Hacker News

points by Windchaser 2 days ago | 0 comments

Yeah, I remember reading that a study found that white and black youth used marijuana at roughly equal rates, but black youth were about 4x as likely to be arrested for it. Due to differences in the # of stops, then differences in searches, then differences in actual arrests, with white youth getting more lenient treatment at each step.

And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"

[–] ToucanLoucan 2 days ago

And to be clear, I was IN this. We got busted for pot YEARS ago, but again, we're white, middle class. We confirmed what we took, we confirmed it was all gone, and I never saw so much as a fine. Cops asked to look around my house, I said sure thing help yourselves, they looked through maybe 1/3 of my home, and then left. And I've never heard a thing about it since then.

The fact that this is the same kind of life event that can literally, without any hyperbole, cost a black person their life, fucks with me sometimes.

[–] the_doctah 2 days ago

Now do firearm related crimes.

Anecdotes fall apart when we don't cherry-pick.

[–] Windchaser 2 days ago

Ancedotes are personal stories, like "oh, my dad was down at the post office the other day, and he saw..."

This is not a personal story, not an anecdote. I'm reporting on a study that looked at incarceration rates for drug use vs the drug use itself.

Why is that important? Because the study itself is solid, and it shows that there is some sort of bias between police/policing and african-american communities.

Sure, maybe that bias doesn't show up in other areas like firearm-related crimes. Or: maybe it does, and we haven't yet figured out how. Or, maybe it plays an indirect role, further eroding the relationship between the AA communities and the police, gradually building up a mutual dynamic that subjects black people to an unhealthy chronic level of stress and despair and harassment while also "justifying" the prejudicial activities of the cops.

There are whole books written about this. But at a minimum, I can't imagine just brushing over a 4x higher arrest rate for the same level of crime. That's pretty damn big.

[–] the_doctah 2 days ago

You're literally just describing a chicken-and-egg problem. Curious what your brain thinks is the reason African-American communities are policed more intensely. Surely every police organization in the United States is just racist.

[–] scheme271 2 days ago

So there is data on some policing in NYC. Because the police need to record stop and frisk encounters, it turns out that black populations get stopped and searched at 2-3 times the rate that other racial groups get stopped and frisked (whites got 10% of the encounters despite being something like 33% of the pop and black+latinos got 90% of the encounters). And it's not like the frisks turned up anything, with the vast majority (90%) of the frisks finding nothing. I believe there's similar data for police in other cities.

At the very least, this suggests that police in NYC and probably elsewhere were disproportionately singling out Black (and Latinos) for intrusive searches without evidence and on a pretextual basis.

[–] ToucanLoucan 2 days ago

I mean their officers keep getting caught posting racist shit, participating in racist chats, police unions regularly donate to republican politicians, and they murder black people so often that the phrase “driving/walking while black” is common slang for when the aforementioned African Americans get gunned down for every day misdemeanors.

So, every police institution? I’m sure there are exceptions, but there’s enough of a preponderance to safely assume it and the data bears that out.

[–] yieldcrv 2 days ago

it's all related

most of the violent crimes are from people with prior crimes, but the prior crimes themselves weren't necessarily violent, but just enough to marginalize that person from ability to participate in society with steady jobs

such as the possession of now-legalized substances, and the possession stop itself was based on flimsy pretexts that could have been fought, but it made more sense to take a plea-deal for that person or they were not aware of how to not engage with police and damned themselves without a lawyer present