Re:Profiling Atherton
by NoPiece on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @02:38AM
(#6171220)
The author is cherry picking his data. He has a pool of 12,500 tickets, and is looking at a very narrow type of infraction that affected 182 drivers of 12,500. In that small pool, why do hispanic names show up disproportionately? Maybe they are more likely than your typical Atherton resident to not have a license due to immigration status.
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12500 refers to the section of the vehicle code under which 182 tickets were issued: http://dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d06/vc12500.htm
You are right! I read, "Why were so many (over a hundred) of the 12500 tickets," incorrectly. Looks like there were actually 1509 records in the author's JSON object.
Nonetheless, it is an infraction type that will disproportionately target illegal immigrants since they can't get driver's licenses. If the author wanted to show racism, he'd need to pick something like speeding and show that hispanic names show up more than their presence in the area.
This. He is ignoring the rest of the data and looking only at "vehicle code violations" - and then irresponsibly reporting it to seem like Hispanics driving without licenses is a disproportionally large drain on police resources when in fact, as you say, this is only a narrow violation comprising a small minority of total tickets issued.