Victims are often criminals, and that is a paradox American policing can’t solve

Oddly enough in AZ you are supposed to have a victim for a crime yet you can be charged with criminal speeding and there be no victim.

Public intoxication less so, but it is also mostly used as a pretext to remove people from public spaces in cases where it is obvious they shouldn't be there.

Speeding is also mostly treated as a minor infraction, not quite a crime. Sure, if you really do it good, you can get detained for an extended period of time, but you really have to do it good to end up in that situation.

Speeding is arguably not victimless. Someone pointed out the "shooting into a crowd without hitting anyone" analogy, which is apt. You're engaging in immediately threatening and dangerous behavior.

Public intoxication is also not victimless; that's the "disorderly" part of "drunk and disorderly" (whether it gets enforced correctly/equally is a different discussion.) This is actually a great example of my point: you can get as drunk as you want, and no one will care until you start disturbing the peace, being belligerent, damaging property, urinating in public spaces, etc. If you're drunk and sitting in a bar quietly, it's not a problem. We don't arrest you because you might drive drunk later, we wait until you actually drive drunk. We treat other drugs completely differently.

This is insane... who defines that group ? Are all govts legitimate ? Do all govts get to define violence ?

There is no ethical violence or all violence is ethical because your reasons arent more valid than someone elses

A small handful of states permit "private prosecution" of crimes, with very significant limitations. It certainly can't be used to shut down the victim in the fashion you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Sta...

The "race to the courthouse" article you linked doesn't even specify which country it applies to, and cites zero sources.

It appears to refer to https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/, which isn't about criminal prosecutions at all. It's about certain civil law situations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/s...

> But obtaining the crack was no easy feat. To match the words crafted by the speech-writers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents lured a suspected District drug dealer to Lafayette Park four days before the speech so they could make what appears to have been the agency's first undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity, according to officials familiar with the case.

> In fact, when first contacted by an undercover DEA agent posing as a drug buyer, the teenage suspect seemed baffled by the agent's request.

> "Where the {expletive} is the White House?" he replied in a conversation that was secretly tape-recorded by the DEA.

> "We had to manipulate him to get him down there," said William McMullan, assistant special agent in charge of DEA's Washington field office. "It wasn't easy."

This one is the original marihuana legislation, predating Nixon's war on drugs, right?

> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

When was this originally published? I keep seeing it in a 2016 magazine, which is a bit odd given how groundbreaking a revelation it is. Especially considering the quote was collected 22 years prior, and the man died 17 years prior. Was this around and just not well known at the time?

> "In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."

Adverse impact, problematic enough, does not imply something was made with racist intent.

>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).

This is an amazing and explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a great deal of attention. Instead Baum would not include it in his book, but instead would wait for decades later when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute it.

At any rate, if the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:

>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).

http://www.samefacts.com/2011/06/drug-policy/who-started-the...

The disparity is in charges of possession. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/racial-disparity-in-marijuana...

https://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime...

Starting with the most obvious point, the Crime Statistics Bureau of San Francisco doesn't exist.

Looking at the "data", one would conclude that Autism is on the rise. But we didn't even know what it was not too long ago. And we sure as hell didn't check for it. There are more diagnoses of Autism because we're actually looking now.

Today, domestic violence would be classified as a violent crime. In the fifties, it was called keeping your wife in line.

Lynching a black man was a way to keep him away from your pristine daughter in the fifties. Now. It's a crime.

Defenders of police misconduct tend to cite the "it's just a few bad apples" line without noting the full adage is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel".

The thing is is survivorship bias often shows in the media. most police encounters are not reported in the media because it's common and everyday. But the very few that turn into a big production get reported because it gets ratings. So through survivorship bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, the problem seems bigger than it actually is.