Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

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> Out of curiosity I asked my manager, who is like 20 yrs older than me, if he had ever been stopped and searched, he said not once in his life.

I had a similar conversation when a black colleague was late for work, having been stopped and searched by the police in London.

The other 10 (white) developers were all shocked, but he said it as casually as someone might report they'd missed the train, or had a puncture on a bicycle. He was stopped regularly, nothing to be done about it.

No one else had ever been stopped.

(A few months later, one of these white developers and I were walking away from the office when the other guy was stopped by the police. They searched his backpack on suspicion of theft. They told us the description was "white youth, short black hair, red football shirt, riding a blue mountain bike with a black backpack", which exactly matched my colleague.)

The government figures say, from April 2019 to March 2020:

> there were 6 stop and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people

and this is an improvement!

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-jus...

I've seen similar happen in London - black people stopped and seeming to be harassed by police for no obvious reason.

But the main anecdote for me is when I was crossing the Swiss-French border near Geneva in a car with my girlfriend.

She is black; I am white.

She was told to get out of the car and required to present various paperwork, then they checked up on the paperwork, holding her for maybe 10-20 minutes, making phone calls.

A man with an impressively large gun stood nearby.

She had a decent job at the UN in Geneva nearby, a perfectly good identity card, and it's not at all unusual for black people to cross that border in a car.

I thought they might check my paperwork too, but they were not interested and didn't ask me for anything, not even to get out of the car. It seems I was free to pass, except of course I waited for my temporarily detained girlfriend.

I've also heard a similar style of tale from Switzerland, from a friend who has lived there for 30 years.

She went to report her son's bicycle being stolen. She is white, but when the police heard her name (it is an Eastern European name), they instantly became less polite, making remarks such as "it's probably one of your country mates that did this, you know?". She got a little bit of comeuppance when she handed them her ID - her Canadian passport - and they suddenly became very polite again.

While the color of your skin makes you a much bigger target for harassment, xenophobia even for people who's skin is white is a pretty similar thought process for those who perpetrate it, and extremely widespread.

For what it's worth, I'm white and this happened to me countless times because I had a french licence plate that wasn't from around the border.

This. 99% of policing is just fishing with a pretext. Even when they're out to run a speed trap and collect revenue they still err toward stopping the outlier cars.

If you don't blend in you get a ton more attention. That can mean an out of state plate, a skin tone that doesn't match the area, a vehicle that doesn't match the area or you're checking stereotype boxes for criminal activity.

I mean, an interesting question that gets underreported is: what is the rate at which searches of black people find evidence, vs white people, per search? Police just want crimes (ironically); if one visually identifiable population group gives them more crimes, they'll preferentially search that one. Hell, it's even worse - if you see a crowd, and you know that, for instance, to pull numbers out of my ass, black people are 10% more likely to be carrying drugs than white people, it's in your rational (if racist) interest as a police officer to always preferentially search black people over white people - just like how if a coin comes up heads 60% of the time, you guess heads every time, not 60%.

The solution is drug law reform and changing the incentives of the police away from maximizing case count.

That doesn't add up though. If you guess that black people are more likely to have guns and you search them far more often, more evidence will turn up, even if they are/were as likely to have a gun than any other group.

If you never search white people for drugs, guess what? You never find drugs on white people.

It's a self-fulfilling racist prophecy.

Yes that's correct. However, in that case, while your total number of black drug crimes will be high, your "drug crimes per interaction" rate will still tell the true story.

(Assuming no straight up fraud/planting drugs on the part of the police, which is also very possible.)

The "drug crimes per interaction" rate doesn't work for this case either, if the number of interactions is just too low. And if you look at real numbers, in the US, for example, we're talking a difference in the order of two magnitudes.

So if any person has a 10% chance to carry an illegal drug and you search 100 black dudes and 1 white dude, chances are your drug crimes per interaction will be 0 with the white dude and about 10% with the black dudes.

Now add to that, that the white dude is much more likely to get off with a warning that's not committed to protocol and there we are.

>Positive outcome rates are similar whatever people’s ethnicity is. Around 25% of searches result in some action being taken.

https://fullfact.org/crime/stop-and-search-england-and-wales...

That's for London

Well to answer your question just look at crime statistics by race.

Well that's not quite the same, since it's biased by rate of search. The interesting question is crime statistics corrected for encounter rate.

Which tbf I also don't have links for on hand.

In my town, the police stop and search old white ladies. So far they have not found any guns or drugs.

As a black guy in London, I've not been stopped and searched in over a decade, so I do think that profiling tends to happen more the younger you are (and fit a particular profile).

Yup. Police have the high crime demographics memorized. If you check more boxes you get more attention.

(I shouldn't have to say this but obviously I'm describing things are they are, not endorsing them).

A counter example is that we have gotten in trouble in the US for NOT sending the police into high crime areas as well.

A less cynical and perhaps naive explanation would be that it makes sense statistically for minorities to be stopped when there is a description.

You may be astonished to learn that men are stopped and frisked 10x more than women.

https://www.met.police.uk/sd/stats-and-data/met/stop-and-sea...

At the university where I worked, a colleague mentioned that he had been stopped by the campus police four times in his time there (which was longer than my time). He was surprised to learn that I had been stopped thrice over a shorter period, and I am so white I can be seen from great distances. We regularly had to come in at night for patches and upgrades then and it was just a fact of life.

Even in my neighborhood, if I go out walking at night, I get stopped by the police, approximately once every two years. This is with a grey sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and a long white shirt, hardly burglary attire.

I wonder how much of it is a function of being male and, if large, apparently threatening-looking.

I'm 43 and white and have been stopped and searched once - late at night when it was raining and I had my hood up and was walking fast to get back to my friend's place - apparently I was "acting suspicious". I'm pretty sure that if my hood had been down it would never have happened..

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