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| A White Woman, Racism, and a Poodle | Login/Join |
Has Achieved Nirvana |
As to the rest, you are making tons of assumptions about the facts. Those will certainly not always be the fact pattern. | |||
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
"Fraught" is a good word. My head almost did explode when you suggested your hypothetical police force deal with... the mentally ill. I'm assuming you probably meant the homeless mentally ill population. Ideally, police officers would not have to deal with the mentally ill. They aren't equipped for it. It was an American tragedy when Reagan relesed the mentally ill into the streets and a vast number of them ended up criminally incarcerated. | |||
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| Does This Avatar Make My Butt Look Big? Minor Deity  |
That's true. I was trying to suggest to you that it is not easy to convince anyone they are demonstrating racism or bias in how they do their job, and they are almost always resistant to and insulted by the very suggestion. There are numerous challenges in preparing a statistical analysis that accounts for the relevant variables, not to mention data limitations. Like, say you want to know whether officers are pulling over a disproportionate number of Latino drivers. Your first challenge will be figuring out which drivers are Latino. Are you going by last name alone? Skin color? Are you sure you can distinguish between a Latino person and someone from Pakistan? How about Latinos who are very pale and look white, and mixed race people? In other words, these things are complex. Rather than try to do a reliable statistical analysis AND convince deputies that they are being biased AND figure out how on earth they could learned not to be biased, it might just be easier to decide we don't care enough about turn signal violations to bother. | |||
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
This seems relevant to the turn signal discussion. Tim Scott is black, a Republican, and a U.S. Senator. From Twitter: "Tim Scott says in the past year he was pulled over and given a warning for *not turning on his turn signal early enough* on a turn. Once was pulled over 7 times in a year." | |||
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| Does This Avatar Make My Butt Look Big? Minor Deity |
Ticky tack harassment unrelated to public safety. | |||
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana  |
There are enough inane laws on the books that pretty much any cop can pull over pretty much any driver at any time. And, as we've seen and heard, if they can't find anything obvious, they'll make something up. A distant relative was once driving his ratty old van and got pulled over on the basis that "one of his mudflaps was half-missing".
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
I don't want to assume ... is your distant relative white? All of which goes to prove, tell them not to enforce turn signals, they'll just enforce something else. The classic is "you were driving erratically". Which is why, hard as it may be, the only way to ensure that they aren't engaging in racial bias is to audit them, through dash cam footage of their stops. True, you won't always know the race of the person they are stopping, but hopefully you'll see what the cop saw, and, if it's hard for you to know, it's hard for them to know, too. Or, we could just say don't enforce turn signal laws, and declare the problem solved, even though we know they'll just stop people for something else. | |||
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| Never Offline |
I strongly welcome any attempt to gather more data about law enforcement racism. However I suspect those numbers will not be generated. This alternate method of proof of systemic racism, the one that involves viral anecdote culled from millions of arrests, is doing very well without the risk of numbers which might not align with it. | |||
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana |
Yes, but he was a scrawny unwashed hick living in rural Oregon. An area where an old beat up van in black spray paint is probably a rolling meth lab. All his lights worked, his tabs were current, he wasn't driving erratically or too fast or too slowly. But a cop really really really wanted to pull him over and see what was in the back of the van. If they want to hassle you, they will.
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| czarina Has Achieved Nirvana  |
i think vans must be a common target. when i drove vans it seems like i was stopped a lot more. especially at the canadian border i had to take everything out of the van and put it back again. happened twice.
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| Does This Avatar Make My Butt Look Big? Minor Deity |
The idea is you strip officers of the right to make any discretionary stops that do not have a strong connection to public safety. Off the top of my head, that would include: Equipment violations Turn signal Failure to maintain lane Seat belt These are the offenses that officers use to get into cars, and they do this only with people of color and poor people. There are probably a lot Of others that aren’t occurring to me after a glass of wine. | |||
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| Does This Avatar Make My Butt Look Big? Minor Deity |
There are even times when people are stopped for an expired drivers license or a warrant. How can an officer know someone’s license is expired before they pull them over? Cause the person was pulled over for a tricky tack reason that even the cop didn’t want to use as the basis for a citation. I am so glad people are paying attention. Kudos to all of you. | |||
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
You've ignored the point, so let me say it again. If an officer wants to stop someone, they will simply say "they were driving erratically." So, taking away their opportunity to stop someone for a turn signal violation may make you feel better, but it won't actually accomplish anything ... unless you do what I suggest, and audit their dash cams. (And not just for the stops, but for the instances in which they chose not to make a stop.) If you want to stop racist traffic stops, you'll need to do something that actually works, not something that feeds your preconception but doesn't actually have any positive real-world effect. | |||
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| Does This Avatar Make My Butt Look Big? Minor Deity |
Hey, you're the expert! | |||
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
I think you need to do what Camden did and what Minneapolis says they are going to do. Disband the entire corrupt enterprise and start over. Not perfect but it seems to work.
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