Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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Worth noting that police typically "randomly" drug search black people/drivers at a much higher rate than white people, even though white people are just as likely, or more likely to have drugs on them.

It's then easy for (ignorant) people to point at those numbers and say look, 80% of the time when police search someone for drugs and find them, it's a black person, so obviously black people are more likely to have drugs on them so we should search them more.

It's like a higher-level version of being arrested for resisting arrest (by asking "what are you arresting me for?")

> Worth noting that police typically "randomly" drug search black people/drivers at a much higher rate than white people, even though white people are just as likely, or more likely to have drugs on them.

White people are more likely to have drugs when searched for drugs because police are less likely to search white people for drugs for reasons other than having real reason to think that they have drugs.

They may also be more likely to have drugs because they are less likely to be searched out of the blue, but the difference simply due to blacks being subject to more harassment searches is probably the bigger factor.

I'm curious on what evidence you base the statement "white people are more likely to have drugs on them than black people." When controlling for socioeconomic status I would expect no difference by race, and honestly when controlling for socioeconomic status I would only expect which drugs were found to change, and not necessarily the rate at which they were found.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/polic...

> For years, police records have shown that black drivers tend to be less likely than white drivers to turn up with guns or drugs when searched at traffic stops. At the same time, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be subjected to these searches, according to a 2013 federal survey.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traff...

> Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

> Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.

That's still not the same thing, though. If, among the 1% of African Americans pulled over, 10% have drugs, while among the 0.5% of White Americans pulled over 20% have drugs, it doesn't actually say much about the overall rates of drug ownership. Maybe police are really bad at figuring out which African Americans are carrying drugs, and the overall rate in that population is 10% - while the police manage to pull over everyone else carrying drugs, leading to a population rate of 0.1%. (Or you can flip this around too)

The point is that you're measuring after a selection effect, and measurements after a selection effect are worthless. Imagine comparing income between racial groups, but only surveying people buying sports cars - it's just not useful.

Most of these stops are in high crime areas, which also have high rates of poverty. It would make sense that blacks are stopped more than whites since blacks, as a percentage of population, tend to be poorer than whites.

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