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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

>Newark PD still arrests Black people at a much much higher rate than white people.

And if it's the case that people in the city's black community are committing arrestable offenses (however stupid some definitions of what is an offense for which you can be arrested and charged with for are), then what should the department do? Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing just because it's bad PR?

It's apparently not popular to mention and undoubtedly there are many social victimization factors at work contributing to it, but young men in the black community really do commit more violent crime and crime of many other types than do many young men in a number of other ethnic communities.

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> if

There is a lot of evidence, that is easy to find, that laws criminalize African-Americans (e.g., drugs abused by poor African-Americans are criminal and result in prison; those abused by wealthy white people are sicknesses and result in treatment); that police harass and are brutal toward them (e.g., driving while black, predictive policing, and all the well-documented brutality and racism), and that prosecutors and courts sentence them to disproportionately harsh sentences, including long probation and loss of voting rights, and the inability, with a conviction, to get employment.

In my city I've seen the police in action many 5 times. Twice, it involved clear abuse and harassment of peaceful African-Americans. It's just my anecdotal experience, but are the odds?

Your argument is decades-old at this point; we know so much more now. What do you think of all that's been learned in the meantime (and by learned, I mean learned by the wealthy white population - it was known by some for generations)? Are we going to just rehash decades of learning? Nobody is making the points you are arguing with.

You must be referring to the crack/cocaine sentencing distinction. That policy was rectified many years ago. Besides that, you're incorrect that black and white Americans consume "different drugs". I would argue that your argument is also "decades old". And the way in which you suggest that issues of race and crime in America are settled, or that we've "learned" the right answer, suggests that you believe people on the other side of this issue are somehow remedial. Surely you see how this can be an obstacle to convincing them you are correct.

I listed a few examples; there are many others that are well known and easy to learn about. If you want to provide evidence, address the issues, and advance our knowledge, please do!

> you suggest that issues of race and crime in America are settled, or that we've "learned" the right answer, suggests that you believe people on the other side of this issue are somehow remedial. Surely you see how this can be an obstacle to convincing them you are correct.

But these strawperson characterizations and this victimhood are more distractions from the issues, as is the ignorance of the GGP post I responded to above - they are well-known ways of halting progress. And yes, there are some things that are well-established (though again, I haven't said the words you put in my mouth); I'm not going to spend time reviewing all human knowledge (also a well-known technique of stopping discussion). I'm here to move forward.

I'd be happy to. A good place to start is the excellent, nuanced commentary on this topic from black professors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0H4M5uP_y8

One thing they reference during this podcast but don't talk about in much detail is the case of Tony Timpa. Many of the things many claim only happen to black Americans are in fact more general issues of police brutality, poor training, or hard realities of policing. And that means yes, it happens to white Americans too.

The last thing I want to do is distract from the issues. I want us to move past these surface level discussions that we are inundated with in both the professional and social media realms. Please watch the Glenn and John episode above for more on what I mean.

Edit: Apologies. To be clear, Tony Timpa was a white man killed by a police officer in Dallas a few years ago via knee on neck. No media attention or mass protests.

Edit 2: For those more textually inclined, here is McWhorter's most recent post on the topic https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-victorians-had-to-a...

The thing is, it can be true that the police are both generally brutal and racist. In fact that seems the most likely thing given my limited observations of US policing.

Please show evidence for your claim. Anecdotes not accepted.

Edit: Both links I posted discussed studies, statistics, and analysis relevant to this that belie your claim. Please rebut those or post your own.

It seems like it’s quite widely known that US police shoot everyone at a higher rather than any developed country. You can google those stats as well as anyone. That’s evidence for ‘brutality’, not excluding the possibility that they may also be brutalised by a difficult job with poor training.

That is known. I'm asking for the evidence of racism. That charge is much more suspect when looking at the data, despite it being widely believed.

I'll add that much of the international criticism of the number of police shootings in America fails to take into account the number of guns the citizenry has, legally registered or otherwise. This leads to greatly increased risk for all involved and leads police to use tactics that might not be needed elsewhere.

>That policy was rectified many years ago.

You're half right - the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reformed the punishment ratio from 100:1 to about 18:1, and later in 2018 Congress made this change retroactive. This certainly improved the issue, but lawmakers continue to discuss whether it should be eliminated entirely.

Source: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/19/22336224/equal-act-cocaine-sen...

Thank you. I was not aware of this.

If black Americans smoke weed rather than alcohol then yes, they take different drugs. Weed is criminalised far in excess of any justification based on personal or social harms. It just seems normal to drink, in a rational drug policy it would be more controlled than many other drugs.

I'm sorry but you're just incorrect if you're suggesting white Americans don't consume cannabis at high rates.

No I wasn’t suggesting that. However in black populations in the UK at least smoking weed is more ‘normal’ than it is in white populations. By normal I mean accepted and not deviant, not necessarily to imply higher consumption.

I see. There is a history of racist or xenophobic criminalization of marijuana (when it was called that commonly) in the US. See reefer madness and associated politics. Disparity in use is no longer the case in the US.

Cannabis is typically used a pretext to police Black people for other things (that is, police assume they can get them for another crime, and even if they can't, they can still use cannabis charges).

White people consuming cannabis is not typically a police priority.

You're speaking with a white person who has been charged and convicted of cannabis possession. It certainly seemed like a priority for them when I was in the back of the squad car, and when they knocked on my door and arrested me at 5:30 AM in my underwear for supposedly failing to pay a fine I had actually paid.

I always point to the case of three black teens arrested for the "crime" of waiting for the bus to a basketball scrimmage.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/04/charge...

> Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing

Yes. No one’s ordered police to focus on anyone one kind of crime. Police in America have total discretion to choose which laws they enforce and which they don’t.

In Arizona you can get six months in jail for spitting in a public park, but you don’t see Arizona cops trying to arrest everyone for that. It’s a federal crime to let your dog bark in a National Park but the park police don’t really care. Similarly, there’s nothing forcing cops to focus on marijuana possession.

Is there a reason to believe these drug possession arrests were primarily for marijuana? New Jersey passed a law in mid 2020 to decriminalize it starting January, so I’d be surprised if it were a big police focus in the interval.

focus on marijuana possession

NJ recently legalized weed, so pretty soon those arrests won't be an issue.

Except see Chicago, where its also legal, and arresting black people for marijuana related crimes continues unabated.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-marijuana-le...

”Most arrests involve possessing or attempting to sell amounts over the legal limit of 30 grams.

I mean, they are breaking the new marijuana laws. Is this wrong? If I try and make my own moonshine and sell it I’ll go to jail too.

Will you? It depends on the law, the resources law enforcement dedicates to moonshine enforcement, the attitude toward you of the individual officers, and your personal power - including your ability to afford a good lawyer.

And much of that is strongly correlated with race.

Making your own moonshine can kill people via methanol poisoning. Weed can’t kill you. What’s your point again? Hundreds of thousands of pounds of weed are sold via the black market every year, yet nobody dies[0].

You could also never be caught for moonshining, I know drug dealers who have sold for years without any police contact.

[0] People died from consuming THC carts that were tainted with Vitamin E acetate. Otherwise, weed products have not killed anyone ever.

> People died from consuming THC carts that were tainted with Vitamin E acetate. Otherwise, weed products have not killed anyone ever.

there are also concerns about microbial contamination with weed that is improperly grown/processed. this is exactly why weed ought to be legal but regulated. people engaged in grey market sales are performing an end run around the new safety regulations.

Is microbial contamination of weed more dangerous than contamination of vegetables?

I dunno, probably depends on the microbe? there are also laws that apply to produce growers over a certain (very low) revenue threshold, if that's what you're getting at.

but anyways, that's kinda besides the point. if people are growing stuff for their own consumption, I don't really care how safely they do it. I'm all for people distilling whiskey at their own risk. but if you're going to make money selling stuff to other people, it should be as safe as is reasonably possible. somehow I get the idea that random dudes selling flowers/concentrates/cartridges aren't looking that deeply into their supply chain. people died recently from what should be a fairly harmless plant.

With vegetables they are part of a regulated legal industry that has the ability to perform nation-wide awareness initiatives & recalls if there is some form of contamination.

And events like that also represents a significant financial loss to the producers, which itself acts as a form of accountability above & beyond regulatory penalties that might apply.

Basically, it doesn't matter if microbial contamination of weed isn't any more dangerous than for vegetables because current agricultural products have a remediation process in place to mitigate the danger, a process that doesn't exist for unregulated weed.

> Black and brown people are left out of the windfall and continue to be arrested for selling weed illegally.

I would hazard a guess that if they were instead selling bootlegged booze illegally they would also be arrested. I’m not clear what point you’re trying to make.

I hear you, but:

1) Selling bootleg booze has health/quality risks that selling weed doesn't. You don't see crackdowns on people selling other plants without a license.

2) Legalizing possession and then only giving licenses to well-connected people who are excellent at getting paperwork through the system is, well, a lot better than nothing but doesn't really solve the whole problem.

Why does the business of selling cannabis need to be so accessible?

If someone wants to do it, they can put in the work to 'get the paperwork through the system'; if they just want it to be available to them and their friends, well, now it is, because someone else has put in that work. I don't really see the issue?

(But then, I'm glad to live in a country that hasn't legalised it, so what do I know.)

In most states the licenses are extremely hard to get, it's not a matter of just 'putting in the work'. They're effectively out of reach for your standard weed dealer.

A standard weed dealer is not on the same level as the person that would get the license. A standard dealer is part of a very large organization. They're the equivalent of a person working a cash register. I expect it's extremely hard for someone who starts out working the register at a McDonalds to become a franchise owner.

That's not to say that getting a license isn't harder than starting a fast food franchise, but the metric of difficulty we use here shouldn't be the typical weed dealer.

Probably a better comparison would be an entrepreneur trying to start a liquor store. Even then, it makes sense to me that as society tries to figure out the best way to do this, it goes carefully & with a lot of scrutiny to figure out how to do it right. It's not the sort of thing that should have a "move fast & break things" approach.

Life isn't 'the wire', your standard dealer is a dude with a medium-grade connect and some friends.

As far as 'move fast and break things'.. in one sense, preserving the status quo is conservative, but it is also continually breaking things all the time. Glass, ribs, lives, etc. Compared to the status quo, we could break fewer things.

The issue is that legalization is a new development and the effects of asymmetric enforcement continue to disadvantage racial groups.

Drug laws were not created in a vacuum. They are just one step on a long journey of racially motivated oppression.

Selling is different, I think, than possession because dealers are often not just selling one thing like marijuana, but more dangerous drugs as well. I can understand an arrest in the case of dealing.

> It’s a federal crime to let your dog bark in a National Park but the park police don’t really care.

The regulation (36 CFR § 2.15) says it is prohibited to take pets to any “area closed to the possession of pets”, or to “[allow] a pet to make noise that is unreasonable considering location, time of day or night, impact on park users, and other relevant factors, or that frightens wildlife”. It is entirely reasonable to have this written down, so that it can be enforced if necessary.

The presence of dogs has a significant impact on the behavior of wild animals, and park rangers absolutely do care if you bring your dog to areas of a National Park where it should not be, or if your dog is incessantly barking or howling in areas of the park where it is a nuisance. They will walk up to you and tell you to take your dog directly back to your car, or tell you to shut your dog up or leave.

If you refuse to follow directions / give them a hard time about it, this regulation gives them authority to take further action, including charging a fine etc.

What a disgusting and false comment

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/29/fac...

- Rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black homicide are similar, at around 80% and 90%

- Rates of Black-on-white and white-on-Black homicide also within 8 points

- Police kill Black people at disproportionate rates

I encourage everyone to actually read the linked article and draw your own conclusions.

That article only covers homicide, which is a relatively rare crime. There are many other types of crimes that can warrant a police response and arrest such as property crime, assault, robbery, etc.

In addition, the link provided only covers relative homicide rates, ie what percentage of homicides that occur are committed by member of a given race. It does not address what percentage of individuals in a given demographic that have committed homicide.

These sources from the fbi provide a bit better context:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf

Of course, looking at crime statistics only through the lens of race and ethnicity also misses a lot of context. Poverty rates have a huge impact on crime rates and due to racism, both present and past, poverty rates in the American black demographic are much higher than poverty rates in the American white demographic.

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137

https://www.statista.com/statistics/422520/us-rate-of-violen...

Those stats don't say what you think they say. Those show that white people are no more likely to kill black people than black people are to kill white people. They do not say that black people are no more likely to kill someone.

Large % of black Americans don't trust the criminal justice system and police, I expect this leads to more extrajudicial crime fighting carried out by the community that skews assault/murder rates.

That's not skewed numbers, "extrajudicial crime fighting" that ends with someone dead is correctly categorized as murder. Lack of trust in the system is a problem, but retributive killings are not the solution.

>someone dead is correctly categorized as murder.

Yes but how the data is recorded and interpreted is definitely skewed by a population not being able to rely-on/trust what should be public services.

What is the correct solution for tax payers that are criminalized by the institutions that they are forced to fund?

For decades nobody even believed the black horror stories about police misconduct until body cams/camera phones were widely available and the news was forced to cover them.

> "extrajudicial crime fighting" that ends with someone dead is correctly categorized as murder.

That is no more true than it is without the word “extrajudicial”. It’s homicide, sure, but not all homicide is murder, and not all exteadjudicial crime fighting that results in death meets the definition of murder (or even criminal homicide.)

> Lack of trust in the system is a problem, but retributive killings are not the solution.

Retributive killings (and extradjudicial response generally) aren’t intended as solution to lack of trust in the system, they are solutions to other problems for which the palpable hostility of the system forecloses otherwise superior solutions.

Dismantling the system and replacing it with one that is trustworthy is the solution, but it was one that is actively opposed by those whosd relative position is supported by the features of the system that render it untrustworthy to the population at issue.

I think the article uses an odd way to frame it. To me, a rate should be measured in "people per year" or "people per year normalized by population size". Meanwhile the article is using the word "rate" to refer to what is actually the ratio between two different rates.

The FBI stats seem to back up the above commenter (however one would expect policing biases to be reflected in their statistics). If you compare a random white person[1] and a random black person, the black person is ~5x more likely to be murdered by someone of the same race[2]. Even though the absolute number of murders is about the same, the population sizes are very different, which lines up with one group being disproportionately represented in arrests[3]

1: It's worth noting that the FBI stats lump most Hispanic/Latino people under 'white', I'm not sure if the numbers would look different if you used the colloquial definition of 'white'

2: 0.001% chance of being murdered per year vs a .006% chance

3: If anything I think that's proof of of institutional racism's impact. I'm guessing the disparity is really just showing income inequality

Please do tell me what's "disgusting" about mentioning a statistical fact? Feel free to look at the FBI's uniform crime statistics, among others and see what I mean. Ideological considerations only make progress harder when they blatantly try to ignore realities. As for your claim that police disproportionately kill black people, well, actually it's a bit more complicated than that and doesn't quite negate what I mentioned above about crime stats. Every unjustifiable death of a black individual or anyone at the hands of the police is a tragedy and a probabl crime that needs to be addressed, but here, read these if you like, for additional perspective: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/11/opinion/statistical-p...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-rac...

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