I infer from your belittling description of his activities as his "little game" and putting "prove" in skeptical quotes that you don't see the value in this particular piece of journalism and aren't swayed by the evidence presented therein. So while I doubt you can swayed otherwise, I will say that I did find it to be valuable and his experience adds another anecdote on the collective pile of evidence that the cops and prosecutors treat brown and black people vastly different for comparable infractions of the law. And both as a native New Yorker, and moreover as a citizen of the United States, I think this is a very big problems worth paying attention to.
>I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.
Yeah, but you kind of are; in your very next paragraph in fact.
> Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.
We really need to get over the cops-jobs-are-so-dangerous-we-can't-question-anything-they-do mantra. The statistics show, in fact, it isn't nearly as dangerous as they'd like us to believe, and even if it were, it still wouldn't justify the kind of double standards the article was shining a spotlight on.
And for those that, quite frankly, don't really care one way of the other about racial profiling (I imagine because it won't ever affect them), I'd argue that everyone should care when the justice system clearly retaliates against a citizen for exposing problems in it's institutions. It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off.