Georgia Southern QB: roadside drug test wrongly showed bird droppings as cocaine

There is too much of a police state, period.

This paper(1) is by a Black economist at Harvard. On page 5, Blacks are 25% less likely to be shot, though they are more likely to experience non-lethal force. The paper concludes there are a minority of officers who discriminate.

I was quite surprised by that.

I also was curious about that because it didn't match my preconceived notions, so did a rough check of some of the crime stats myself(2). It seems about 25% of fatal shootings are of Blacks, which is about proportionately double the rate. But if you look at something like arrest rate for violent crime as a metric for encounters with police, they're a little bit over 25%, which would be consistent with the former paper's conclusion.

I have no doubt that in the past there was terrible discrimination, and that presently a minority of officers do it, which is still unacceptable. But whenever I see people talking about this topic presently, I never see facts or statistics brought into it and it comes off as hand-wavey virtue signalling.

I also worry that there is a growing problem of a police state -- it is not only a problem of discrimination.

1- http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

2- https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside...

>When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

Also, blind obedience is gross. It's our duty to think.

Cops there seem to have way too much power, and a worrying amount of them make use of it with enough regularity that there is never shortage of news regarding it.

Things are crap in Europe too, but it hardly ever gets that bad here.

Its the same for most people visiting China. Whatever human rights abuses you perceive don't define China and you are probably exempt from that and any socioeconomic problem there.

Because a huge number of black people in America describe a frequency and quality of interactions with police that are vastly different from white people's described experiences, claims which are backed up by horrifying anecdotes (like this story, or the seemingly weekly story of some other small town police department that was "shocked" to find it had officers in the local KKK chapter) and larger scale statistics on law enforcement.

That is a strong prior. Coupled with the utter stupidity of testing bird shit on the outside of a car to see if it's cocaine, it seems entirely fair to conclude this was motivated by some amount of racism.

As you may have noticed, the trouble with the word racism is that nobody feels they are racist. Nobody feels like they are consciously participating in the behaviors described in books/movies from a prior time as being part of intolerable indiscretions. All while the threshold for getting statistics for an individual event is impossible, yet the demands for sensitivity and societal change are numerous, imperceptible, seemingly random and difficult to understand if they are valid until broader consensus is reached.

Martin Luther King didn't have a statistics or spreadsheets or studies either, but we still accept the shared experiences he brought to the national spotlight as "racism". The things experienced then in Alabama were normalized "what? you think I hate black people? I've never consciously put a single negative thought in my head" behaviors as well. Behaviors that were often economically rationalized, as much as a yellow taxi driver in NYC today not wanting to drive to Brooklyn and assuming black customers in Manhattan want that and decides not to stop. There is a shared worse experience amongst people with similar phenotypes that runs parallel to the user experience people expect and commend.

Here, the disparity of the interactions people experience and expect with police merely continue to confirm what people already believed.

It is accurate that there may be more consistent socioeconomic drivers to this experience, than merely race-based ones, or socioeconomic drivers which correlated to race-based experiences.

But when people highlight "racism", they want a consistent experience in line with their trust in the fabric of society. They want to not experience total derailment and marginalization of their life in a random pitfall that their whole family has experienced in one way or another. Its not "assuming racism", it is just recognizing that this is the colloquialism for understanding how institutions will marginalize people. Does it accurately reflect the experience that many white people are also subjected to when they can't/don't procure good legal representation? Probably not. Fixing accountability problems with the state will help them too.

> How can the police protect them

The goal of the kind of policing described here is not to protect the population they're harassing members of. It is to harass them to help maintain a racist status quo.

> There isn't an easy balance

This kind of enlightened centrism serves a similar purpose. Don't defend bad practices if you don't support them.

The Department of Justice's official report [0] on the Ferguson police department after their killing of Michael Brown concluded unambiguously (see page 9) that the Ferguson PD aggressively fined poor black neighborhoods to make up budget shortfalls, and they coordinated with the city council on this. This is no lefty, prison-abolitionist organization; it's the US DOJ concluding unambiguously that this police department overpoliced its citizens to extract money from them. The racial and economic bias makes sense in this context: black communities know they are overpoliced and have been talking about it for ages, but nobody listens to them, so the Ferguson police knew they could get away with the exact same extortion tactics used by the mob to rob the poor and downtrodden.

There are many other conflicts of interest and lacks of oversight that incentivize police departments to literally rob their citizens; civil asset forfeiture [1] allows police to confiscate, hold, and liquidate assets that they believe are related to crimes, often without trial or other due process; this mechanism is also frequently abused.

Police departments also often have quotas (though they outwardly deny it) on how many arrests/stops they need to make or tickets they need to issue; again, this incentivizes cops to go to neighborhoods that are marginalized and abuse their inhabitants (as happens in NYC, where stop-and-frisk quotas mostly impact black and hispanic citizens [2], as revealed by actual NYPD officers and corroborated by the huge number of non-rich, non-white men who are predominantly targetted by this policy).

And all of this forms a feedback cycle: cops abuse the marginalized, building criminal records for the disenfranchised citizens in specific neighborhoods; those neighborhoods become "high crime" because our metrics of crime are based on police activity, which is deliberately higher in those places; and the police then justify continuing their interference in those communities by claiming that they are "high crime" and therefore in need of extra policing.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...

[1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2013/03/21/174941454/at-stop-and-frisk-t...