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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have any. But I can’t recall ever seeing or hearing of a white businessman in a suit getting ordered to the ground without cause.

It is fully possible this was random chance. It’s an anecdote, not statistics. But if you want to look at statistics, there are plenty of studies. From the first hit on Google for police stops: a black person in North Carolina is 95% more likely to get pulled over than a white person, over twice as likely to be searched, but less likely to be in possession of contraband or get a ticket.[1]

1: https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/racial_disparities_traffi...

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I'm not claiming that there aren't some people in positions of authority that don't make prejudiced assumptions. What I'm saying is that you can't assume every time something like this happens it's due to race. Statistics without context are often misleading. I read the article and it's hardly objective. I would prefer to see the dataset as well as other demographics and details of who was stopped, the kind of cars they drove and other such detail. Often, people don't analyze very deeply and start with preconceived notions, especially around race. In addition, how many of these cops actually saw the driver before making the stop - especially highway stops.

It is hard to think of any rational to stop a well-dressed person engaging in no shady behavior and immediately escalate to “lie face-down with your hands over your head.”

There are other news reports of similar incidents with black men. If race is not a factor, we would expect to see many more white than black men wrongly treated in this way, as they are a larger share of the population. I’m not aware of similar reports for white men, but would be interested to see them.

Re traffic stops: The idea that you can’t see the race of a driver while driving behind them is ludicrous. Next time you’re on the highway look in the rear view mirror of the car in front of you. You can see the person’s face.

If they’re actually stopping and searching people on some heuristic that just happens to be correlated with race, they should stop - it’s a bad heuristic. They’re searching black drivers at double the rate of whites, but finding contraband at a lower rate.

Clearly something they’re doing is broken, and it manifests as an undo burden on black drivers.

Now ask yourself why black traffic deaths are up a lot more than other races’ the past couple of years.

When you are hitting cars with a radar gun — that’s how most speeding tickets happen — you in fact cannot see the race of the driver.

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