https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...

Budget seems like the least of our problems in fixing U.S. policing, though I recognize in some cities it may be more of a problem than others. The biggest problem seems to be the huge amount of resistance from police to any change at all.

I'm watching this closely:

https://cornellsun.com/2021/04/02/mayor-svante-myricks-09-po...

I tried to search for the original source to see if I could find how they are calculating theses costs but didn’t have any luck.

I mention this because NYPD budget is often referenced as $6 billion, but that’s only operating costs, and the actual amount is closer to $11 billion (including fringe benefits like overtime and funding the NYPD pension).

With a 2020 GPD of $20,936 billion Then 0.8% of that is $167 billion

If we assume that policing costs are more closely tied to population rather than GDP we’d expect that NYPD costs to be about 2.5% of national amount. That’s approximately $4.2 billion.

But NYPD costs are $11 billion, which is 6.5% of estimated national policing costs (for 2.5% of the population).

Admittedly, I can imagine that there are reasons why a big city area might have higher than average costs, but 6.5% makes me feel that the 0.8% of GDP might be either underestimating how much US spends as part of GDP, or calculating national costs using different methods for different countries.

A huge problem is the massive, and influential, police union. Police resisting change at an individual or local level is one thing, but their union is a huge coordinated lobby that works against anything that would be better for the public if they perceive it as even slightly unfavorable to police.

[1]: https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/07/newark-must-do-more-to-st...

If we are overly fixated on racism by the police and confuse correlation with causation, we might entirely miss other structural/systemic factors that might be leading (or forcing) black people to criminal behavior more often than white people.

I am aware of some research that tries to estimate propensity to actually commit crimes using victim surveys instead of police data, but I see so many conflicting results from different academic fields that I don't feel like I can form an opinion.

All I know is that measuring disparities in arrests is not enough and cannot possibly be enough to distinguish police racism specifically from other racial disparities.

Arrest records do not provide this data either. If an area or activity is policed at a lower rate, it will look like fewer crimes are committed there.

Example: there have been public "420" festivals all over the country dating back to well before the recent legalizations. These were not accompanied by mass arrests, despite mass public lawbreaking. Drugs and underage drinking are endemic on college campuses. Somehow police are unable to arrest these lawbreakers. If you prefer finance, what percentage of financial fraud do you believe results in an arrest? Or consider the discretion allowed to police in deciding when to arrest someone for riding an unlicensed bicycle. There are many other examples of less-policed spaces.

Arrest records frequently tell you more about who is permitted to break laws than the number of crimes committed somewhere.

I recently had some deeper insights around this. I have witnessed reasoning for these things being different at different times over the years, but the main factor has been calls/reports/complaints from the communities.

Busting people at an airbnb in a quite retirement neighborhood as opposed to a college campus, drug complaints blocks from an elem school in a low income area as opposed to breckenridge, co - (which told it's police to leave weed alone many moons ago) - these things are not driven by a nationwide predisposition from those who swear allegiance to the blue cult of the country.. these things are actually driven by the individual community in most cases.

I'll admit sometimes that 'community' could be real-estate developers looking to gentrify or whatever- sometimes it could be 'x color people who fear Y people at X place' - and the bicycle thing in the news recently was probably someone complaining and pointing out safety concerns - which had bad optics when viewed through the 'but you don't do that to X percentage of other bikers' - sure..

I also understand there are places where people don't call cops do to fears or reprisal - and I don't think this is a color of skin thing so much.

I'd love to deep dive in this further, but my point is that it's not so much cops as a whole are some type of way - it's often more a reflection of individual neighborhoods and communities and their tolerance or lack of tolerance for various things - and often that is what is reflected in reports more than number of crimes committed in X or Y place.

Thankfully these things can change - sadly I already see some of pendulum swinging the other way however. In places where people are finding additional freedoms through "progressive DA's, and progressive law changes" some are not considering how their use of such affects other near them. So I expect an ebb and flow of these things based on how annoyed people are by effects - no matter the color of those involved.

Now you can point out disproportionate court cases, pleads, incarcerations and all those kinds of stats and get similar points made - and certainly there may be places that look at racial things - but I believe there it is more of an issue of socio-econimc access to legal assistance more than anything - and that is complex too.

> it's often more a reflection of individual neighborhoods and communities and their tolerance or lack of tolerance for various things

Combining this with the larger discussion, are you suggesting that predominantly white communities have a higher tolerance for lawless behavior like drug use, and thus are comfortable being policed at lower rates? (Or the converse, that communities of color are less tolerant of lawbreaking and demand more policing.) I admit that I haven't heard that before. And it makes me uncomfortable, because on balance people I have known across ethnic groups are pretty much the same. It would be a little odd to discover that white communities are generally more tolerant of criminal behavior.

> Busting people at an airbnb in a quite retirement neighborhood as opposed to a college campus, drug complaints blocks from an elem school in a low income area as opposed to breckenridge, co - (which told it's police to leave weed alone many moons ago)

Intentionally unequal application of the laws starts with this kind of thinking, and leads to downstream problems that spring from the resulting distrust of the justice system.

Your Breck (95% white) example is telling. Communities shouldn't be able to exempt themselves from state & federal laws just because most of the residents are white and they have decided they don't like those laws. Even writing it sounds absurd. And it's definitely not a privilege that is afforded to communities of color.

So I think it's not fair to paint 'cops' as letting "X peeps" go across the whole country and stats.. just as it's not fair to say "Y peeps" are committing more crime.. I agree stats do not reflect actual crimes committed - it more shows the local areas tolerance for types of crimes. Which why the opposing view about 420 parties and such you mention is not a good opposing view - it's a local thing. Comparing the arrests in Chicago to tolerance for non-violent smoking in Colorado does not show apples to apples.

Those different communities are pressuring politicians differently. Often times a crackdown on arrests for minor things in a 'broken windows' community is done to prevent other crime not the petty stepping stones that are reflected in arrest stats.

When you say "redirect attention to your initial suggestion that higher arrest rates of minorities is indicative of higher crime rates among those folks" - I think you are thinking of a comment made by someone else, don't think I was inferring that.

Hey, I am with you on the unequal law is bullshit - and I've been advocating for changes in policing for some years now. Unfortunately the climate for discussions on this have the country so divided by arguments with race that it's hard to really get all citizens together for true change.

Why is breck mostly white telling? it's the only example I am aware of that did that decades ago - I think if we take the race out of the equation we can have some better discussions about cities VS state on issues like this - we are having large battles in states vs cities with all sorts of important issues these days. The atlantic had an article about this not too long ago. I've watched many city vs state things biol the past several years - it's interesting, and I hope it leads to more people paying attention to state elections and legislatures!

If you want to focus on the 'communities of color' not getting similar policing - there could be interesting answers to questions around that - but they may not fit the narrative that is popular right now.

In the cities I have experienced lots of blue lights, there are lots of requests from residents to police. It appears to me that things like gun shots bring more cops, assaults on citizens and such bring them out, fighting for territory beings them. If no one called the cops they would rather be eating donuts somewhere I am sure.

I know this can vary locale to locale, but I think in general in most places around the US, harder policing is brought by request, and more is brought by increased violence.

Now - the time period that bloomberg had his "stop and frisk" - that huge unconstitutional violation of rights for years - I will march with you that the disproportionate results of that crap appear to be focused on mostly minorities - and even if they try to say the results justified the means - I disagree and could not believe we had that going on in this country.

Even then - look at the country, it's a very big place, and bloomberg's persecution is a small blip on the map by square miles - so most of the country is not doing that kind of thing the past 50 years.

I am glad writing "because most of the residents are white and they have decided they don't like those laws." sounds absurd, because it is - the local community there wrote laws to stop the local police from coming down on weed smokers / sellers.. they did not get a pass from the state and feds, but they also did not have multiple shootings every week over it - which would of brought pressure to crack down on things.

Truth is - many 'communities of color' have been asking for strong policing, because they have been hotbeds of violence and don't like it. I do not say this to be divisive by color - I've noticed a big shift since we occupied Afganastan in more 'communities of whites' having had increases in lifestyle changes that have had a large increase in request for more hard core policing in their neighborhoods.

I wish we would take white black and all that out of these discussions and get more to citizens expect X types of service from the men and women (and whatever other pronouns) in blue..

we should all at least get the protections listed in the bill or rights.

Sadly I have seen recently many asking cops for more intrusions into people's lives and property to stop 'assumed crime' - and this is about white people.. It's like the citizens around here don't even know what the bill of rights says.

I assure you this is an American citizen VS the state thing - much more than it's a white vs black thing - in most of the country, most of the time.

Yours is the same argument that George Floyd deserved what he got because he was a criminal. Being arrested or frisked by police does not a criminal make. Conviction does.

It's a duck.

Regardless of what you want to call it in the time between the event later deemed criminal, and the sentencing, surely you see that that's what GP was referring to? That there may be differences in demography of 'who is involved in these events'.

> If we are overly fixated

Sorry but that is gaslighting and victim blaming. Tell the parent of a black teenager to not be overly fixated on police reform.

All of these are considered crimes in all jurisdictions I know of in the USA: theft/burglary/robbery, violence or threat thereof, and reckless endangerment. If you commit one of those acts, you have definitionally committed a crime, even if you are not convicted in a court of law.

> dismisses the overwhelmingly higher rates of arrests for non whites as not being a systemic racism issue

I encourage you to re-read what I wrote, because that isn't what I said.

My post raises a question of causality. There are several common proposals for why arrest rates for blacks are disproportionately high:

1. Police are racist, so they arrest black people at higher rates than other people, regardless of criminality.

2. Criminal law is written specifically to target black people.

3. Black people, due to systemic racism elsewhere in society, end up committing more acts-that-are-legally-defined-as-crimes, and this eventually leads to a greater number of arrests.

4. Actual racist ideology, which is generally vile and I will not repeat it here.

The reality is probably a combination of explanations 1-3, and there is surely mutual causality among them.

Any serious attempt to understand the problem must attempt to disentangle these explanations from each other.

> assumes that white people commit fewer crimes with no data to back it up

I said that we specifically don't have good data, but it's not safe to assume that all demographics commit crimes at the same rate. See above.

> Sorry but that is gaslighting and victim blaming. Tell the parent of a black teenager to not be overly fixated on police reform.

This is a bad faith misrepresentation of what I wrote.

If anything, the media getting stuff kinda-wrong but still raising awareness is a net positive.

Also it should be obvious that police reform is necessary, and obviously people will care the most about the issues that affect them personally.

Moreover, nothing ever seems to get done without single-minded people focusing intently on a single problem. We need people working on all aspects of the racism issue, including racism in policing and law.

But you simply cannot look at the arrest numbers and assume that the discrepancy is definitely and entirely because of police racism. It would be fallacious to do so, and if you intend to put forth policy based on data then you should try to avoid logical fallacies in the process.

Hence the systemic racism problem in a nutshell. It only makes sense through the lense of human bias and racism. Are those "people" really more frequently involved in said events, or are they more frequently policed?

Now that you've specified though, the only remaining wiggle room is 'who is actually committing the crimes'.

80% arrests being black people is 'fine' if 80% of 'arrestable crime'[^] is committed by the black population; it just points to something other than policing needing improvement. Education perhaps, or welfare.

[^] by this I just mean that not all convicted crime involves an arrest, and maybe there are demographic differences in the types of crimes committed

Yes, policing and criminal justice in America fucking sucks (especially if you have dark skin) and needs major reform no matter what. But I don't want to start seeing ghosts where none exist, and chasing after them instead of focusing on other problems.

Edit: I explained this better in a different comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925138

This is vague and leads to confusion. We shouldn't imagine we can learn anything simply by judging the characters of individual officers. If our laws and police practices are racist, the beliefs and actions of the officers themselves won't matter. Of course, there are racist officers, just as there are racist judges, legislators, grocers, veterinarians, etc. I doubt that Newark has a high concentration of racist police officers relative to the rest of the nation, however.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people:

White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3

White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2

White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8

The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe.

This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system". There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. That cop will (involuntarily) collect statistics on the world around him or her, and will act accordingly. We call it learning. You can't help but do it. I think some small proportion of this enormous difference is due to a feedback loop, i.e. people end up murdering more because they're policed more.

Insofar as you are "outraged" by this simple statement of fact, you are part of the problem--not the solution. Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye. Ignoring the obvious truth proves to me that you don't really care about actually helping people, and are really in it to impress your friends with how woke you are.

There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution.

FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...

Do you think we can improve the damage we've done through policing?

I agree! I infer you think it has some causal connection with murder rates. I think that's probably true, but that the relationship is weak. Black people in the U.S., while poorer than average compared to the rest of the U.S. population, are some of the richest people in the world in terms of their actual material consumption. There are lots of poorer (and much poorer) populations out there who do not display similar murder rates. I take that as evidence that not being on the same footing economically is probably not a primary driver of the high murder rate among Black Americans.

>Do you think we can improve the damage we've done through policing?

Yes! Step one is stop causing new damage. I think the easiest way to accomplish this is to end the War on Drugs once and for all. It's the lowest-hanging fruit--a watermelon-sized apple really. We're starting to go down this path as a nation, and it's imperative we keep going down that path. There will be negative effects, but I think the positive effects will greatly outweigh them.

If you want to try to paint a picture of the modal murder in the U.S., it's "Young brown man argues with other young brown man about something silly, things escalate, someone pulls out a cheap pistol and shoots the other guy"

Gang murders, while profitable fodder for mass media, are a clear minority.

0: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Problem is that you have lots of poor immigrants that immigrated here from former communist countries, or latin america, or Laos/Cambodia, with no money and no savings whatsover. Some came as starving refugees, and are still poorer than the average.

Yet, they don't end up doing crime at the same rate as some other poor people.

Being poor seems like a copout and doesn't address the issue.

First of all, most police stops and arrests aren't for murder, but for various petty crimes (particularly drugs and traffic violations) that are certainly unevenly enforced, even controlling for other factors (see e.g. see e.g. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...), so citing murder statistics here to seems a little irrelevant, as they are such a small fraction of police stops. It is also probably not an effective means of catching murderers (instead turning communities against the police, perhaps contributing to the pathetic murder clearance rates achieved by police). As you probably know, many have argued that there is both overpolicing of petty crimes and underpolicing of violent crimes in minority communities ( see, e.g. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8411733/black-community-polici...).

But, sticking to murder rates, these statistics also ignore a lot of dynamics. At least in urban areas (I don't have much familiarity with rural areas), most murders aren't individuals acting independently to commit murder. Instead, a large fraction of murders are gang-related (either directly, or collaterally), suggesting that to large extent, differential gang prevalence might be a dominant factor in the difference in murder rates.

Why are gangs prevalent today in some communities and not others? 100 years ago, gangs in places like Chicago were predominantly ethnic white (think Al Capone), though those gangs have largely declined and no longer play a larger role as far as I can tell. Nowadays, 90% of gang members appear to be Black or Hispanic (https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demograph...). Gangs of course are not all the same (some are probably more violent than others), but maybe the right question to be asking is why are gangs so prevalent among urban minorities.

I don't have any special knowledge here, but I imagine that in many cases, differential policing may certainly be a direct or indirect contributor to high gang prevalence. . There of course other many other reasons (community disinvestment, inertia, the "war on drugs."), but differential policing has the potential to cause a positive feedback loop here (unfair treatment -> higher gang membership -> higher violent rates -> unfair treatment) that probably needs to be broken. Of course, historically, unfair treatment of Blacks well predates the formation of Black street gangs (according to https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/434..., Black street gangs didn't become prevalent in large urban areas until the 50's/60's).

It might be "natural" for police to treat communities with higher murder rates differently, but that does not mean that it's the smart or right thing to do.

Here is the strongest presentation of this argument that I've seen: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe...

I don't have a well-formed opinion here, but IMO it's worth considering many possible combinations of factors.

This is really good

We should be careful with what we're talking about here: stops vs. arrests vs. crimes committed vs. offenders. They're all different things. The argument I'm making is basically this: the murder statistics are the most reliable, so we'll look at those. We should expect a very strong correlation between murder rates and other violent crime, though. And this expectation of much higher rates of violent crime in general should lead us to expect much higher arrest rates among Black Americans relative to other populations all else being equal. Now, all else obviously isn't equal. But the magnitude of the difference in murder rates is absolutely enormous (and it'll about double when we're just thinking about men), so we should expect that the majority of the difference in arrest rates is driven by the same thing...whatever is causing Black Americans to murder at 7x the rate of everybody else.

As I commented elsewhere, it isn't actually true that gang-related killings are most killings.[0]

If you want to try to paint a picture of the modal murder in the U.S., it's "Young brown man argues with other young brown man about something silly, things escalate, someone pulls out a cheap pistol and shoots the other guy"

Gang murders, while profitable fodder for mass media, are a clear minority.

0: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Note that applying 50% to the number of 2019 Chicago murders already saturates the nationwide "Gangland killings" in the FBI UCR, suggesting that perhaps many of the "unknown" murders would fall into that category. It would also not surprise me if many of the "other arguments" killings are also gang-related or at least gang-associated. Of course, it doesn't help that ~half of murders go unsolved here (and in many other cities) and gang-related violence is especially unlikely to find cooperative witnesses.

That said, this is only place with a police department not known for its honesty. Other places might be different. Southern states all have above average white homicide rates, but only Louisiana seems to have an above-average Black homicide rate, at least according to https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/23/health/gun-deaths-in-men-by-s... (caveat 1: this is victims, I could not quickly find corresponding data for offenders. caveat 2: most Blacks live in the South, it's not surprising those states might drive the average.).

My gut says you're right, Chicago probably doesn't generalize well to the rest of the U.S. It could be that there are huge swaths of the country where there basically are no gangs, and so all murders are not gang-related. But still, the data you're showing makes the federal numbers seem way too low...

This [0] suggests that about 1/3 of murders in the U.S. go unsolved.

0: https://projectcoldcase.org/cold-case-homicide-stats/

How does that compare with other metros? My impression is that police and schools are some of the most expensive services cities provide, and both consume a significant chunk of most cities' budgets.

And if it's the case that people in the city's black community are committing arrestable offenses (however stupid some definitions of what is an offense for which you can be arrested and charged with for are), then what should the department do? Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing just because it's bad PR?

It's apparently not popular to mention and undoubtedly there are many social victimization factors at work contributing to it, but young men in the black community really do commit more violent crime and crime of many other types than do many young men in a number of other ethnic communities.

There is a lot of evidence, that is easy to find, that laws criminalize African-Americans (e.g., drugs abused by poor African-Americans are criminal and result in prison; those abused by wealthy white people are sicknesses and result in treatment); that police harass and are brutal toward them (e.g., driving while black, predictive policing, and all the well-documented brutality and racism), and that prosecutors and courts sentence them to disproportionately harsh sentences, including long probation and loss of voting rights, and the inability, with a conviction, to get employment.

In my city I've seen the police in action many 5 times. Twice, it involved clear abuse and harassment of peaceful African-Americans. It's just my anecdotal experience, but are the odds?

Your argument is decades-old at this point; we know so much more now. What do you think of all that's been learned in the meantime (and by learned, I mean learned by the wealthy white population - it was known by some for generations)? Are we going to just rehash decades of learning? Nobody is making the points you are arguing with.

You're half right - the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reformed the punishment ratio from 100:1 to about 18:1, and later in 2018 Congress made this change retroactive. This certainly improved the issue, but lawmakers continue to discuss whether it should be eliminated entirely.

Source: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/19/22336224/equal-act-cocaine-sen...

White people consuming cannabis is not typically a police priority.

> you suggest that issues of race and crime in America are settled, or that we've "learned" the right answer, suggests that you believe people on the other side of this issue are somehow remedial. Surely you see how this can be an obstacle to convincing them you are correct.

But these strawperson characterizations and this victimhood are more distractions from the issues, as is the ignorance of the GGP post I responded to above - they are well-known ways of halting progress. And yes, there are some things that are well-established (though again, I haven't said the words you put in my mouth); I'm not going to spend time reviewing all human knowledge (also a well-known technique of stopping discussion). I'm here to move forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0H4M5uP_y8

One thing they reference during this podcast but don't talk about in much detail is the case of Tony Timpa. Many of the things many claim only happen to black Americans are in fact more general issues of police brutality, poor training, or hard realities of policing. And that means yes, it happens to white Americans too.

The last thing I want to do is distract from the issues. I want us to move past these surface level discussions that we are inundated with in both the professional and social media realms. Please watch the Glenn and John episode above for more on what I mean.

Edit: Apologies. To be clear, Tony Timpa was a white man killed by a police officer in Dallas a few years ago via knee on neck. No media attention or mass protests.

Edit 2: For those more textually inclined, here is McWhorter's most recent post on the topic https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-victorians-had-to-a...

Edit: Both links I posted discussed studies, statistics, and analysis relevant to this that belie your claim. Please rebut those or post your own.

I'll add that much of the international criticism of the number of police shootings in America fails to take into account the number of guns the citizenry has, legally registered or otherwise. This leads to greatly increased risk for all involved and leads police to use tactics that might not be needed elsewhere.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/04/charge...

Yes. No one’s ordered police to focus on anyone one kind of crime. Police in America have total discretion to choose which laws they enforce and which they don’t.

In Arizona you can get six months in jail for spitting in a public park, but you don’t see Arizona cops trying to arrest everyone for that. It’s a federal crime to let your dog bark in a National Park but the park police don’t really care. Similarly, there’s nothing forcing cops to focus on marijuana possession.

The regulation (36 CFR § 2.15) says it is prohibited to take pets to any “area closed to the possession of pets”, or to “[allow] a pet to make noise that is unreasonable considering location, time of day or night, impact on park users, and other relevant factors, or that frightens wildlife”. It is entirely reasonable to have this written down, so that it can be enforced if necessary.

The presence of dogs has a significant impact on the behavior of wild animals, and park rangers absolutely do care if you bring your dog to areas of a National Park where it should not be, or if your dog is incessantly barking or howling in areas of the park where it is a nuisance. They will walk up to you and tell you to take your dog directly back to your car, or tell you to shut your dog up or leave.

If you refuse to follow directions / give them a hard time about it, this regulation gives them authority to take further action, including charging a fine etc.

NJ recently legalized weed, so pretty soon those arrests won't be an issue.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-marijuana-le...

I would hazard a guess that if they were instead selling bootlegged booze illegally they would also be arrested. I’m not clear what point you’re trying to make.

1) Selling bootleg booze has health/quality risks that selling weed doesn't. You don't see crackdowns on people selling other plants without a license.

2) Legalizing possession and then only giving licenses to well-connected people who are excellent at getting paperwork through the system is, well, a lot better than nothing but doesn't really solve the whole problem.

Results: Alcohol, heroin and crack emerged as the most harmful drugs (overall weighted harm score 72, 55 and 50, respectively). The remaining drugs had an overall weighted harm score of 38 or less, making them much less harmful than alcohol. The overall weighted harm scores of the EU experts correlated well with those previously given by the UK panel.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881115581980

If someone wants to do it, they can put in the work to 'get the paperwork through the system'; if they just want it to be available to them and their friends, well, now it is, because someone else has put in that work. I don't really see the issue?

(But then, I'm glad to live in a country that hasn't legalised it, so what do I know.)

That's not to say that getting a license isn't harder than starting a fast food franchise, but the metric of difficulty we use here shouldn't be the typical weed dealer.

Probably a better comparison would be an entrepreneur trying to start a liquor store. Even then, it makes sense to me that as society tries to figure out the best way to do this, it goes carefully & with a lot of scrutiny to figure out how to do it right. It's not the sort of thing that should have a "move fast & break things" approach.

As far as 'move fast and break things'.. in one sense, preserving the status quo is conservative, but it is also continually breaking things all the time. Glass, ribs, lives, etc. Compared to the status quo, we could break fewer things.

Drug laws were not created in a vacuum. They are just one step on a long journey of racially motivated oppression.

I mean, they are breaking the new marijuana laws. Is this wrong? If I try and make my own moonshine and sell it I’ll go to jail too.

And much of that is strongly correlated with race.

You could also never be caught for moonshining, I know drug dealers who have sold for years without any police contact.

[0] People died from consuming THC carts that were tainted with Vitamin E acetate. Otherwise, weed products have not killed anyone ever.

there are also concerns about microbial contamination with weed that is improperly grown/processed. this is exactly why weed ought to be legal but regulated. people engaged in grey market sales are performing an end run around the new safety regulations.

but anyways, that's kinda besides the point. if people are growing stuff for their own consumption, I don't really care how safely they do it. I'm all for people distilling whiskey at their own risk. but if you're going to make money selling stuff to other people, it should be as safe as is reasonably possible. somehow I get the idea that random dudes selling flowers/concentrates/cartridges aren't looking that deeply into their supply chain. people died recently from what should be a fairly harmless plant.

And events like that also represents a significant financial loss to the producers, which itself acts as a form of accountability above & beyond regulatory penalties that might apply.

Basically, it doesn't matter if microbial contamination of weed isn't any more dangerous than for vegetables because current agricultural products have a remediation process in place to mitigate the danger, a process that doesn't exist for unregulated weed.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/29/fac...

- Rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black homicide are similar, at around 80% and 90%

- Rates of Black-on-white and white-on-Black homicide also within 8 points

- Police kill Black people at disproportionate rates

In addition, the link provided only covers relative homicide rates, ie what percentage of homicides that occur are committed by member of a given race. It does not address what percentage of individuals in a given demographic that have committed homicide.

These sources from the fbi provide a bit better context:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf

Of course, looking at crime statistics only through the lens of race and ethnicity also misses a lot of context. Poverty rates have a huge impact on crime rates and due to racism, both present and past, poverty rates in the American black demographic are much higher than poverty rates in the American white demographic.

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137

https://www.statista.com/statistics/422520/us-rate-of-violen...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-rac...

I am flagging this because you're a throwaway account who's calling people Nazis and "hardcore racists" for referring to the exact same dataset you yourself brought into the discussion. This type of grossly unprincipled behavior is why having a productive discussion about crime in this country is impossible.

That is no more true than it is without the word “extrajudicial”. It’s homicide, sure, but not all homicide is murder, and not all exteadjudicial crime fighting that results in death meets the definition of murder (or even criminal homicide.)

> Lack of trust in the system is a problem, but retributive killings are not the solution.

Retributive killings (and extradjudicial response generally) aren’t intended as solution to lack of trust in the system, they are solutions to other problems for which the palpable hostility of the system forecloses otherwise superior solutions.

Dismantling the system and replacing it with one that is trustworthy is the solution, but it was one that is actively opposed by those whosd relative position is supported by the features of the system that render it untrustworthy to the population at issue.

Yes but how the data is recorded and interpreted is definitely skewed by a population not being able to rely-on/trust what should be public services.

What is the correct solution for tax payers that are criminalized by the institutions that they are forced to fund?

For decades nobody even believed the black horror stories about police misconduct until body cams/camera phones were widely available and the news was forced to cover them.

The FBI stats seem to back up the above commenter (however one would expect policing biases to be reflected in their statistics). If you compare a random white person[1] and a random black person, the black person is ~5x more likely to be murdered by someone of the same race[2]. Even though the absolute number of murders is about the same, the population sizes are very different, which lines up with one group being disproportionately represented in arrests[3]

1: It's worth noting that the FBI stats lump most Hispanic/Latino people under 'white', I'm not sure if the numbers would look different if you used the colloquial definition of 'white'

2: 0.001% chance of being murdered per year vs a .006% chance

3: If anything I think that's proof of of institutional racism's impact. I'm guessing the disparity is really just showing income inequality

I'm suggesting that the fractions might be different but it's a pain to do that math on my phone's calculator while also referring to pages in a web browser so I won't bother. Feel free to run the numbers if you're so inclined and update me!

>But, you spent the whole post talking about race, but you really think it is income? I'm confused.

I don't think it's controversial to say that racism and classism in the USA are inextricably linked. Sometimes this is even enforced via laws (a common example being the disparity in sentencing guidelines for crack vs other forms of cocaine).

>Is there a Goodwin's Law for citing FBI statistics yet

Don't make bad faith attempts to invoke Godwin's law. I cited FBI statistics because you used them first in your own comment.