> the stop is equally likely to result in an arrest
A study of California police data found that "when the police search black, Latino and Native American people, they are less likely to find drugs, weapons or other contraband compared to when they search white people."
So do you believe this article should be disregarded, because it uses data that differs from California's and Chicago's?
Or would you instead prefer to only use the parts of this article that support your position, and replace those that don't with data from California and Chicago that does?
"So Blacks are being arrested at the same rate as others in the city, even when they’re not doing anything wrong. So while Blacks represent a hugely disproportionate percentage of police stops, they represent an even greater percentage of specious police stops not related to criminality."
Thank you for catching that. Now if only he'd state how much greater, but apparently he ran out of numbers by this point in the article. But he does give us some clues. Earlier in the article he states:
> City-wide, 24% of residents are Black, while 68% of police bike/ped stops are of Blacks.
So Blacks are 2.8x more likely to be stopped. And:
> they represent an even greater percentage of specious police stops
A quick reading might make one think their stops are more than 2.8x more likely to be specious. But a careful reading would only say that more than 68% of all specious stops are of Blacks. How much more? That's cleverly left to the reader's imagination. But throughout the article he heavily implies the unfairness in stops is 180%:
> An unbiased sample would be clustered around the dotted line: a beat whose population is about 40% Black would have about 40% of its police stops be of Blacks.
So "even greater percentage of specious stops" gives the impression that taking specious stops into account worsens the picture. Of these 3 articles, only the Washington Post bothers to give the ratio of specious stops*, which turns out to be... 21% (averaging all states given in that graph, without correcting for population size).
That's still bias, and I'll freely admit it suggests racism. But it's much less than the 180% racism the article tries to imply. It's 8.6x less - nearly an order of magnitude. That's enough for me to say the article is misleading, and given how strategically it ran out of numbers when it came to comparing specious stops, I'm willing to say it is deliberately misleading.
*If you think the situation in Oakland is much different than the states the Post covered, you're free to work out the numbers from the raw data at https://www.oaklandca.gov/resources/stop-data
A study of California police data found that "when the police search black, Latino and Native American people, they are less likely to find drugs, weapons or other contraband compared to when they search white people."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/02/california-p...
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