More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A recent study by a team of Stanford psychologists and computer scientists analyzed audio transcripts taken from police body cameras in Oakland California in April 2014. Looking at the language used in the interactions, and comparing how the officers interacted with black and white drivers, this study of 981 traffic stops and over 36,000 utterances found that officers used more respectful language when interacting with white drivers: they were more likely to refer to them by their last names rather than by their first name or by a nickname, more likely to say “please,” less likely to use
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As Tom Tyler, Jonathan Jackson, and Avital Mentovich (2015) describe it, the police moved from working on crimes in progress, or on solving crimes that had previously occurred, to a proactive strategy of preventive measures aimed at deterring future crimes. This more proactive approach to policing has led to more frequent police-initiated nonvoluntary public contacts with the legal system, both through increased stop, question, and frisk activities and via zero-tolerance policies that bring more people within the criminal justice system through arrests, court appearances, and even time in
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the “new” model of policing seeks to stop the crime in the first place.
Minority report-ish.
Especially problematic is that the “risk-management” model is applied unevenly across racial lines;
to a considerable extent white neighborhoods still enjoy the old, community-based style of policing, while minority neighborhoods receive more intense scrutiny.
Data???
They developed “drug courier profiles” and stopped hundreds or thousands of drivers, often fitting a particular demographic profile, in a needle-in-a-haystack strategy of finding a small number with significant contraband.
Curious what the drug courier profiles are -- would love references on this
He found them by the hundreds in the thick volumes of the Florida vehicle code: rarely enforced laws against driving with burned-out license plate lights, out-of-kilter headlights, obscured tags, and windshield cracks. State codes bulge with such niggling prohibitions, some dating from the days of the horseless carriage. “‘The vehicle code gives me fifteen hundred reasons to pull you over,’ one CHP [California Highway Patrol] officer told me.”
Effectively, the Court permitted the use of routine traffic stops for targeted criminal investigations. The war on crime was the justification for these actions.
Allows discrimination.
To those readers who are not lawyers, the 1968 movement from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion” may not appear to be an important distinction, but suspicion is a very low standard as compared to probable cause.
For an officer to follow a driver until that driver commits a traffic infraction is legally permissible, but many would question whether it is fair.
One of our conclusions in this book is that the ordinary citizens’ understanding of fairness is important to incorporate. This, not the legal details, determines how people think about and respond to disproportionate police scrutiny. It may be legal, but it is not fair.
Thus, millions of Americans have been targeted for more intensive police attention outside of the gaze or knowledge of most middle-class whites. And it has not been trivial at all. It has been humiliating, frustrating, and unfair. Beyond all that, it has been ineffective.
When Philando Castile was shot and killed in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2016 after a routine traffic stop, he had been pulled over at least forty-six times from the time he learned to drive until his death fourteen years later; he had had various suspensions of his license and fines for such violations as driving without a license or not having valid insurance.
In contrast, poverty keeps many from paying the initial fine, leading to accumulating court sanctions, fees, and penalties.
A particularly egregious finding of the Ferguson report was the degree to which the city had come to use court fees as a source of municipal revenue. The city relied on its poorest residents for traffic fines, court fees, and arrests because all of these were income-generating activities for the city. In effect, the city was financed through selective and targeted enforcement of various laws that did little to make people safer, but which imposed a severe burden on those least able to bear it (see US DOJ 2015).
In other words, whereas the typical middle-class American might be slightly bothered by a traffic stop, they would likely recognize it as a momentary inconvenience with very little chance of long-lasting consequence. For others, those more commonly targeted with more aggressive policing, the calculus is entirely different.
Outcome not the same, disparity exists among color and whatnot.
Further, only about half of those contraband hits lead to arrest, which is not surprising because when we look at the amounts of contraband found, it is typically that associated with a user, not a distributor, of the item in question.
What does typical mean?
Our sense is close to Glaser’s in that the US Constitution guarantees equal protection of the law without regard to race, ethnicity, and other demographic features. Racial differences are clear in many areas of life, but race itself should not be the basis (or even a basis) of decisions by the police which generate those differences: behavior should.
The police perspective that profiling only occurs if race is the “sole” determinant of a decision is so restrictive that it would virtually never come into play.
Intersectionality
If poverty, housing, job, educational and health-care opportunities are systematically different across groups, then we certainly cannot expect the police to solve those problems, and it may be those larger problems which are generating differences in the propensity to be involved in crime. The police simply come to reflect these social pathologies.
Wow.
Perhaps, due to implicit bias shared by most Americans, a large share of officers tends to treat black drivers just slightly more aggressively than white drivers. Consider the recent study in Oakland, California finding subtle differences in how officers spoke to white and black citizens they encountered (Voigt et al. 2017). These subtle but system-wide differences could be due to inaccurate statistical assumptions or over-wrought stereotypes.
While i sway latter here, i appreciate the non objective view
Note that institutional practices such as differential policing in different neighborhoods could have a significant racial impact, but might be an inadvertent, unintentional corollary or consequence of policing decisions that were made for other
Explicit prejudice is a set of feelings about others that are consciously accessible, seemingly controllable, and self-reported. Racism based on explicit prejudice is referred to as old-fashioned or overt racism. Implicit prejudice may or may not be consciously accessible, and may be difficult or impossible to control. Implicit prejudice is believed to be a consequence of years of exposure to associations in the environment, it tends to be impervious to conscious control, and it is relatively stable. Racism based on implicit prejudice has various names: subtle, covert, modern, ambivalent, or
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People from another group are wrongly assumed to be “all the same,” that is, out-group homogeneity is a common assumption (see Anderson 2010, 22–81).
Monolithic black man
In fact, there are reasons to believe that the circumstances governing traffic stops, particularly, the high-volume nature of modern police patrolling tactics, encourage officers to act upon subtle biases.
Really good and emphasizes the importance of empathy
He also notes: “Reasonable people can and do disagree over whether racial profiling is legal, fair, ethical, and effective” (3). He cites US government (Bureau of Justice Statistics) data projecting that as of 2003, 5.9 percent of white boys born will serve time in prison as compared to 17.2 for Latinos and 32.2 percent for blacks (6).
Where is it now?
He cites a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study noting the rates at which young men reported having carried a gun in the past thirty days: 17.2 for blacks, 18.2 for whites, and 18.5 for Hispanics. But blacks were three times as likely to be arrested on weapons charges as compared to whites (Glaser
The problem comes in when particular elements of the “actuarial” profile are over-emphasized, particularly the demographic elements.
Ooh. I wonder if this is applicable at the hotline
But, Glaser notes, if the deterrence argument is to be introduced, it has to work both ways: while one group recognizes it is under increased surveillance, another group sees the police moving away – “reverse deterrence.” If the police are looking disproportionately for criminals in one neighborhood, or among one demographic group, then individuals with criminal tendencies who are immune to that targeting may decide to commit more crime.
Indeed, the very localized and place-based patterns of policing are strong possible explanations of racial difference. With housing substantially segregated by race (see Sharkey 2013), a simple cause of racial difference in contact with the police could simply be that the police patrol more intensively on one side of town than the other. Naturally, the police go where the crime is, whether by design or by responding to calls for service. And this may bring them into contact with minorities with greater frequency than whites.
“There is no logic to spending a million dollars a year to incarcerate people from one block in Brooklyn – over half for non-violent drug offenses – and return them, on average, in less than three years stigmatized, unskilled, and untrained to the same unchanged block” (2003, 2). Tucker and Cadora suggest that a better use of incarceration funds would be to invest in jobs, economic vitality, health care, and social services in those neighborhoods hardest hit by crime.
In a neighborhood where police surveillance is a daily occurrence, where large percentages of the young male population are under judicial supervision – on parole or subject to an outstanding warrant (often for an unpaid court fee) – many social pathologies develop. Injured individuals avoid the hospital, fathers avoid their children’s schools, people cannot keep regular hours and so cannot work even if they find a job, as all these things create opportunities to be found by the police.
Thus, the great paradox of a highly punitive approach to crime control is that it winds up criminalizing so much of daily life as to foster widespread illegality as people work to circumvent it. Intensive policing and the crime it intends to control become mutually reinforcing. The extent to which crime elicits harsh policing, or policing itself contributes to a climate of violence and illegality, becomes impossible to sort out.
When the police interact with citizens rarely, respectfully, and lightly, we can expect little effect on citizen feelings of belonging. But when the interactions are common, aggressive, and seemingly unjustified, then the citizen so treated may well develop an angry response. Given that traffic stops are the most common type of encounter that Americans have with the police, we believe it is an important place to start. What lessons are different demographic groups being taught?
Starting point
We measure black political empowerment as a combination of three factors: the black shares of the population, the voting population, and the elected officials. These three factors are of course highly interconnected, so we treat them as one.
How are they interconnected
The tarnish has been real, as very few young men of color have escaped the knowledge that they could be pulled over for a pretext, potentially subjected to search, and possibly arrested while their white equivalent on the other side of town would not have to fear these events.
We should note at the outset that while North Carolina was at the forefront of passage of such a law and is a national leader in making the resulting database publicly available with minimal administrative hurdles, it has never provided any official analysis of the traffic statistics collected under the law.
Black, Hispanic, white, male, female, young, and older drivers face dramatically different odds of search and arrest following routine traffic stops. Black and Hispanic males are roughly twice as likely to be searched as white males.
We conducted a series of keyword searches of major national newspapers for different combinations of terms reflecting racial profiling and found an unmistakable pattern each time.
What are the terms?
This can give an idea of the “legislative intent” – clearly, legislators expected that the law would either absolve the State Highway Patrol (SHP) and other agencies from accusations of profiling, or provide clear evidence that it was happening.
The goal of the bill: To assure black motorists, especially young black men, that they aren’t being stopped more frequently than other drivers. “This happens,” Cunningham said. “But even if it doesn’t, even if people think there’s a problem, we need to deal with that”
It is perhaps surprising, then, that no reports have ever been issued (see Mance 2012, fn. 3). The state has never publicly taken a position on whether these mountains of data include any indications that might cause concern. Neither has the state publicly concluded that police agencies refrain from racial profiling. State officials simply have not addressed the question.
If Sen. Ballance focused the law initially on the SHP as a compromise, he was certainly right to seek to expand it to other agencies. The SHP itself proves to have relatively low racial disparities compared to other agencies. This is reassuring as it accounts for approximately half of all traffic stops in the state.
We are careful throughout the book to make clear that we are not studying bias; we are studying racial difference.
But logically so then some other communities should see more white commuters, causing the statewide numbers to cancel out, with some showing inaccuracies in one direction and others in the opposite direction. As we will show, this is not what the data reveal.
