The Fining of Black America
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
If you've already criminalized so much of daily life that there's an essentially unlimited amount of "criminals" to go out and fine whenever you need a little extra cash, you've ceased to be "law enforcement" at all and have simply implemented a brutally regressive tax scheme, Sheriff of Nottingham style.
A car is a multiton killing machine if used improperly. Speeding is substantially more dangerous than jaywalking, and it moves the risk to other people.
If the speed limits were raised to a level where speeders were genuinely unsafe without a major attitude adjustment among drivers, the roads would be considerably more dangerous.
1) most people actually drive slightly below the limit, since vast majority of cars are not comfortable cruisers at 90mph, sure you can get to 90mph in your 1.4 Polo but it will be very loud inside and uncomfortable.
2) Even less people drive significantly above the speed limit, so the police does not see patrolling motorways as worth their time - even if you were doing an otherwise crazy 120mph(200kmh) the largest ticket they could give you would be like ~$100 and a few points on your licence(you need 21 to lose it). So it's not worth their time.
As a result, when I drive there I don't have to worry about constantly being 5-10mph over the limit, since 90mph is fast enough. Setting the speed limit on a 4-5 lane highway to 50mph like in some places in the States is just asking for trouble,and I'm sure it's an excellent source of revenue for the local law enforcement.
> Poland has one of the highest death rates for traffic accidents in the European Union, with 93 deaths per million persons per year, compared with the EU average of 55.
EDIT: hang on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year
Poland: 10.3
US: 10.6
The non-motorway roads may be death traps.
I have -never- seen a police officer pull someone over for violating this law.
I also agree with the sibling poster that points out that the speed limits on roadways seem low.
I know of a few residential areas where the roads are improperly not arterial (but should be due to traffic volume) leading to lower speed limits than they would otherwise appear to support.
Highways should also have condition based speed limits; but really I'd prefer the HOV lanes are replaced with 'self driving car' lanes that have a speed limit in law, but based on the evaluation of the automated vehicles. Probably carpools should be given a kick-back based on occupancy volume.
Actually driving the speed limit would be quite dangerous - the speed differential between lanes, coupled with the impetus for those behind you to do a lot of lane-changing, is not pleasant.
If we genuinely believed the speed limits mattered, we could enforce them uniformly against everyone using ANPR cameras and timestamps. Instead, squad cars pick a few random unlucky souls (out of the hundreds of people going roughly the same speed in their vicinity) to be slapped with a fine.
They are more likely to do this at the end of the month, when ticket quotas are due. In some random jurisdictions you may pass through on a road trip, they are more likely to ticket travelers passing through, who aren't voting on the next sheriff. And yes, in some cases they are more likely to pick you if you're black (particularly if also driving a nice car).
I'm not objecting to ticketing of drivers who are going substantially faster than traffic, weaving through lanes, etc. I am objecting to the fact that the normal daily driving behavior required to not cause an accident (i.e. go with the flow, 10-15mph over the speed limit) is criminal and enforcement is "random" with some opportunity for bias against people the local cops don't like.
In a world of self-driving cars, maybe speeding will be less like a fine and more like a toll. So if you want to go over the speed limit, you pay a toll to the local municipality for the right to do so.
- Nobody really expects the cops to sweep the dorms at NYU for marijuana, even though this would probably turn up a ton of arrests. Smoking a joint while looking like a minority and being in a minority part of town carries a much higher probability of being arrested.
- Crossing the street against the light at or around the front of MIT doesn't get you cited for jaywalking, ever.
- All of New York City has (had?) a prohibition on open containers of alcohol. This prohibition is generally unenforced in non-minority areas.
- Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men.
Funny you should bring that up, but not only it's true, there's some considerable history there. Few people are aware of it these days, but historically, South was actually very restrictive with respect to right to carry arms - most of it prohibited _all_ forms of carrying outright (look at this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Rtc.gif - and note where the red color is concentrated in mid-80s).
These laws mostly date to the post-Reconstruction era, and during Jim Crow (and later, but that's when it was most prominent) were effectively enforced or not enforced on the basis of race, and, to some extent, political affiliation (say, if you're a white dude who's travelling around the state to help blacks register in the 50s).
Nor for dark-skinned men in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
While Georgia allows open carry of long-guns without a permit, white people walking around with AR-15 rifles would probably be stopped and questioned by the police regardless.
Open carry of handguns, and concealed carry of any weapon, in Georgia is only legal with a Georgia Weapons Carry License, which is only obtained after a background check and review by a local probate judge.
While someone of darker complexion might run into trouble with certain racists on certain police forces, I don't think it's fair to damn the whole state's laws based on that. So called "Terry" stops are not allowed, no matter what color someone's skin is.
Let's assume that's correct. It doesn't address the point that every citizen could not be expected to be afforded this treatment. A group of dark-skinned men who carry long guns into a store are likely to spend some time on the pavement, or worse. (It's a very big subject so I won't post citations, but there have been ample publications indicating that unarmed people of color are killed by police at a higher rate than white people. That's a long way from questioning.)
The right to carry long guns in public places is created by legislation that is dependent on our understanding that the police can figure out who should not be allowed to enjoy this right. If our shared understanding was that the outcome of these laws would be vast numbers of swarthy men carrying AR-15s in all public places, an armed minority teenager behind us at every ATM, our public debate around guns would be very different.
> So called "Terry" stops are not allowed, no matter what color someone's skin is.
If you believe this is how the law is actually enforced in America, you really should spend more time with people outside your current circle of acquaintances. If you don't believe that this is how our laws are currently enforced, then you are in agreement with my post.
I'd argue that this statement would stand, even without the racial qualifiers. I don't think I've seen an AR-15 outside of a shooting range or gun show. If "vast numbers" of people felt the need to carry them in all public places, I think I'd look for somewhere else to be, where I could feel safe without being armed.
That's the beauty of open-carry, you don't have to be armed because everyone around you is! /half-ironicly, half-pointedly
In a large group of people, there's also a good chance that a percentage of them wouldn't know what they're doing and just kill whatever kind of safety benefit everyone else imagines they've got.
I think groups might be less likely to stir trouble than a single individual, for a variety of reasons. But I could be wrong, it would depend largely on the responding officers, I imagine. If the citizens are being peaceful and do not act in threatening ways, I would not expect trouble.
* technically it is, but the fine was set to $1 many years ago in order to effectively make it legal
The point is that behavior is only effectively legal when it's actually legal and not only made so by convention, because relying on convention leads to selective prosecution.
I wonder whether removing the decision making from the police, or at least attempting to, helps in getting laws more evenly enforced.
We've decided to create special jurisdictions where certain laws are ignored for certain people. Campus Police are basically this practice codified into law and organization. Your student ID is a pass that gives you immunity from prosecution from certain violations.
Genuine question as I don't know. But essentially laws like that become tools with which law enforcement can excercise malice toward individuals if they please.
I am reminded of a story of a man out on probation, who used a knife for his work. He had been out for a while, normally the knife was concealed as it's required to be. But it was visible when he was stopped on his way home from work. The state of New York has pretty strict laws at their disposal, and they chose to use them in this case, and the man who had been getting his life back together was thrown back in jail over what is essentially a technicality.
Laws that seem harmless and unenforced should be removed, less they be abused. Just like it is best to remove a deprecated function when it's no longer in use, lest it become a risk.
The issue was the knife itself being illegal in New York -- a knife that could be bought at almost any hardware or art supply store in the city. Concealed or not, the guy was violating a poorly written law meant to criminalize switchblades in the mid 20th century. But cops had been using it to arrest African American men if they saw the telltale pocket clip while stopping them for something else.
They classified this certain kind of utility knife as a "gravity knife", even though it wasn't. The law outlaws knives opened with a flick of the wrist, and it took a cop five tries to flick one open in court once because they aren't designed to be opened that way. But that one time was all it took.
To bring this back to the original question: in a just world, an arrest for owning one of these knives -- again, one that you could buy at any hardware store shouldn't violate someone's probation. Neither should jaywalking, something I do countless times a day.
Its a long read but worth it.
The original point is still valid, it was just a bad example. No one gets cited for jaywalking here.
The point is they enforce whatever, whenever. There are far too many laws and they are very unevenly enforced.
Now that the local constable has a legal reason to stop and detain due to the criminal act of jay-walking, a round of questioning and a search for other violations may begin in earnest. It's part of the shakedown machine.
In the same vein, pedestrians in the city of Providence have the right of way at all crosswalks unless a walk signal is present, in which case the jaywalking rule above applies.
Again, the point of TFA was that minor ordinances are selectively applied ("generally"). What you say is true only in some neighborhoods. But in neighborhoods where the police are looking for a pretext to stop someone, jaywalking ordinances are a handy tool.
Selective enforcement of the law has been written about quite frequently, and is a well-studied phenomenon. As such, I won't try to rehash the body of work, but here's an example from NYC I found in a few seconds:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/the-nypd-enforces-jaywalkin...
"A look at the precincts that report comparatively significant numbers of jaywalking citations over the past few years reveals a pattern: the South Bronx, Harlem, north Brooklyn."
(TL;DR; those areas were not selected due to particularly high accident fatality rates.)
I'm not sure about jaywalking citation stats in Boston and Providence, but random stops have been a part of life in poorer neighborhoods in both cities.
"Nobody really expects the cops to sweep the dorms at NYU for marijuana, even though this would probably turn up a ton of arrests."
Switch out "NYU" with "ghetto" and your statement is instantly absurd. These laws you're sleaking of are intended to be enforced, selectively. This is HN, we all love statistics. What is the probability that a person standing trial for possession marijuana who was apprehended in their home and where the primary reason provided in seeking the exercised warrant or reasoning provided explaining exigent circumstances was suspicion of possession or use of marijuana and the person on trial is white? Black?
You can't be evidence based when it suits your world view, but not when it doesn't. The term for that is confirmation bias.
The thing that gets missed is that a ton of laws on the books are written with the expectation that they will not be applied evenly.
You should read before jumping down someone's throat.
"I totally agree..."
And everything else is pretty much still good to go. Sorry. I'm pretty opinionated on this topic. As someone with dual degrees in political science and economics, followed by 15 years of all this great country has to offer the white male, and then living in Baltimore during the uprising, listening to my neighbors, marching with fellow Baltimoreans (?), almost getting arrested for holding a sign while on a public sidewalk during a march, staring down rows of cops 10 deep, having motorcycle cops rev their engines with protestors just feet on front of them laid out on the ground, having the National Guard lock down our city for a week, having government sigint airplanes flying overhead, and then riding my bicycle home, to a safe, warm meal and going to my good paying job with benefits the next day, while some black kid follows his mother's advice and walks into a police station on his own volition to surrender to the ppolice for vandalizing a cop car and then having his bail set higher than what was set for the police officers who where arraigned for manslaughter. But yeah, i blew it all out proportion in that comment.
I would argue it's borderline racketeering, since the police are trying to "solve" a problem that doesn't exist.
It's literally highway robbery.
Is it though, or is that just the hook being used to drive traffic?
They found a correlation between the size of the African American population and the percentage of government revenue from fines, but what evidence is there that the cause is actually racism? The article essentially explains the cause -- African Americans tend to live in higher crime areas, which leads to more police presence in those areas and thus more fines.
In other words, the real problem is that the cops can fine anybody for no real reason (and some municipalities use this for revenue generation), and that problem disproportionately affects African Americans because they have more proximity to more cops.
The problem with framing it as racism is that support for a cause is generally motivated primarily by self-interest, and if you paint it as "this is a problem for black people" then the majority of voters hear that as "this is not a problem for you" when in actual fact it is a problem that affects everyone.
It's always been about money. The people who have it and the people who don't.
Why would they write more tickets on a population that doesn't respond to them (context: according to TFA some already have fines for "missed court dates" etc)?
If you want to generate revenue, wouldn't you go hard on writing tickets in a middle-class neighborhood, where the population makes enough money to pay the fines but not enough to have the time/resources to fight?
[0] please Google the name - information is readily available, but the links are too politically charged for this particular discussion.
And a many-armed one, at that!
I'm not sure why that seems unlikely. African Americans commit a disproportionately large amount of violent crimes. It seems reasonable to expect that they also commit a larger amount of misdemeanors and minor infractions. It would be far more surprising if they had a higher propensity to break the law, but only when the violation is serious and the penalty heavy.
> Although African Americans and Whites report smoking marijuana at the same rates, African Americans are 3.7 times more likely get arrested for marijuana possession.
> An analysis of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 6.6% of White people between the ages of 12 and 25 have sold drugs compared to 5.0% of Blacks. Yet Black people are 3.6 times more likely get arrested for selling drugs.
The discrepancy may be explainable simply by the police presence in the area.
I'd take it one step further:
I live in a medium to medium class neighborhood with a few lower priced apartments dotted throughout. One is actually next door to me. I had to call 911 last weekend when a bbq at the apt building next to me was close to violence. I listened through an open window as one calm male tried to disuade his friend from starting a fight as the latter ranted for 45 minutes in the street sometime after midnight. I heard male number one mention an open arrest warrant as an attempt to reason with male number two that violence was not going to end well. Male number two repeatedly dismissed this and periodically became hysterical with anger.
Between my initial call to 911 and the time when police arrived, I heard a new voice arrive, alerting the hostile guy that he (male number three) had called his cousin for backup and reminding everyone that his cousin is a Crip (a west coast gang, for those who are unfamiliar). I made a second 911 call to update the officers that the situation appeared to be escalating.
So, what I'm driving towards is the additional possibility that this type of behavior sticks out terribly in a quiet neighborhood where most residents have families and go to sleep by 10pm. The likelihood of someone notifying authorities is probably greater than in a high crime area because this is an extremely rare occurrence here.
Edit: yes, I live in a predominantly white neighborhood and the bbq attendees were all black, but that seemed less relevant until I remembered that someone is likely to ask.
This is exactly what I was talking about in my post above.
The instinct or intuition to notice danger is totally different. Call it paranoia, call it introspection, it doesn't matter, it is there and it is real.
> this type of behavior sticks out terribly in a quiet neighborhood where most residents have families and go to sleep by 10pm. The likelihood of someone notifying authorities is probably greater
This is why the recent migration from MENA to Germany is going to go very wrong. Combining Germans, a people notoriously for being 'societal correct' with young men from MENA is perfectly calibrated to result in violence. There are no two ways about it.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
Is a good meta-analysis, which on this particular data point leads to:
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf
And in the OP's substantive point about "violent crimes", the FBI's crime stats prove them definitively correct.
Blacks get arrested for drugs in about the same ratio to whites as they commit violent crime.
They were running from the cops and dove into bushes. But pretty white girls that lived in a place where the average house is over a million. No ticket or anything. Cops took them home and woke up their mom and they had their iPhones taken away for a month. That was all.
If they were black males doing the same the situation would have ended very differently.
from today: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/fare-beating-t...
If people act like boors, it makes sense they are more likely to get arrested.
Another occasion he installed a wooden shed behind the council house (housing for the poor) he lived in. The council predictably told him they would kick his family out of the house if they didn't take it down. Again; another thing I would never have done in a million years because I would have assumed it was obvious I needed permission before building sheds on a property I do not own. Shit, I probably even need planning permission from the government, let alone the property owner in lots of cases.
I strongly suspect it is the same thing with smoking drugs. Some groups act in ways which are far more likely to get them arrested even if they commit those crimes at comparable rates to the native population example: smoking illegal drugs in the street vs smoking them in your own home.
I don't have an explanation for the underlying mechanism but I've seen the same thing time and time again in (five) black persons I've been working with. They're not bad people or stupid, certainly not the ones I work with, but their 'boundaries' just aren't the same as mine and other white coworkers. What is an immediate and definite red flag for trouble ahead to me is invisible to them, it is like there is a communication band they don't access. Which is weird because the five people I worked with were certainly more socially adaptive than I.
My rough guess is that I and other natives have, let us call it: a residual paranoia instinct that black foreigners do not. I expect different groups have different social relations and this is an invisible wall dividing people that hardly anybody feels comfortable thinking or talking about.
There is no obvious causal reason to link violent offenses and non-violent offenses. In fact, in my experience, I would expect an inverse causal relationship. I know quite a few ... people ... who would pick your pocket, steal from your house, etc. but would never actually physically assault somebody.
Your statement might be true, but some data is required.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...
In addition, non-violent offenses concerning alcohol are heavily skewed toward a racial component of white yet seem to not related to violent offenses at all.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to show causality.
The article data indicates that the fine rates are as high as 21 times the normal rate.
It does not look like the crime rate is enough to explain the fine rate.
This graph really doesn't seem to support their hypothesis AT ALL - the correlation looks really weak, and they give no strength statistics for it at all. Of the municipalities with the lowest revenue from fines, all of those with the highest percentages (from 80% up to around 100%) of African Americans are represented. On the other hand, in the scattering of municipalities with high revenue from fines (say, over 20%) the percentage of African Americans is anything from less than 5% to 80% with no clear pattern. I'm not convinced...
I think it would be interesting to look at the ethnic distribution of the police force vs that of local population, in case it offers a stronger signal? One needs the data to do it though and I can't see a link to a clean download.
It's like proving that everybody got rich in a town overnight since the average income shot up while Bill Gates came for a visit.
Rotate the image to the left (i.e. swap the X and Y axis).
And you can clearly see that the larger the black population the less they rely on fines.
There are some outliers, and those should be stopped.
I called and emailed the alderman office that would handle that spot and got zero results. Tried contacting media outlets, etc, but nobody wants to help out in fixing the spot. Hell, I even posted on reddit and got downvoted for "trying to help dumb people".
It's incredibly frustrating that it's seemingly impossible to get anything done in any large city as an individual who just wants to help out.
Working with the data has been fun and all and has probably been the biggest learning experience of anything I've ever done... but doing it all on my own has been pretty stressful, especially after trying really, really hard to get some attention through conventional ways. It's really disheartening to have next to zero traction from the city and the local "open gov hack" groups. Many journalists and tech folks who want to help out have their own goals, but I've been finding more and more that their goals are (at the risk of the obvious) largely attention seeking, so "unsexy" stories don't get much attention.
It's a very strange dynamic where so many folk are interested in visualization of data over actually solving problems. I really don't get it. Taking a break from this sort of work will be nice.
Having a random Internet guy make a Sankey diagram to show G+ user numbers helped the hell in promoting that story.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
If you're on Reddit, drop a request at /r/MKaTS
Raw: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8w4PnXvOPIiVmNiUzVPZ1JfX0...
Mostly cleaned up (ignore the file name :p ): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8w4PnXvOPIia0J3RGVyd0tka2...
Keep kicking that story around, someone will eventually pick up on it.
https://www.amazon.com/Between-World-Me-Ta-Nehisi-Coates/dp/...
Give it a read/listen. It's incredible how many things will click into place, how drastically different you'll perceive the world before and after.
This means that you're understanding of poverty will lack nuance. If you're one kind of person, you'll think its just bad parenting and bad culture. If you're another kind of person, you'll think it's external causes from racism, bad schools, etc.
The fact of the matter is that most people I've encountered who actually grew up in and around poverty understand that Coates portrayal is heavily biased towards the "external" causes, as opposed to the other forms of literature heavily biased towards the "it's their fault they are poor."
Why is this? Because there isn't really a market for the nuanced truth: It's a mix of both. I grew up in an extremely poor county with about 50% white/black, and most of both were poor. I went to the same schools, and watched some of my friends go down one path, while most went down the other, very bad path.
The problem is people like you, whose parents did what I'm doing with my kids (keeping them away from these failing schools and bad neighborhoods), have no clue what's going on and are limited in your information to the two extremes of WHY this is happening.
Why did two of the extremely smart, black male friends of mine growing up go down such extremely different paths? They both were poor, both highly intelligent, but one decided he wanted to fit in with the overly masculine cultural norms in black youth culture, while the other went down the path of escaping the trap of poverty by getting financial aid and going to a great public university. Their paths diverged in 8th grade.
What book out there explains this, and if it exists, is there a market for it? Probably not.
I was born and raised in San Francisco and am first generation Chinese-American. However, as a son of working class parents, my friends and I have spent most of our lives growing up through the inner-city school system dominated by minorities -- black, Hispanic, Asian (mostly Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, but no Korean or Japanese). While at the time, I couldn't understand the plights of those I went to school with, looking back, I can now see how difficult it was for them, particularly those who were African-American.
And for those that make it out of the "hood," they face institutional racism. It's like an uphill battle. Even if somebody were to be in good spirits about it, only to be shot down over and over again, they'll eventually become frustrated. They begin to feel trapped in a nation they were born into that they, too, consider their own, but have parents that don't want them and/or hate them.
I know how fortunate I am to be lumped into a group of "Asians" or "Chinese," where in this country, people discriminate across all lines -- be it racial, socioeconomic, attitudes, beliefs, etc.
Whenever I see things like this and seeing people argue that their plights are just "sour grapes", and to, "stop playing the race card", really has no idea. And it's even more difficult to institute change in a system run by the privileged who have no idea what the lives of the poor are like. Nobody choose to be born black or into poverty. It's easy to say, "play the hand that you're dealt, when you've started with aces in the hole, or a favorable hand."
Reading the article and looking at their chart[1], something stood out to me. The 38 municipalities they list appear to be extreme outliers with another 100 municipalities looking like relative outliers. It appears that if you remove those cities, trends would look quite different. For example, it actually appears that the median reliance on fine of high-percentage African American cities is lower than average.
Basically, it looks like most of the action is in a few place. Thus, it seems like Federal Government should be investigating those 38 or 100 city governments, just as they investigated Ferguson's government.
For-profit prisons create similar problems. It becomes in the best interest of those profiting from these systems to encourage systemic crime. The problem was exposed years ago in the media, why hasn't it been dealt with?
I think this is evidence that the people running those local governments are insane. Would a rational minded person ever support such a system? It doesn't take a genius to look at the long term consequences and think "Maybe this plan needs adjustment."
For an interesting perspective on private prisons, you should see what Gary Johnson has to say on the matter based on his experience as Governor of New Mexico: http://govgaryjohnson.tumblr.com/post/139039414105/private-p...
If you want to see some serious influence (for the worse), take a look at the prison guard and law enforcement unions. At least the private organizations are accountable, liable. They aren't bestowed with any magical priviledges or powers. Deals can be renegotiated, people can be fired, competitors can be pursued.
Who knows what we could achieve under private (wholly volunatary) policing. Organizations could actually compete on budget, effectiveness, community-fit, supplemental charity services. Don't like the service? Hire someone else.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the lack of statistical significance, std deviation, p-values, etc. Opinions are great and charts are fun but I don't really know that the conclusion is justified outside of Ferguson and other specific municipalities.
Bonus, one pension one authority to negotiate contracts, etc.
The current decentralization is resulting in abuse an lack of accountability. I'm sure we could devise community oversight over the state police force. At least the police could have less variance and without the pressure to raise funds from citing locals, provide a fairer police force.
The benefit is that you get more consistency between police training across the state and pooled resources. Certainly I think the police are more trusted here.
1. During sentencing, does the sentence we are imposing on this man/woman markedly deviate from the sentence imposed on similar offenders in similar circumstances who come from different racial backgrounds.
2. Initially - would a reasonable person, giving rise to the circumstances have cause to believe that the defendant would not have been subject to scrutiny were he of a different race (and allow defense counsel to bring in statistical evidence to try and prove this.)
All we are trying to do here is to prevent differential treatment under the law, which seems like a very easy problem to fix.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
The API readme does not contain the word 'flag'.
I wonder how many devs work on HN. There are a number of features on my wishlist.
Nick (kogir) left to work on a startup over a year ago. As for features, come back in a few days and review what you said here.
Any chance of open sourcing and letting us contribute?
Why is this being downvoted? Parts of reddit are open sourced.
>Why is this being downvoted?
A very good question, particularly since this subthread is detached and off-topic. I actually think some have custom feeds (or at least, refresh a lot) largely just for delivering downvotes (w/ no other response).
Here is pg on open sourcing and features:
>pg 1272 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5025176
>I don't have time to manage such a project. I don't think it's necessary anyway. The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content.
>actually think some have custom feeds (or at least, refresh a lot) largely just for delivering downvotes (w/ no other response).
I don't complain about downvotes, but lately I have noticed some of my comments seem to get -2 downvotes almost as a group throughout a thread. It's odd. People have claimed to run networks of accounts specifically for downvoting, so maybe someone is trying to clean house, I don't know. Maybe off topic threads automatically get downvoted.
>>The reason HN lacks x cool feature is not that I expend no energy on the site, but that I expend all my energy on what users actually care about, which is not features but the content.
It's his site and he can have whatever priorities he likes, but I think it's obvious he's wrong about users not caring about both.
Vote reversal is a badly needed feature. I often hit the wrong one on touchscreens because the characters are so small and close together.
As for off-topic threads, I'm still looking for where I can find them. I asked a moderator and was threatened with banishment because I am supposedly expected to know the answer to that question already.
Certainly pg prioritizes as he pleases, but it seems like the content is very thin these days. Good content can be replicated in places with good features and good features allow good content to be produced.
It was a joke, I know you've put a lot of work into improving the site. And I'm usually the one pointing out that thread folding is coming every time it gets mentioned, as it does often, month after month, so it's not as if I don't defend you as well.
>As for features, come back in a few days and review what you said here.
I look forward to it. I seriously do.
"Watch what gets flagged" just means look at the posts that get flag-killed.
Did you downmod my question before responding? How do legit questions get -1 karma?
Where can I watch the downmod feed?
from 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of all Failure to Comply charges.
1) MLK jr. on turning working class whites against freed blacks.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...
2) Eleanor Rooselvet gets involved when Southern states give New Deal money disproportionally to whites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Civil_rights...
That actually surprised me: I expected racially biased policing to be confirmed, but I also expected evidence of bias against poor people. (Though targeting them seems like a terrible way to increase revenue.)
Edit: since they're analyzing cities relying on revenue from fines, this makes sense. You can fine poor people all you want, but if you end up jailing them when they stop even showing up to court, they're now a cost and not a source of revenue. Though there are businesses that somehow make money through fees on payment plans that only exist because they're for fines people can't afford to pay.
I suggest this is mostly a problem with how law enforcement works across the board in America.
Also - going to see a 'judge' for a minor traffic ticket? That's crazy.
In Canada, you get a ticket, you pay it, done.
And there aren't crazy traps everywhere etc..
That African Americans happen to occupy the lower tier of the economic stratum (not saying this is right), means they are much more likely to be thrown by any disbursement of these fines: 'not showing to court' for tiny offenses can be worse than the offence itself.
Perhaps it's exasperated by racism, but it's more of a general problem.
Yes, dude, I'm well aware of American history, thanks for the deep insight.
Also, it's much more complicated than 'slavery and oppression'.
I did not indicate or imply that one could not challenge a ticket in Canadian court. Of course you can.
I'm pointing to the fact that in many places if America - if you get a speeding ticket you have to go to court. Literally a day off work to standing in line, wait your turn for a 30 second process in front of a judge wherein they give you your $120 fine - and then you can pay it.
The idea that you have to go to court just to pay a speeding ticket is insane.
As someone who had to drive through Marin county daily - where there is a little gap where the speed limit is 50mph - and the cops pull over people all day long for $$, I can assure you that in many counties, you pretty much have to go to court.
They don't just 'give you a ticket' - they give you a summons.
Now - technically, you may be able to do a lot of stuff by mail, but it's a legal process.
Point being: they don't just 'give you a ticket you can pay' in many counties.
Because the court was on my way to work, I would stop in and spend a few hours waiting in line for my 'less than 30 seconds' in front of a judge. That's how it works.
It's absolutely nutjobs.
I should get the ticket, and pay online with my iphone 20 seconds later.
But the greater issue is the degree of enforcement: In the USA - the cops are crazy about ticketing and stopping for small stuff. Cops use tickets as a form of revenue. In most countries, it's not like that.
The likelihood of being arbitrarily stopped for some kind of small violation is 10x in California than it is in Ontario - and probably greater if you throw a little bit of racism in there.