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Comment by cantrevealname | Hacker News Reader

> fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls

As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations. The theory being that someone who doesn't care about laws against serious acts cares even less about traffic laws.

Timothy McVeigh was caught because he was stopped for driving without a license plate on his car. Law enforcement perhaps would never have solved one of the biggest crimes in U.S. history if the police had not made a minor traffic stop.

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The issue with traffic stops, particularly "random" ones instead of "road is cordoned off, and every vehicle coming along is checked" checkpoints, is that they tend to be very selective in enforcement.

Basically, if you look somewhat rich (e.g. in a suit) or in trades clothings, and your car isn't too shabby you won't get stopped randomly.

Someone driving a beater though because that's all they can afford? Perfect target for "random" traffic spots.

Or, as is far more often the case, they find someone of colour (usually Black) driving a car that fits some racially biased‡ preconceived notion (e.g., the only way a Black man could be driving this car is either (a) they are a drug dealer because they’ve got lots of cash or (b) they’ve stolen it).

‡ While an unfortunately large number of police officers in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are outright racist, not all are. However, most do pattern matching according to what they’ve been trained as "indicators of criminality", and most of those patterns have their basis in systemic racism that have no connection to real criminality. As I pointed out on a wholly separate discussion the other day, the most common and largest form of theft — and the one least prosecuted — is wage theft by white collar workers.

This is provably the case.

https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...

Daytime, black drivers get disproportionately pulled over. Nighttime, same rate as others. Daylight savings time switch used to eliminate other variables in a really elegant way.

This data suggests traffic stops are more often pretext stops rather than in response to dangerous driving

New Jersey Turnpike seems to suggest the opposite. That different groups break traffic rules at different rates, and given the amount of speeding the police under enforced black speeding tickets

Got a cite you'd like to share? The only one I can see is a 20 year study that the DOJ asked not be released due to methodology problems.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-racial-profiling-my... It is a two decade old article. Heather MacDonald has been harping on it for that long

> However, most do pattern matching according to what they’ve been trained as "indicators of criminality", and most of those patterns have their basis in systemic racism that have no connection to real criminality.

Somewhat going off topic here but I'm curious: do you think in the USA African Americans have the same real rate of serious criminality (such as murder, not speeding) as other groups once you adjust for poverty?

I don’t have time to search to show my work (nor do I care to do so), but my understanding of the data is that suggests the same or lower.

The real incidence rate is hard to tease out because of the presumption of criminality baked into the American system — we know, for example, that Blacks in America are on average charged more frequently, convicted more frequently, and imprisoned for longer than any other group. White defendants are more likely to be offered diversion programs or be offered leniency, even if they are from the same economic circumstances.

In Canada, that presumption of criminality is placed on Indigenous peoples and the imbalances between groups on charges, convictions, and imprisons are similarly lopsided as those for Black Americans.

> The real incidence rate is hard to tease out because of the presumption of criminality baked into the American system

I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be. We have multiple independent sources collecting this data. The FBI collects racial data on perpetrators and victims, and multiple national surveys ask victims of crimes about the demographics of the perpetrator. The numbers from all these independent sources are fairly consistent.

Murders are especially easy to get reliable numbers on because there's a body. We know black people are murdered at dramatically higher rates than any other race and that most murder is intraracial. The reported racial crime statistics are accurate unless we believe that white people are sneaking into inner city majority black areas to murder black people undetected in massive numbers and the FBI is conspiring with multiple independent data collection groups to cover it up.

As someone who likes to have a "beater" vehicle for work/puttering, this is shockingly noticeable.

I've gotten pulled over multiple times in a crappy old pickup, while never being pulled over in a slightly less crappy, slightly less old Lexus that I drove far more regularly and far more... spiritedly.

> Basically, if you look somewhat rich (e.g. in a suit) or in trades clothings, and your car isn't too shabby you won't get stopped randomly.

Might this make sense if what they're looking for are outstanding warrants or drugs?

I could see those two groups having a lower likelihood of those two things.

In high school I had a friend who received a pretty cheap car as a gift from his grandmother. I was with him when we were stopped and essentially harassed for some 30 minutes. We all knew it was the car and the disparity to the nicer neighborhood we were in.

His parents knew it too. He literally never once drove the car again and got rid of it soon after. They continued to let him drive their cars until college.

> As a counterargument, I read somewhere that the number one way that serious criminals are caught is due to motor vehicle violations.

Seems entirely consistent to me. If traffic stops are (nearly) the only thing police do, that is the only way police will find criminals. It doesn't mean it's a good way.

Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well.

Stop and frisk reduced crime as well.

It’s like the fact that the greater the number of people in jail, the lower the crime rate. It’s true because a certain percentage of people commit crimes and if they’re in jail, they won’t.

That doesn’t mean we should go these things. We need to evaluate net impact. Or just not do things that are wrong even if they have utilitarian benefit.

> Yes of course if you stop lots of people you will find criminals. If you go door to door you will as well.

"papers, please"

Counterpoint: possible sampling bias because traffic stops are one of the most common pretexts for police searches.

That is like saying 'we need to cure heart attacks because most people die of heart attacks'. Something has to kill you -- when your heart stops that's a heart attack.

Someone had to catch McVeigh -- it just so happened it was cop that pulled him over.

If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive 'catch the offenders (if it is convenient, like, you already stopped them)' maybe McVeigh wouldn't have wanted to blow up a Federal building because the FBI was involved in a string of mis-advised deadly interactions where they shot first and asked questions later (Waco, Ruby Ridge -- this is what McVeigh was specifically pissed about).

>If we focused resources on the community instead of punitive [...]

Yeah, but the problem with this approach is that the benefits are uncertain and take forever to materialize. Going back to the example of heart attacks, we might be able to prevent them if only we convinced people to have healthy diets and exercise, but doing so is fiendishly hard, so we end up with the imperfect solutions of open heart surgery and statins.

My point about heart attacks is that everyone dies and something has to kill you if you don't die of getting hit by a bus, or cancer or whatever. Cause of death: 'old' is not a thing. So healthy diets won't prevent heart attacks unless you can prevent death from old age.

I don't get it, is your claim that we shouldn't engage in public health interventions until we solve the problem of aging once and for all? I don't think anyone is under the illusion that curing heart attacks will make people live forever. Sure, someone who didn't die of a heart attack at 75 or whatever might have lived until 85 and died from dementia, but living 10 extra years is an improvement that we shouldn't pass up.

I don't think you understand what I am saying. When a person gets old and then has an acute health problem they have to go to the hospital for, they stay there until they die because you can't just keep zapping people with paddles and intubating them -- they die eventually. The doctor has to write a cause of death and it says whatever medical name for 'heart stopped' and 'lack of oxygen to brain' is. Pouring money into medical research to prevent those two things is not going to stop people from dying of old age. You have to die from --something-- and criminals have to get caught --somehow--. Saying 'they get caught driving so we should pull over more people' is silly because pulling people over has nothing to do with it, just like the heart attack isn't what kills old people.

Using racially biased traffic stops is worse than any poster here has yet to fully explore. Biased systems of laws and policing were used to re-enslave black people after emancipation, feeding them into the convict leasing system. That lasted well into the 20th century, and the ghost of that system haunts US policing and incarceration.

Racism in laws and law enforcement is intentional and by design.

It's like racially biased gun laws. The origin of gun control is southern Democrats trying to keep guns out of emancipated blacks after Republican Lincoln ended slavery

That needs context: Those southern democrats were recruited into the Republican party with the inception of Nixon's "southern strategy." That started in the early 1970's. They are now the backbone of the MAGA movement.

The entire Southern Strategy narrative just seems like an oversimplification. Suggesting that at one point the values of the republican and democratic party flipped. But that doesn't make any sense. Like you would have low information voters who had no idea the Republicans went from being pro war to anti war. Or that Democrats went from pro guns to anti guns. Instead it seems like the Democrats have been around since Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson, and that Republicans have existed since Abraham Lincoln. Although Lincoln's Republicans took up the second party slot to the Democrats, the republican party didn't take over the politics and ideology of the Whigs who they replaced.

Yet in all the tv/movies (breaking bad coming to mind) they are careful about this. Taillights working, don’t speed etc.

“Break only one law at a time”

Ocean's 11 would be a pretty bad movie if the crew got caught on outstanding warrants and/or parole violations because they were going 50 in a school zone.

Got to say, you don't often see someone making the argument "but it works like that in the movies".

Makes me wonder if writers have an obligation to ensure what they right is realistic to prevent the masses from being mislead...

Yes, smart criminals don't get caught (or don't get easily caught, ie. after much effort and resources). They know that breaking the law in one hand can lead to a domino effect. I mean, look at Gus Fring's enterprise. Turns out, the entire chicken nugget industry was a front. They're probably the exception to the rule though.

Every few years a new video makes the rounds where a guy gets pulled over for driving exactly the speed limit or slightly under it, because apparently following all the laws is also suspicious. All behavior is "suspicious", so there's no true way around that pretext for a stop.

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