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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Swing and a miss, overpolicing has nothing to do with violent crime. It has to do with nonviolent infractions that marginalize people to begin with. Being actually caught with illicit substances , or caught for the unpaid ticket.

These things are evenly distributed across society, but when overly targeting minorities it further marginalizes them.

Exhibit A) YOU might not be able to relate to people that routinely have a bag of coke on them, but a proportionate demographics of the population do.

Exhibit B) Silicon Valley openly brags about microdosing acid to perform at work at their half million $ jobs. Overpolicing would ensnare them if overpolicing existed in that demographic and then they would be ineligible for jobs the rest of their life. If you cant be subsidized by your family then you have actual crime to consider. Guess where you will live too.

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> These things are evenly distributed across society

This is an unproven assertion. You should provide evidence of it, because on its face it is a completely ludicrous claim. Rates of illicit drug activity, violent crime, etc are _not_ evenly distributed in society. Not even close.

> Exhibit B) Silicon Valley openly brags about microdosing acid to perform at work at their half million $ jobs. Overpolicing would ensnare them if overpolicing existed in that demographic and then they would be ineligible for jobs the rest of their life. If you cant be subsidized by your family then you have actual crime to consider. Guess where you will live too.

Quite simply, the reason people that microdose are not getting thrown in jail is because they're not doing the other things that would lead to them getting discovered, i.e. engaging in crime or driving a car with significant (meaning, more than a person can safely swallow to avoid arrest) quantities of lsd.

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Just incase you try to pin a belief-set on me, I oppose the war on drugs, no-knock raids, and even speeding tickets completely and would entirely abolish them if I were the BFDL.

Actually, black people use drugs at slightly lower rates than whites. This is common knowledge or should be. Here's 3 of the top 6 google links for "illicit drug use by race":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377408/

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_and...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723521...

We're talking about violent crime... drug prosecutions and other nonviolent crime are notorious for selective enforcement.

A bullet fired, a body, etc. are much harder to hide.

and my immediate reply to you was that its not about violent crime

It doesn't exist in isolation

There is no “culture that commits violent crime”

There is a marginalized population from overpolicing for nonviolent crimes

It cascades

It can be fixed by acknowledging this component

No. We're definitely not.

From the parent post:

> It has to do with nonviolent infractions that marginalize people to begin with. Being actually caught with illicit substances , or caught for the unpaid ticket.

> These things are evenly distributed across society, but when overly targeting minorities it further marginalizes them.

Yes it doesnt match your worldview, consider seeing if you can corroborate it. I know strange concept for you to find a source instead of hoping to pick apart the person that posted, but you might be surprised

But regarding the rebuttal to microdosing users, if they were getting randomly frisked and randomly tested and randomly stopped for “broken” taillights, because the algorithm said so, they would be getting caught and reinforcing the algorithm and human biases

This is what is happening disproportionately to some demographics that dont have inherently different behavior from other demographics

>Quite simply, the reason people that microdose are not getting thrown in jail is because they're not doing the other things that would lead to them getting discovered, i.e. engaging in crime or driving a car with significant (meaning, more than a person can safely swallow to avoid arrest) quantities of lsd.

Counterargument, it's well documented and studied that policies like "stop and frisk" and to some degree traffic enforcement disproportionately target minorities. Most of the people in SV "microdosing on LSD" are not.

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