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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

> Also, some police are known to be racist

Worse yet, most police are at least classist. Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.

What happens when there's already heavy policing of poorer neighborhoods, and police are trained to "get the bad ones off the streets"? They look for any excuse to arrest and prosecute people in those neighborhoods. Once you have a felony conviction on your record, you're basically unemployable for 10 years (in the US at least). Thus continuing the cycle of poverty. And of course, minorities tend to be disproportionately poor.

This makes that cycle worse. Anyone in the proximity of such a felon due to this data collection and aggregation now becomes a target by the police, raising their chances of getting caught up in the legal system and experiencing life-long consequences because of it.

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> Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods.

I see this sentiment often. If this were true it would represent a criminal opportunity to victimize "wealthier neighborhoods." As far as I can tell: that does not seem to be the case very often; and victimization rates are higher in "poor neighborhoods."

I can see the logic of an argument that excessive legal criminalization induces cycles of harmful involvement in law enforcement and legal systems. However, using the language "policed far more heavily" as opposed to "criminalized far more heavily" places the blame on a convenient-to-scapegoat blue-collar occupation rather than directly upon the powerful people who compose the ever-expanding encyclopedia of laws and regulations.

Police already have discretion to enforce the law on whomever, and however they wish. It is inappropriate to try and shift blame entirely to lawmakers, when (obviously) the police have culpability here because of the choices they make regarding the enforcement of those laws. That's why the sentiment is so common. Obviously. Come on.

I still don't get it--not being obtuse, it isn't obvious to me. Is the claim that differences in policing are due to discretion in law enforcement and not because victimization rates are different in neighborhoods of different socio-economic statuses?

Discretion in enforcement is either lawful or not. If discretion is the key problem and lawmakers do not address it, then yes, the responsibility is on lawmakers and ultimately on voters.

Discretion is not the key problem. Discretion is a necessary part of the job.

Let me address victimization rates - because yes, they are higher in poorer communities. That does not justify in any way the behavior of police in those communities, which is to randomly pull over/stop and search/etc. people on the street who "look" like bad guys. If somebody kills someone, sure, arrest them and put them in prison. Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it.

https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/incarceration-a...

The culture of policing is the key problem, which is created by a confluence of training, recruiting practices, general societal attitudes, and the political leadership of elected officials. It's not one problem, as you can see - it's many contributing factors.

A local town near me was praised some years back for drastically reducing violence by shifting towards community-based outreach policing. The local news actually called out Chicago for not following its example, you should definitely read about it:

https://www.aurora-il.org/1637/Community-Oriented-Policing-C...

Critics of community oriented policing typically view it as "being soft on crime" instead of a systems problem. The "put bad guys in prison" model has the effect of continuing the cycle of poverty, and measures such as mostly doing away with pre-trial detention (i.e. bond) for non-violent offenders are intended as a systemic fix for the poverty cycle.

Wait, it sounds like you are shifting the goalposts. In the item "37598636" [0] at issue is Poor neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than wealthier neighborhoods. but here at 37605421 [1] the issue is how not how much policing is performed. Maybe the claim is better stated as "poor neighborhoods poorly policed stay poor."

Additionally, the americanactionforum.org link does not support the claim "Most "bad guys" sent to prison are not violent offenders (drugs, theft, homelessness, child support, etc.) with drug possession being a huge chunk of it."

The link is somewhat inconsistent. It claims "The United States currently incarcerates 2.2 million people, nearly half of whom are non-violent drug offenders" and "Of the 2.2 million currently being held in the U.S. criminal justice system, nearly 500,000 people are being held for drug offenses." .5M is about a quarter of 2.2M.

Looking at one of the cited sources [2, Table 13], the latest data is 2019 and states that a slim majority of prisoners are in prison for violent crime. Given that the ojp.gov survey does not include pre-trial jail, maybe % nonviolent drug offenders is different from the below data, but my null hypothesis is that the proportions would remain largely similar.

       Violent:  55.5%
      Property:  16.0%
          Drug:  14.1%
  Public Order:  12.3%

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598636

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37605421

2. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p19.pdf

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