?

At least some before I label someone a racist. Like I said he might be racist but I didn’t see anything to label him that.

Just because he is a white cop pulling over a black driver Doesn’t make him racist. If everything was the exact same but the cop was black would you label him a racist or just a dickhead cop?

I said many times I’m not ok with the stop, but based on the stop and questions I was clearly a bias of being rental/out of towner (which is wrong too, but doesn’t make someone a racist)

Forget what proof I need, what did you see that makes him a racist? You think he has never stopped a white person for no good reason and asked them similar questions (Maybe, but I doubt it)?

> Here you have to understand the training/experience of highway patrol

We moved away from intent in the 1970s.

What matters now is impact, not intent. If excessive police stops disproportionately affect black drivers those stops are racist, and the people performing the stops are racist.

But we know this, from Fergusson and similar.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm

> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.

> This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety.

> The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety.

> If excessive police stops disproportionately affect black drivers those stops are racist, and the people performing the stops are racist.

So black police in those jurisdictions are racists against blacks because the jurisdiction as a whole disproportionately stops blacks?

I don’t think that’s how it works.

That is exactly how it works. The color of the Police is Blue, not black or any other color.

Condemning all black police officers As racists for nothing more than working for Ferguson Police department (An insert any other jurisdiction which disproportionately stops blacks) is the most white privileged thing I’ve ever heard...until your second sentence where you attempt to strip people of their race based on their occupation?

Is there any other occupation(s) you strip people of their racial identity Or just police?

Oh please, that's the least charitable interpretation possible of what I wrote.

So, just in case you actually mean what you say, what I'm getting at:

if your colleagues have a certain conduct, you follow suite. It's human nature. That doesn't mean every police officer, black or other other ethnicity is inherently racist. But they as a group act according to a pattern. A Blue pattern. You watch out for your own, no matter race or creed. I hope that cleared things up.

> You watch out for your own, no matter race or creed.

That is the complete opposite of being a racist.

Only if the definition of "your own" is the entire human race.

> if your colleagues have a certain conduct, you follow suite. It's human nature.

Thanks for writing that

> The color of the Police is Blue, not black or any other color.

At what point do these abstractions become ridiculous? White and Black are races but Blue is a different category and yet equivalent?

> What matters now is impact, not intent. If excessive police stops disproportionately affect black drivers those stops are racist, and the people performing the stops are racist.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. Impact can reveal underlying issues but is not necessarily racist in and of itself.

Consider the policy of "draw 100,000 names out of a hat and search those people for drugs". It is very unlikely that the demographic of those arrested as a result perfectly matches the demographic of the nation as a while, but I think it is hard to argue discrimination or prejudice here, because there is not even an opportunity for a human to have exercised discrimination.

Fishing stops like the OP posted try to be like this policy - a random dragnet. The issue, of course, is that the randomness is implemented by a racist police force. Black people are "randomly" stopped disproportionately, and treated harsher during the stop. So the disproportionate result is plausibly explained by racist intent.

"What matters now is impact, not intent."

James Mickens, using logic and humor, makes this point in a way that even geeks might understand.

"Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

> We moved away from intent in the 1970s. > > What matters now is impact, not intent. If excessive police stops disproportionately affect black drivers those stops are racist, and the people performing the stops are racist.

You're probably right, but suspect you'd find quite a few of people who would not agree (we have a whole legal system based on intent for all sorts of crimes -- most people think it matters.)

With that assumption, don't think it's super constructive to harden oneself to an academic definition that can interpreted as weaponization. There are so many unambiguous examples of racism that can galvanize the majority / help facilitate understanding -- don't see the point in the flippancy / pushing to ball to a place that will be polarizing. You're not changing any minds.