Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.
If you're doing crimes, you're paying for them. Now the police, the argument goes, lets white people walk away with warrants. In the same time, they let less black people walk away. Is that the argument?
This might be true, but my problem is the letting people walk away in the first place. I don't want the police to do that at all. If the crime is not too bad, then don't emit warrants to begin with. But if there is a warrant, then that should be enforced.
I don't see how not enforcing warrants for black people or criminals of any color will make things better. It won't make things better for the society at large or for the black community. I believe the hard working black people also want less crime on the streets.
There is a problem with longer sentencing for black people, from what I heard. That is not a police issue. Police violence is a police issue, for all races. But police trying to arrest based on a warrant is not an issue, even if it devolves in violence.
What am I getting wrong?
Deal with it. The police stopping you is not them thinking you are a criminal necessarily.
That's a very different situation which is obviously non-discriminatory. But consider how you'd feel if they just stopped some and waved others through, don't you see the potential for unfairness?
There are several things wrong with this statement: the idea that most crimes are commited by individuals and not corporations, the idea that they are commited on the street, and the idea that searching a person somehow can prevent crime.
Firstly a large chunk of crime, is commited by corporates, thats wage theft, consumer law breaches, money laundering, environmental protection, etc. Secondly most crimes are white collar crimes, and we do a very poor job of investigating both.
Lastly even for street crime, which is a small percentage of all crime, stop and search is just a populist show of force that does nothing usefull.
You know what actually reduces crime? Having competent detectives, investigators and prosecutors who can actualy arrest not the individual weed smoker but the kingpin running the show, or bring a complex case against a major company have it stand up to their highly paid team of lawyers.
Real life experiment, look at Baltimore homicides https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015
Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...
All the police did was not getting proactively involved on the streets, those stop and search you were mentioning. They still responded to calls and did their investigations. The result is 50% more deaths from homicides, each year.
I did make my point and tried to support it with (some) data.
Jacob Blake was wanted for rape and he violated a restraining order(approaching the said rape victim). He fought the police and even choke-hold one of them. He was preparing to run away with a stolen car with the kids in it (that he did not have custody of). Their mother was the one that called the police, and the police knew who they were dealing with. If he would have been let go by the police, I assume an amber alert would have been issued.
Floyd was being arrested for passing counterfeit bills.
Brianna Taylor was shot after her boyfriend started shooting at the cops. The cops were executing a warrant for drug dealing. They didn't find anything, but that is beyond the point.
The guy that was shot at Wendy's (Rayshard Brooks -had to look him up)was so drunk that he fell asleep at the drive through, and the employees had to call the police to clear the lane. He had prior DUIs and he fought during the arrest, stole a taser and fired it at the cops.
These were the big cases of last year that I can remember right now. None of these were because of mere stops in traffic.
The 3 shouldn't have died, sure, but I am addressing your point: It was more than a benign stop for any of the big cases last year. I am assuming there are traffic stops where innocent people died, but BLM of 2020 was not protesting for them.
Note: I am not making a statement about the propriety of this, but merely working through an example of applied statistics.