Exactly. Vice or maybe Vox did a short with an ex-cop who mentioned this concept. He said they made a lot of arrests of black men carrying illegal switch blades. But said that white people carried those illegal blades just as often. Including many police officers that he worked with. But since they mostly patrolled in black neighborhoods, they of course made many more arrests and citations for carrying an illegal blade.
The fact that you find more crime where you patrol more is such a simple concept, it hardly seems necessary to mention. And yet so many people seem to think all this police data is useful.
There is an argument to be made that carrying a knife should not be a crime for anyone, and that we all have a right to carry a knife to protect ourselves or even use a tool.
But lets accept for a moment that reducing the number of knives on the street reduces violence and protects innocent people. If you accept that premise, then you have to say it's beneficial to society that the police remove as many knives as possible: whenever someone gets arrested for a knife violation it's a good thing, regardless of their skin colour.
And given that we have limited enforcement resources, we should focus most in those areas with the most knife crime victims. So while i accept everything you relayed in your post, the proper conclusion would change quite a bit if there are many more victims of knife crime in the black neighbourhoods... I do not know if that is the case, and i'm not implying the answer is more likely one way or the other.
But if in fact more people are getting stabbed or robbed at knife point in black neighbourhoods and you accept that knife laws are good in general, then it's good that such laws are more strictly enforced in that area, to help protect all the innocent people in that area who might fall victim.
And this principle really is colorblind. For instance many people speed in their cars everywhere, but we should more heavily enforce speed limits near high traffic and pedestrian areas and locations where accidents keep happening.
Now, maybe the rate of knife crime is worse in white neighbourhoods, in which case it really is a miscarriage of justice that more black men are getting charged for illegal blades. But I don't think you can say one way or the other without knowing and considering that statistic.
The stats show the police, black or white, are about equally likely to use excessive force against black or white people _per incident_. The problem is that they make contact with black people far more often per-capita. Some of this is being more suspicious of black people, of looking harder at them to find something. This is most convincingly seen with the drug war, where uses of drugs are about equal by race, but black people are stopped, searched, and arrested significantly more often. Some is a larger pre-existing societal problem of where people live. When black people are more likely to live in bad neighborhoods, and police are more likely to have encounters in bad neighborhoods...
The point is that there are two explanations for the difference observed. One is that white police make the correct amount of arrests, and black police make too few. Another is that white police make too many arrests, and black police make the right amount. The paper seems to assume the latter (I only scanned it very quickly).
Perhaps to someone who lives in Chicago, it’s “obvious” which of these is true. But that’s not usually good enough for science: we want to base our claims on evidence, not on our intuitions.
Isn't this just a reiteration of the thing where more black people interact with the police and so there are disproportionately many shootings and people assume racism?
It's not that surprising that the same would apply to police officers, e.g. off-duty black officers live in black neighborhoods and black neighborhoods have a larger police presence or higher crime rates, so there are disproportionately many police shootings and black officers are no less affected than anyone else there.
The article seems to imply this:
> Of the 26 fatal shootings, 5, including Officer Ridley’s case, involved an off-duty officer who came across a crime in progress and moved to help other officers or a civilian, the report found. In five other cases, including the Edwards shooting, an off-duty officer was a crime victim and then tried to make an arrest or to take police action, the report found.
> In all but 2 of the 26 fatal shootings of officers that were examined, the victim was holding a gun and had it “displayed” when he or she was shot, the report found.
Sounds a lot like off-duty white officers may just be less likely to encounter situations in which they draw their weapons.
For an example of this backed up by data, the NYPD stop-and-frisk program has always overwhelmingly focused on black and Latino people (almost 90% of all people stopped in some years), even though they make up only 15% of the population of some of the precincts involved AND white people were more individually likely to actually have an illegal weapon (the supposed reason for the stop-and-frisk program to exist).
"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."
It's possible to come to conclusions about that situation that aren't explained by racism. Correlation is not causation.
If I live in a neighborhood that has a greater incidence of violence, it's reasonable to assume that such a neighborhood might experience more policing. A neighborhood that has more policing in inherently one where you're more likely to be caught afoul of any law, violence not withstanding.
I had friends that lived in the boonies that saw a police officer maybe once a month if that. At the time I lived in the suburbs. I saw a cop maybe once a week. Now that I live in a city I see a police officer roughly once a day or every other day. If you see cops more often, it's more likely that you'll commit a crime in their presence and be incarcerated.
To get a more definitive answer on the magnitude of effect racism has, it would be important to control for other factors so you have a more fair comparison.
For example, if you take people of race X, Y and Z that are all of the same socioeconomic status and live in the same neighborhood, what is the likelihood that each are arrested for non-violent crimes?
The meta point here is that policies can disproportionately affect people with certain characteristics without any intent to disproportionately impact people with certain characteristics.
Racism may very well be the cause of the phenomena you've highlighted, but the data presented thus far is mostly inconclusive and at best suggests an amount of racism that explains far less of the discrepancy than accompanying confounding factors.
The sundry multivariate analysis I've seen (example [0]) attempted generally arrive at the conclusion that yes there is some racism, but that the magnitude of the impact of racism on outcomes is greatly overstated relative to other explanations. That doesn't mean that we still shouldn't address that injustice, but it does mean that there may be lower hanging fruit we might want to address first if our goal is a maximal improvement in justice instead of a modest improvement in justice. Not that we should eventually address all injustices, but resources are finite and it's fair to have a discussion about how to prioritize tackling different injustices and come to agreement on criteria we use to prioritize tackling different injustices.
Basically of that 3x rate, what percent is explained by racism and what is explained by other factors? What are those other factors and what is the contribution factor of each towards the 3x discrepancy.
There are a lot of different questions here, though. This study only addresses one.
There are lots of ways for the system to be racially skewed/biased without being a product of personal bias - so many that I think the focus on "racist police" makes it hard to recognize a lot of easily-provable problems.
Stop-and-frisk is my go-to example of a system that produces bias regardless of the race or biases of the officers involved. In theory, it's an efficient use of limited police resources, it can be implemented race-blind, and it "only catches criminals". There's room to talk about harassment of non-criminals, but at least regarding the people who get arrested its an understandable idea.
In practice, criminality is a product of conviction. Stop-and-frisk mostly catches 'possession' crimes like personal-use drugs and illegal weapons (and since a 3-inch pocketknife is illegal in many cities, we shouldn't mistake this for violent intent). As a result, living in a stop-and-frisk area massively increases your odds of being charged with a low-grade crime - it's not as though carrying marijuana or a Leatherman is rare among un-policed groups. Even if you attempt a crude race-blind implementation, like policing based on neighborhood crime rate, you end up with a vicious cycle where crime rates are high because enforcement is high.
So I think we do a disservice when we limit our discussion and investigation to officer bias. Even when it's not present, it's still easy to build an unequal system.
It is a tactic commonly used as you say. It's also a relevant statistic here, although all race on black violence would have been even better. It still serves to support the point quite clearly that police are not to be feared as much as criminals, even if you're black.
Having said that, a lot of criminal violence happens if you're mixed up in that world or frequenting a bad area as opposed to just random violence. There's something different about police violence where it has that random quality and can affect you anywhere, sometimes just minding your own business.
Plus it's doubly egregious because the police are supposed to protect you, not hurt you. Even before this became an issue, and as a white person, I get nervous with police interactions. You just don't know what kind of mood they're in or how they're interpreting the situation.
> Two strikingly different types of areas experience high police vehicle deployments — 1) dense, higher-income, commercial areas and 2) lower-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic residents. We discuss the implications of these disparities for policing equity and for algorithms trained on policing data.
You can see the history of police in this. Uniformed police depts were founded by merchants wanting to protect their property and socialize the costs.
Prior to uniformed police, we had town watch/night watch/shire reeves . These folks were drawn from the citizenry and pulled a shift watching things, and it was considered quite a nuisance and unglamorous.
Eventually, wealthy folks started paying others to take their shifts on the watch, and a cottage industry emerged. At that time, watches were still loosely organized and without uniform.
In the mid 1800s, two phenomena occurred that molded police. The first was the idea that a uniformed guard would have a preventative effect on crime in wealthier areas (which resulted in early police depts in London and Boston, iirc). And the second was the increasingly structured and bold slave patrols. The two concepts both focused on protecting wealth (at that time, slaves were property just like warehouses and factories).
Over time, the two merged somewhat. Some police departments emerged directly from slave patrols, others never had anything to do with slave patrols and instead focused on protecting docks and the like.
The results of this research saying, "wealth and race seem to be where police are deployed" is a fascinating rhyme to the origins of police.
(Note, I'm deliberately not saying "cause" or "reflection" here - I do not have the data to say why police are deployed this way. I'm just noting the way it rhymes with history.)
Our populace isn't homogeneous though. The areas that police target far more frequently (urban, non-white, lesser educated) are the areas that are least armed. Rural, white men with college degrees are significantly more likely to have guns, yet far less likely to be targeted by police. In most cases, they are the police.
One interpretation of this data is that police are systemically targeting lesser-armed areas where they have a fire-power advantage. Policing "their own people" is taboo and dangerous - they are outgunned. They post-hoc rationalize this racist bullying by pointing to all the crime they found, despite only looking in one place.
> 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."
I think what OP alluded too is not understanding preexisting bias.
"Where should police patrol" ->where crime is highest.
Where is crime highest ->existing reports point to X neighborhood having the most arrests.
Without asking "why" it may ignore That neighborhood is black, so historically racist decisions lead to extra patrolling (but no evidence of increased crime rates) which led to more arrests.
These biases are also present in murder convictions, widely used to benchmark crime rates over time and geography due to the inability of police to ignore dead bodies selectively.
It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is.
Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities.
> Police in oakland find contraband at the same rate regardless of race, but search black drivers 4x more often.
This is remarkable and indicates white drivers are 4x more likely to be carrying contraband than black ones.
> The more white a suspect appears to be the less likely police are to use force. The more black a suspect appears the more likely it is that police will use force.
I can say that as a Brazilian. Even when I was clearly wrong, police was never anything other than extremely polite with me and often dismissed my misbehaviour with a friendly warning, which is the complete opposite of the experience a close friend of mine, who’s somewhat black, had during our teens. In fact, when he and another friend were found to be carrying a small, but illegal, amount of marijuana in their car, the black friend was indicted while the white one faced no charges.
> Another possible explanation is that Blacks are more likely to be criminals, and these stops represent police getting bad guys off the street. [..] City-wide, 68% of no-arrest stops city-wide were of Blacks, the same proportion as arrest stops, which means that Blacks were no more likely to be criminals than others who were stopped.
If, despite being stopped more often, the stop is equally likely to result in an arrest (I'm assuming that's what "no more likely to be criminals than others who were stopped" means, since if they were less likely, the author would surely mention it), doesn't that support this explanation? Of course there are problems with this, since an arrest itself is up to the cop's possibly biased judgement. Which brings me back to
> There is more policing in those beats, they argue, because that’s where the crime’s happening. There’s a logical problem with this argument, because more crime will always be found where more policing is done. But leaving that aside
How quickly he moves on! But there is a solution: look at crimes not affected by over-policing, such as homicide, or look at victimization surveys [1], that don't involve the police. Finding the results is left as an exercise for the reader.
The fact that you find more crime where you patrol more is such a simple concept, it hardly seems necessary to mention. And yet so many people seem to think all this police data is useful.
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