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Comment by 47gfnm8sgf7m | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand that correctly. Are you saying that POC are acquitted or have charges dropped far more often for the same crimes (i.e. have a far lower conviction rate)?

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POC are more likely to be pulled over, then when pulled over more likely to ask to be searched, then when searched more likely to be arrested when situations are similar to non-POC folks.

It doesn't really stop there either, they are more likely to be convicted of the same crimes and then get longer sentences. They are less likely to be offered probation. This eliminates huge percentages of men permanently from POC communities. It is possible that this process can be blamed for the social issues present in the inner city.

"The New Jim Crow" covers a lot more in a lot more detail. I would strongly recommend the read.

In general, POC are more likely to be arrested for committing a crime.

The parent's point isn't about whether they are acquitted, it's that if you were to commit a crime as a POC, you are more likely to be arrested than if you had committed that same crime as a non-POC. In both scenarios you committed a crime, but in one of them the system never has a record of it. This is why arrest rates and crime rates are different: if a POC is more likely to get arrested for committing a crime, the arrest rates by race (POCs get arrested more) will not reflect the crime rates by race (differences are generally smaller).

Most empirical data indicates that white people are arrested and convicted at a higher rate relative to basal offense rate than black people.

Post your sources. I've seen otherwise (especially for low level drug offenses) but you're the one making the claim.

Communities of color are over-policed. There's a huge racial divide in income, and crimes that tend to be committed by the poor (like shoplifting, loitering, and fare-evasion) are far more likely to be prosecuted than crimes committed by the wealthy (smoking some weed in your suburban living room, fudging your taxes a bit). The end result is that people of color are more likely to have an arrest record, even if they're just as likely to commit a crime as a white person.

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).

https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data https://www.nyclu.org/en/press-releases/analysis-finds-racia...

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