To wit:
> wrongly detained him after identifying him as a suspect in a panhandling case.
Slammed to the ground for being suspected of panhandling? (To my mind, panhandling is akin to free speech.)
Just a regular guy going about his business, and he is murdered (and I don't use that term lightly) by the very people sworn to "protect and serve" him.
- Drug offenses: 46%
- Weapons, Explosives, Arson: 20%
- Sex Offenses: 11%
- Extortion, Fraud, Bribery: 6%
- Immigration: 5%
- Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses: 5%
- Robbery: 3%
- Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses: 3%
So drugs vs (WEA + BLPO + R + HAAKO) is 46% vs 39%. Last I checked 46 > 39, so yeah we are talking about things like pot.
[0] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
__EDIT__: It appears that the parent has removed their comment, so let me add context. Here I'm responding to the parent's claim that you can outright dismiss drug related crimes because it is all about violent offenses. I'm just trying to show that drugs play a big role and thus dismissing them is naive.
And the people in federal prison for drugs don't get there by smoking pot on their front porch. They're mostly there for trafficking.
> we're not talking about drug, we're talking about violent crime.
So my response was more in the lines of "we can't dismiss drugs when they are a big factor."
Note: this is also why HN tries to prevent editing, because now the context of what I was responding to is completely lost.
Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison. Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your information is misleading to make it look like most people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is factually untrue.
Jails, County, State, and Federal prisons are all different. It would definitely make sense that the more serious convictions, especially with harder drugs, goes to federal. That's kinda the point of federal...
All of the money put into cops, lawyers, prosecution, sentencing, prison, parole, etc could be put into tackling the consequences of legal use.
All of the money currently flowing into the black market, into gangs, into crime and violence causers, would try up.
How many of those that graduated to crack/meth etc. started out with simple marijuana arrests?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/22/four-in-ten...
It is difficult, but we have to try to be aware of the biases in the data we have. I should have mentioned in my first post that those were just federal stats. But I try to break down more in another comment state and jails, specifically about possession statistics.
Which I happen to agree is a waste of resources and probably does more harm than good by getting people started "in the system".
Only if you want to talk about the non-violent half to paint a picture that it’s pointless.
For the sake of discussion, assume pot is legal and those drug arrests didn’t happen. Low income areas still have higher rates of violent crime.
Is your argument that drug criminalization is causing other violent crimes?
Neither, it is US statistics.
Getting specifically the "over policed neighborhoods" statistics is a little trickier but when you do some location of arrest lookups you do see a higher percentage of arrests coming from those neighborhoods, so it would make for a reasonable assumption that those neighborhoods are a representative demographic of this dataset (if you're drawing from two jars and you draw 80% from one jar and 20% from the second jar, the marbles you have is a better representation of the contents of the first jar than they are of the second jar).
Tons?
Rape seems an unnecessarily emotional grab here, since most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows and aren't restricted by income.
Vandalism happens everywhere as well.
> It’s always the people in the white upper-class neighborhoods who think the police are the problem.
My mom grew up poor and told me to not trust the police and certainly not let them in the house without a warrant.
> ...because they celebrate...
Who is "they", in this context?
"Tons." "Always." "They." Your language suggests an agenda that you're presenting in absolutes.
That's what the person you replied to said. Not that more police would have been more arrests based on (just) their pot smoking, but on other behavior as well. I saw a lot of vandalism that led to kids being dragged by their ears back to their parents in middle-class neighborhoods, that would've resulted in arrests (even for misdemeanors) for kids in poor neighborhoods (where I've also lived and seen this difference).
In white neighborhoods small crimes would lead to police dragging the kid home, in minority neighborhoods they'd end up with a misdemeanor record (at least). All of this creates a bias in the algorithms which generally assume that someone with a criminal record of some sort is going to be a higher risk individual (which is probably a safe assumption for many crimes), but it is biased because people aren't charged with crimes at equal rates due to the biases in the existing system that these algorithms are more likely to exacerbate than alleviate. Now that the minority community has a thicker criminal record, the policing in that neighborhood continues to go up which continues to create increased conflict between the police and residents as the police end up arresting people for increasingly minor offenses, along with the major ones.
A lack of policing or difference in attitude of the police in poor and/or minority communities versus middle-class/wealthy and/or white communities is very much present in the US (and probably the world). This leads algorithms like those under discussion to end up inheriting the same or similar biases, whether the developers and marketers intended it or not.
The difference is that if you send all the cops to the "bad neighborhoods", then the "good neighborhoods" get away with a lot of crime, even if that crime is low-level.
Let's say all neighborhoods have 100 instances of low-level crime per day. A so-called "bad" neighborhood -- where most of the cops get sent to -- also has instances of much worse crime.
The end result of this officer allocation scheme is that people get arrested in the "bad" neighborhood for a mix of low-level crime and worse crime. But pretty much no one at all gets arrested in the "good" neighborhood, because there's basically no police presence there. So maybe you see in the "good" neighborhood a handful of arrests for those 100 instances of low-level crime, but in the "bad" neighborhood you see 60 arrests for that similar crime. (You also see arrests for more severe crime, but that's not the point.)
I'm of course making up numbers here, but regardless of the magnitude of the numbers, even if they differ between neighborhoods, the percentage of crime handled ends up being much lower in the "good" neighborhoods because of the simple fact that police aren't there to handle it. Sure, they'll come out if called, but response time is longer, and they have very little ability to see things happening in real-time.
Meanwhile, if you feed this data into your algorithm, it will start to believe that there's basically no low-level crime in the "good" neighborhoods -- even though it's the same! -- so it prioritizes those neighborhoods even less.
If you feed an algorithm bad data, it will only give you more bad data. And it becomes worse when you act on that data and feed it more results based on that bad data.
It can (and evidence supports that) at ac basic level:
1. There are more crimes committed in one neighborhood than another
2. Increasing police presence in the higher crime neighborhood does not decrease the occurrence of such crimes
3. Increased police presence leads to unjustified disproportionate enforcement of smaller violations being broken equally by both neighborhoods
Your original reply goes much farther than simply claiming less natural crime, and then adds a lot of armchair sociology without backing. When you ask rhetorical questions and follow with "I don't know", you are implying without evidence and it's not a constructive argument that appears in good faith.
You grow up in a food scarce household with a parent addicted to painkillers with no guidance on what a path to a successful future is and crime becomes a lot more palatable. Getting in the game starts to look like the only possible way to “make it”.
But if you actually bother to do some reading on the subject the conclusions are overwhelmingly clear. Over and over again social programs show very clearly that if you improve education and give people better opportunities to escape the poverty trap and better themselves you reduce crime.
The formula is simple really: if you give people opportunities to make an honest living then they will, for the most part, make an honest living; if you don't give people the opportunity to make an honest living then they will, for the most part, make a dishonest living.
Look at arrest data, the former is exactly what we're talking about. Most of these cases of police brutality come from basically random stops that focus on such minor violations (turn signals, jaywalking, etc) or "your car/description matches a potential subject". See parent and weed usage vs who gets caught with weed.
Not to mention that you throw in rape/murder/assault into a sentence with vandalism. Police have a historically terrible track record with rapes in both processing cases as well as no record of stopping them. Police react to these incidents, not prevent them. The idea that police presence stops these is not supported either as when police reduced their presence in NYC neighborhoods, crime actually went down.[1]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
Massively increased policing has created the environment in which many of these people are born and turn to crime. If you are constantly treated like a criminal, you may come to think of yourself as one.
My example occurred many moons ago before pot was decriminalized any where. I am old :)
Some knee-jerk reactions that we're seeing or considering"
1. Banning facial recognition.
2. Banning predictive policing (this article).
3. Defunding police departments
4. California's ACA5 amendment that seeks to remove anti-discrimination laws, allowing racial and gender discrimination.
https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-fed...
It's a common pattern in societies where the laws are so invasive and numerous that everyone breaks them. We need reasonable laws that are equally and fully enforced to reduce this particular outlet of racism.
Many of the "innocent pranks" and "fun times" that my grandparents and parents would tell me about from their youth, also have components that have been made illegal now.
Almost every Senior Prank has some component of B&E / vandalism.
I've just found it odd how the media we consume seems to exist in this completely different world, where baristas live in massive apartments they could never afford and most of the fun and excitement of the story comes from situations that in real life would most likely end in your arrest.
It seems like decades of being "tough on crime" and having a "war on drugs" has created a society where everyone is always breaking some law. That means that we are all at the mercy of Law Enforcement officers as they use their "professional discretion" to decide who is breaking it enough.
This is an older article but still relevant as ever https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/03/how-the-suprem...
Do you have an air freshener in your car, the police can pull you over for it. Then claim they smell alcohol or marijuana and search your person and vehicle. As long as they stopped you "in good faith" because they thought, even incorrectly, that they could stop you for obstructed view, then it's cool with the courts.
It seems like we are overdue for a correction. While every crime statistic has pointed to the fact that we live in the safest time in history, we continue with zero-tolerance tough-on-crime policy making that does nothing to make us safer.
That said, even if black Americans are more likely to commit these worst of offenses (as reported by victims), it's still unjust because any given black individual may not be guilty and doesn't deserve increased scrutiny based on the color of their skin--justice ought to be colorblind and individualistic.
That said, not everything that appears to be profiling is actually profiling. Police are deployed more densely to areas with high violent crime, and these areas tend to skew black. That means they're more likely to witness more minor offenses as well. The racial disparity here isn't due to profiling, its due to the high incidence of violent crime in certain predominately-minority communities. This is an important distinction because it determines the best course of action to solve the disparity problem--if the problem is mostly attributable to police profiling, then fixing profiling is the most urgent problem. If it's due to high incidence of violence in communities, then the best solutions will be various anti-violence programs and keeping violent offenders off of the streets (and ideally rehabilitating them).
Discretion in deciding which crimes to investigate is always necessary. Discretion on charging and guilty pleas seem much more problematic to me.
What are the specific, and large-scale efforts made to make the law and enforcement more equal?
We could at least try as hard as software bugs - rather than the current situation where the scale is tipped in the other way (ie there are numerous incentives to introduce 'bugs' into the system and not many to take them out)
In addition the fact that you can be arrested for resisting arrest means that if a police officer wants to arrest you they can do so and create a crime afterwards. Recent headlines have shown very vividly how police actively encourage and look for confrontations hoping to spark a reaction. In a high crime area, everyone is a criminal in much the same way everything looks like a nail to a hammer.
Imagine if this man had actually actively resisted the officer:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/24/man-su...