The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate | Hacker News Reader

The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate

rollingstone.com

71 pointsmisiti37807 comments

i was in court to clear a minor ticket yesterday in SF and noticed the demographic of folks in there.

the demographic of the traffic court was mostly minorities and poor folks, completely out of whack with SF general population and what you expect traffic case tickets to reflect. Imagine the criminal cases.

this skew is even after accounting for pre filtering that happens before someone walks into the courtroom (who is ticketed by police, who pays early, who appears etc). Felt I was seeing the results of a system not working right.

Would the system be working well if only there were the correct ratios of demographic groups being oppressed by it?

Minorities have become the face of this issue because they are more likely to get caught up in the system in the first place. But the issue affects us all - perfectly non-racist cops would still run roughshod over plenty of people. What we need to repair is eventually-consistent justice so the murderers end up in jail (criminal) and wrongfully-harmed people are compensated for their losses directly from operating budgets (civil).

The injustice system has been allowed to degrade to its present state because most innocent people simply will not be harmed by it. It's only by getting the majority to see that injustice could have happened to them will you ever make them feel affected. Framing the issue around racism is ultimately self defeating - it turns the issue into one of those longstanding happens-to-other-people problems that people from the dominant group care about just enough to fit in/get laid/assuage conscience.

Anyone else notice that Hacker News has been systematically keeping articles about Police, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner from reaching the front page? This reminds of a post some months ago showing that any post with "NSA" in the headline got a 50% handicap to its points ranking. I wounder what the handicap is for this article.

I was thinking the same thing (disclaimer: i submitted it) but it's definitely weird the article is lingering @ 40

Good point. This is clearly of interest to many people, with 22 points right now. I generally dislike Matt Taibbi but this piece is thoughtful and even-handed rather than inflammatory.

As an aside: I don't understand how selling "loosies" can be a tax violation. Presumably the excise tax was paid when the packet of cigarettes was purchased in the first place!

The cigarettes are typically purchased in a low-tax state, transported to a high-tax one, and sold there.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/cigarette-smuggling...

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