It's just nothing but a fishing expedition for probable cause so that police can exercise their contempt for black youth.
It's just nothing but a fishing expedition for probable cause so that police can exercise their contempt for black youth.
https://www.copsplus.com/sirchie-narkii-test-07-scott-reagen...
Here's the directions on the website:
Confirm suspicions of cocaine presence using the NARKII Test 07-Scott Reagent from Sirchie®. The improved presumptive test utilizes a three-vestibule system to identify powdered cocaine, as well as cocaine bases, crack and freebase. To administer the test, place a small sample of the suspected substance in each of the three ampoules. The first vestibule will melt, creating a blue solution if the sample is pure powdered cocaine. A cocaine base will form hard blue specs that float in a pink solution. Both forms of the substance will dissolve into a pink liquid in the second container. The third ampule will have a burst of blue, that later separates into a pink over blue solution when mixed with either powdered or cocaine bases.
This is hilariously sad. These cops have 0 training, or are out for blood. I'm thinking Hanlon's Razor.
EDIT: Here's the video timestamp where you can see the packet: https://youtu.be/c7j-Ijo2TYw?t=545
Side note HD bodycams are pretty good, surprised you can see and read this packet that clearly.
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.
Nobody would actually think you decorate the front of your car with coke.
Like... of all the ways in the world to do cocaine, smearing it on your hood? At something like $50/half gram, that's a couple hundred dollars of coke on the front of a car doing 70 mph. That didn't blow off.
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.-.