Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

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[edited to match comment guidelines] “I couldn't be bothered reading that source to see what was being compared, and instead I'm going to brush off yet another study showing racial bias in US law enforcement as it not comparing like-for-like, despite the study literally doing exactly what I've decided that they did not”

If you actually could be bothered reading the article - they are comparing stop+ticket for speeding vs camera driven tickets for speeding. They explicitly ensured that they were doing a like-for-like comparison to avoid responses like this.

Speeding tickets issued by machines: speeding tickets are issued to black people at the same rate they’re issued to white people

Speeding tickets issued by police officers: tickets are issued at overwhelmingly higher rate for black people than white.

There are two options:

* black people drive worse than white people, but only when police are present and cameras are not

* police are racially biased when enforcing traffic laws

Given the overwhelming evidence of racial bias in other parts of policing I don’t see any - non-racist - reason to believe that the former is more likely than the latter.

It pains me to say: you can make this point without overtly calling the parent racist; and the guidelines say you should. I do wish that we could have such honest conversations online, but it time shows that doing so is not a sustainable practice. Replying now before you get flagged to death; there is time to edit.

Updated it, but if your response to a study demonstrating racial bias in US law enforcement - where overt racial bias has been established for decades - is to say they're not comparing like-for-like, when even if the comparisons were different you should be expecting approximate matches to racial population proportions, it's clear you are saying "that race is intrinsically more criminal" - and it's a response being made without actually going to the effort to read the sources, which explicitly say they're comparing speeding tickets, i.e exactly the thing the reflexive commenter is claiming they're not.

I get that labeling people leads to flaming/raging but at the same time saying "you can't call out racism or racial bias" (or sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-christian, anti-muslim, anti-whatever bias) fundamentally means saying "these attitudes and comments are acceptable and reasonable".

Nah, I never said you can't call out racism or racial bias. But notice that the first paragraph of what you've written is suitably mealy-mouthed to satisfy the guidelines. You're not directly calling a person racist, but you're saying that a certain behavior has racist over/undertones. This is an approach to the conversation, a very important conversation for us to have as a society which I'm hoping you'll continue holding space for, which props the door open for a curious conversation. No guarantees anybody will meet you with curiosity, but that's more to the second point.

> fundamentally means saying "these attitudes and comments are acceptable and reasonable".

Nah. It doesn't mean that. It means saying that I as a human need to pick my battles, and when I do pick a battle, not waste that energy and opportunity trying approaches that are known to not work.

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