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.