And of course, it happened maybe twice in my life, not a couple times a week.
This means it is not legal for a police officer to control your identity unless they have established this risk of public disorder.
Of course, as a white person living in mostly affluent neighborhoods, I have not even been controlled once in my life. The experience of my friends of "north african descent" on the other hand, has been quite different.
Of course "reasonable cause" can (and usually will) mean, that if you happen to have the "wrong" skin-tone, hair-color etc. you will be controlled. The Police justifies this racial profiling with "experience" and "statistics" (at least in Germany)
> Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a "hunch"). Similarly, Border Patrol cannot search vehicles in the 100-mile zone without a warrant or "probable cause" (a reasonable belief, based on the circumstances, that an immigration violation or crime has likely occurred).
> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. Thus, although the 100-mile border zone is not literally "Constitution free," the U.S. government frequently acts like it is.
You're missing some important numbers here for this to be meaningful: Base rates.
If you're getting 10 spam emails per month, and 99% of them are in English, but you're receiving 1000 legitimate personal emails per month, and 20% of them are in English, that's a total of 210 English emails on average per month. In this case, while technically true that an email written in English is more likely to be spam than an email written in German, it's also such a very poor indicator that you'd be better off using another indicator entirely.
On top of that, you've only pinpointed two categories out of many more possible categories of emails. What if someone is getting 50 spam emails per month, 5 job offer emails per month, 10 updates relevant to their profession per month, 100 professional emails per month, and 50 personal emails per month, and the English:German ratios for those are all 99:1, 9:1, 4:1, 1:1 and 4:1 respectively? Suddenly just "this email is written in English" isn't all that important anymore.
Base rates are very, very, very, super important when discussing stats like these.
They are not allowed to search you without a reason (In theory. I heared that they might just say "I think I smelled cannabis" and then they have a reason.)
Disclaimer: IANAL, and maybe I got some details wrong.
In France, that depends mostly of your shade of skin.
Well, it mostly depend if you live in a sensible district or not. It happens that mostly Arab and black people live in sensible district because they are poorer than the normal average french people. And (relative) poverty is the source of a lot of social problems.
I don't say there is no racism in France too, there is. But it is more indirect, like people trying to avoid looking at black people, or people who prefer helping the white guy instead the black one at school is another example.
The taxi driver made no indication that it was anything abnormal.