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)