I don’t understand what you mean by this? Where did you get this sourced? Do you mean that the suspects were complying and were shot anyway?
I read the above like this…If the white person raises their hands when told to do so and the black person doesn’t and reaches into his pocket instead, who is going to get shot dead?
No, what I already explained that they are pulled over in the parts of town where they live which happens to have higher incidences of crime and more patrolling. More cars patrolling equals more spotting of driving infractions. If the same number of patrols frequented white or Hispanic areas due to public safety needs and few patrolled black areas, those figures for whites and Hispanics would rise too. Also, it would be interesting to know how search procedures are done, like after the officer runs the plates and the license or how that goes down. Is there a criteria beyond race that the officer uses, like compliance, like criminal history, the vehicle’s history which makes them more apt to do a search? My friend who is an older white man has been searched a few times and he hates cops, if that hate is blatantly obvious to the officer, he may punish the driver with a search for being disrespectful, rather than being black. If black people are less cooperative and more disrespectful in general, then it’s common sense that their behavior may be punished depending on the officer. I’d like to see how black officers handle their brothers during traffic stops and if they punish behaviors they do not like with time-consuming intrusions as well.
By strawman I mean an argument that no one is making that’s easier to refute than the arguments that are actually being made. I think the term comes from fighting a war: you don’t gain any ground by setting up straw dummies in your enemies’ clothes and knocking them down, you win by actually fighting your enemy. Similarly, you don’t make a good case for your position by refuting a bunch of arguments that no one’s making against it.
As I am using this term, I mean stories about individual cases. Across the US, 10 million people were arrested in 2015. No one of those stories is going to tell you very much about arrest as a whole. Even several dozen stories won’t. People use stories because our brains are wired to respond to concrete examples, we imbue the characters with emotions and we make intuitive moral judgments about them. But when we’re talking about all arrests, all police actions, all suspects, anecdotes are more of a distraction. Whatever the overall narrative, there will be anecdotes that defy it, where unusual people or events produce unusual outcomes. Again, there might be dozens of such cases, but they don’t tell us very much about the whole story.
This seems circular. I will grant that if the police target the black areas of town, they will tend to stop, search, and arrest more black people. But why are they targeting the black areas of towns? Even if the answer is that those areas have higher crime, if that “higher crime” is measured by the number of arrests, it’s going to be skewed by the fact that the police are targeting the black areas of town. So the argument is, more arrests of black people because the police target their neighborhoods, and the police target their neighborhoods because the arrest rates there are higher.
This also doesn’t answer why searches incident to stops, or the use of violence in the case of arrest, or the rate at which unarmed suspects are killed are higher for blacks. Since these measures look at rates (e.g. searches per stop of a black person versus searches per stop of a white person), they wouldn’t be thrown off by police focusing most of their efforts on black areas.
I don’t think it’s generally a matter of policy, but of practice (though I’m fairly certain there are places in the US where racism is policy). While I think there is some conscious racism, I think a lot of it is unconscious. I think cops often follow their guts, and don’t notice when part of what’s triggering their gut instincts is racial bias. I think the two studies cited in the article as finding little or no evidence of anti-black bias actually show that police mean well, and are overwhelmed in the heat of the moment: in a situation where they aren’t facing a potential threat to themselves or anyone else, they have internalized that they need to think a little longer to see if it’s bias that’s motivating their actions, so they react less quickly. When their life is on the line, that reflection is dropped in favor of speed, and biases shine through.
I do think Hispanic people are racially profiled, yes. I’m sure white officers are among those guilty of it, but I’m not sure if they are particularly guilty. The DOJ report notes that “a racially diverse police force does not guarantee community trust or lawful policing.[…] African Americans are equally likely to fire their weapons, arrest people, and have complaints made about their behavior, and sometimes harbor prejudice against African American civilians themselves.” While, like you, the report recommends taking steps to improve diversity on the police force, it does not claim that as a silver bullet.
As for evidence that Hispanic people are victims of racial profiling, we can look at the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force report which found, like in Ferguson, that black and Hispanic people were significantly more likely to be stopped and searched, but less likely to have contraband. Note especially the rate of “investigatory” stops of black people on page 9.
You have no reason to read it that way, I’m not sure why you would.
Look, can we at least agree that if we want to find out about racial disparities in policing, what we want to do is compare like to like: white people with hands in the air to black people with hands in the air; black people with hands in their pockets to white people with hands in their pockets. I don’t think there has been a study that specifically looks at where a suspects hands were at the time of the shooting, but if you have one please provide. Otherwise, let’s go with the data we do have and not make unfounded assumptions about what it shows.
EDIT: I suppose we have to make assumptions, and better that they be stated; I retract that last sentence. So we have a study that says black people are more often killed when unarmed, and two competing hypotheses:
that the disparity is because black people are more likely to keep their hands in their pockets when unarmed and confronted by police; and
that police are more likely to pull the trigger when they’re looking at a black person.
Police patrol troubled areas more because the areas have high volumes of 911 calls first and foremost, what comes out of those calls may be arrests. Isn’t that called doing what a police officer is paid to do?
How’s about instead of targeting the black neighborhoods in a racially biased way that the police are instead doing their jobs in preserving the peace in areas with high volumes of 911 calls? Could they be following procedure doing their jobs by showing up more frequently in troubled areas where police assistance if often required? Had that possibility even crossed your mind? I don’t think so.
[An aside brought on by your use of the word “targeting” referenced as harmful intention, rather than targeting to help the areas with the most 911 activity: Do you want to prove that only white police officers break the law to racially profile blacks? Or is this conversation to grow to include Hispanics? Does it have to do with white guilt? Are you prone to silently acknowledging racial differences? I only ask these questions because of my belief that you want to think ill of other white people and that goes back to anti-white brainwashing which while you may deny it, you exhibit a strong desire to prove that white people are guilty of racial prejudices.]
“For every action, there is a reaction.” Your behavior during a routine traffic stop or any stop will impact a police officers decisions. For instance, if you sit in your car without getting your drivers license out and ready to give the police officer when he requests it, you are already playing with fire making him request it and him having to remain unalarmed with whatever actions you make next to retrieve it. Most folks wear their license or have it in a purse, if you then quickly reach over under a seat or into a glove box, you may have a weapon drawn and/or fired on you. You are exhibiting abnormal behaviors by 1. not having your license ready for the officer 2. not keeping your license in a usual place 3. having your hand disappear into an area where weapons are frequently concealed. Add disrespect and/or willful disobedience to the mix and bang, bang, your dead. You were an unarmed dummy and the officer did not feel like waiting to see the barrel of a gun.
During traffic stops, people who do not have their license in their hand when the cop approaches the car should be ticketed. That requirement would cut down on a lot of driver stupidity and also signal to the cop that there may be more going on than a simple traffic violation, drunk driving, under the influence of some substance, suspended license, forgot license, etc.
A person of interests behaviors are paramount to how you are treated by an officer. Willful disobedience, even disrespect, can greatly dictate steps that end up in a physical altercation real quick. Fleeing, resisting arrest, failure to give an accurate name and address, not following the polices orders which are always simple. You do not have the freedom to behave any old way when you are dealing with the police and this is common sense stuff.
You’re offering a few hypotheses to explain the observation that more blacks are arrested then we would expect based on demographics:
911 calls are more frequent in majority black areas
Police patrol areas where the most 911 calls are made
The rate at which blacks vs. whites are arrested is what we should expect given the demographics of the areas the police patrol most often.
Do you have anything other than speculation to support these? If they are just speculation, then I would argue that we have better reason to think that it is racial bias that’s driving the observed disparities than that these three hypotheses are true (i.e., the hypothesis that race-bias is the cause of disparities in racial treatment by police is better supported by observation). It’s not impossible that your hypotheses are true, but given other observed correlations between police conduct and suspect race, the simpler explanation is that the same racial biases drive disparities in stops, searches, arrests, and sentencing, than that each of these similar race-correlated disparities is actually driven by a diverse set of additional hypotheses that just happen to result in what look like race correlation.
But your hypotheses seem testable, are you aware of any studies that test them?
EDIT: Here is a study that seems to support hypothesis #1, showing a higher rate of 911 calls from “predominantly black” neighborhoods. I’d like to see the actual correlation between black population and 911 call volume, but this is better than nothing.
How would I find out where the most 911 calls come from?
911 calls are more frequent in majority black areas
Which would be a majority of Ferguson in 2015, but I wonder if it’s as high as 3/4 of the entire city.
I added a link to a study to my last post before I saw your most recent post, but I’ll add it here too. See the map on page 865. Link updated, map is in the “Results” section.
Actually, it’s all common sense stuff and yes, I believe that what happens is a faulty overall result that looks like a race correlation.
Stops…more police in black areas doing their jobs equals more stops
searches…cooperate and you won’t be searched
arrests…witnesses/surveillance often identify suspect, failure to cooperate with police and you will be arrested
sentencing…are they repeat offenders yes or no?
It gives that error because it’s an https link and the https is misconfigured. You can still go to it using the advanced options, but I’ll see if I can find a version that doesn’t throw the error. I updated the link.
#3 is not common sense. #1 and #2 could be true, and police could still over-target black areas because of racial bias. And again, the evidence of racial bias at every other level of criminal justice interaction supports that conclusion.
It supports that conclusion because the people set the parameters up to be slanted…no common sense or an agenda to cause racial disharmony. If it has all been faultily set-up and interpreted like you want to, then sure white cops hate blacks and want to throw them all in jail.
I have to down load the PDF to read it? Is it worth it to find out the 911 call volume of that area in relation to non-black areas?
Right, this is the collection of diverse hypotheses I was talking about. Just going off of no evidence at all, your position is already less likely than mine because it requires more independent hypotheses than mine.
But we also don’t have to go off of zero evidence. How strongly are you willing to commit to the position that all studies finding sentencing disparities failed to control for whether or not the defendant was a repeat offender? That’s the easiest thing in the world to control for, studies have been done that do control for it, and they still find a 10% disparity in sentence length:
This is part of what I’m looking for but an overall one for 2015 and I need to see a map of the demographics, but I’m even finding it difficult to find a reliable source for what the black population was in 2015, rather than go by the 2010 census in light that the increase of blacks in Ferguson kept rising dramatically up until 2010, goes to reason that it kept rising until 2015.
What I find interesting in studies done on resisting arrest, blacks are more frequently arrested for it than whites. How do we find out the reasons why? Bodycams are going to capture these interactions but their use is recent and there may not be any studies yet that witness why.
The preset prejudice by an officer or is it the misbehavior of the suspect that leads to the arrest? Common sense, police don’t arrest for NO reason, so what were their reasons to arrest the black folks? This is what is not being discussed honestly, the cultural/racial differences, the training for those differences.
And yes, it is “common sense” that if all police are patrolling Chicago (for example), then most arrests are going to be in Chicago, especially sense police follow the 911 calls.
And the extremely high relative violence rate of blacks vs whites has nothing at all to do with police bias other than to help inspire it.
Yes, “unarmed” does mask assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest, but also a lot of failure to complies.
I asked Carleas, if a white person complies and does as they are told and a black does not, then the black person is going to get roughed up by police or even shot depending on what the police believe them to be doing as they refuse to comply.
Where are those studies? I guess that there is no liberal outcry for that truth, just the perverted way they want to represent reality that white police officers are bad prejudiced men.
In regards to the study you linked, taken from first paragraph of the report
So is the report talking about first time offenders of any crimes in both cases: black and white? Not made clear!
In 1st paragraph on page 2.
What does this mean?
Page 2, paragraph 2.
So racial disparity does not occur against black females enough to make their case. Why would it only be against black males and not against black females equally if race is indeed the factor for such disparity?
Due to a headache, I’ll let you get back to me on my questions and comments so far about this study before I keep going.
I think there are a few ways to design studies to try to address this, depending on what data is available and what we’re willing to treat as proxies for what:
If we have access to a lot of body camera footage, we could try score incidents to determine if suspect behavior really does account for the difference. If we want to be super rigorous about it, we could replace people with wire-frames or otherwise mask race prior to scoring. Either way, this would be hard and incredibly time consuming. It also depends on the quality of body cam data, which right now doesn’t seem that great; officers often have discretion to turn off their body cameras, and footage seems to go missing when convenient (but here I may be overrelying on anecdote).
We could look at how often resisting arrest charges are filed when a body camera is present vs. when one is not. We could also look at racial disparities in cases where a body camera is present vs. when one is not. We could look at trends in arrest statistics in areas as they roll out body cameras and that shapes officer behavior. We could look at how often cases are dismissed when a body camera is present, and any racial disparity there.
We could compare resisting arrest statistics between wealthy and poor areas, and (if data is available), between wealthy and poor defendants. There, wealth or income would act as a proxy for self-control, and we could see what if any difference that makes on race disparities.
We could control for intoxication, since intoxication is likely to be a good proxy for lack of self-control. If it’s an issue of behavior and cooperation, we should expect racial disparities to be reduced when comparing intoxicated black suspects to intoxicated white suspects, since we’d expect those populations to be both pretty uncooperative.
But I think a better question is what to do since we don’t have any of these studies in front of us. I’m saying, let’s turn to the studies we do have, and try to make sure our hypotheses are consistent.
What question are you looking to answer here? If a black person murders someone and a white person doesn’t, you can bet there will be some disparate police treatment, since murder is illegal and not-murder isn’t. That doesn’t tell us anything about race. Again, we need to compare like to like.
The “first paragraph” is the abstract, you need to look at that part of the report. From page 17:
I don’t agree that that’s how the report should be interpreted. The report is trying to compare like to like, and it recognizes that the criminal justice system as experienced by women is different from the criminal justice system as experienced by men. That’s clear just from the proportion of incarcerated people who are men (more than 80%, according to this report), but it is probably also reflected in the types of crimes, the lengths of sentences, and the factors that are considered. There may not be enough data on women to compare like to like for black women and white women. And in any case, looking at how race affects men is looking at how race affects the substantial majority of prisoners.
I gave a scenario that is alike, the police gave the same order to two people to raise their hands, one did as directed, the other did not which would escalate the policeman’s further reactions immediately. The type of crime does not matter, the defendants behavior does.
Page 17
Where are the specifics in criminal history discussed? What does behavior mean?
What’s different…the officers (NO!), the prosecutors (NO!), the judges (NO!)?
Right, so you are comparing different reactions to different behaviors. If we want to see what the effect of race is, we want to see what the reactions are to the same behavior. If you are right that race plays no part, then when two people of different races behave the same, they are treated the same. Comparing like to like means controlling for other things that could explain differential treatment (e.g. differences in behavior).
Page 9 and 10, also the data appendix starting on page 38 (page 40 in the pdf, the data appendix pages aren’t numbered). They discuss the calculation of charge severity beginning on page 45. So they accounted for both the number of previous charges and the severity of those charges.
The define behavior as “arrest offense, multiple-defendant case structure, and criminal history”. They are other variables they controlled for, attempting to isolate race.
If race is the consistent issue, it would be evident in a majority of cases for both genders where race differences are found, but like I mentioned, they had no case to unfold regarding racial disparities in treatments of women, which must be included to seal a case of racism. Racism against only men makes no sense and defies what racism means. Racism does not differentiate between male and female, being a racist is against all people of color, no matter sex, attire, age, etc.
Bottom of page 14
When they make claims like this I don’t understand why they are making the assumption that the same crimes were being committed when the charges are actually lumped into only two categories: misdemeanors and felonies. The type of felony would definitely weight a prosecutors actions and also a judges actions, but I cannot find where they have these specific stats, comparing a specific crime done by a white to the same crime done by a black. In other words, they are pulling facts and figures from all over the place and making these regressions (which I don’t understand) to try to come up with even sample sizes. If white people are not committing as much criminal activity or as severe criminal activity, why is that being fabricated to equal the sample sizes between blacks and whites? And how can a fabrication speak to real content and context? For example, they are not tracking 100 specific cases from start to finish for a homicide charge for a black man against 100 specific cases from start to finish for a homicide charge for a white man where both men share the same backgrounds, ages, education, economic status, county/state, etc. The clincher is the criminal history and when that is not specific it invalidates the entire study. Why aren’t they using first time offenders with similar backgrounds who have clean records and dispensing with all the other bullshit? Why?
Page 44
Assumptions vs ambiguities…seriously?
I thought this study was based on definitive statistics and case specifics, the information required to formulate a comprehensive study not based on assumptions…educated guesses which could be wrong in many cases.
This is what I was having problems with…guesswork. Why would you conduct a study that doesn’t have all the blanks filled in by factual data? Why base aspects of a study on assumptions, doesn’t that defeat the purpose and results of the study?
I’ll keep reading this study thing, but it’s admitted that it is sketchy several times over.
I don’t understand why they keep making assumptions concerning what I consider the most important aspect of all the cases…the criminal history.
What does this mean?
What is the binary variable?
Hispanics were counted where? They didn’t have their own category, except for in one aspect of the study, which I’m having trouble finding again???Seriously, Hispanics are floating in the white, black, Asian, Indian, and other categories? How is this even possible, let alone actual?
Not specific, not in-depth, and not linked through all the aspects of the study. How much extremely pertinent information is missing? What was this sample size for blacks and for whites?
Earlier in the study they brought up the record of criminal history being available through the AOUSC coding as either a misdemeanor or a felony but not any specifics, but not here. What gives?
Forgive me for the following hand-wavey explanation, I sort of understand statistical regression in the abstract, but I couldn’t do one myself.
Regressions are a mathematical tools that help match like to like. They’re the method by which the authors are controlling for things like criminal history and severity of the crime. The basic idea is that there’s some function that produces the measured outcome, in this case the length of a prison sentence. The function is something like,
(number if prior offenses)*x+(severity of offense)*y+(type of crime)*z+(some remaining unexplained factor)=(length of sentence)
That remaining unexplained factor is the error in the function. If we know the other things, we can guess the length of the sentence plus-or-minus that remaining bit. We can add other factors to try to reduce that remaining unexplained factor. Maybe length of sentence is affected by where in the country the case took place, or how good a lawyer the defendant had, or when the judge last ate. Adding those things to the function would reduce the error, i.e. if we know them for a case we can guess the prison sentence better. Other things we could add probably wouldn’t: defendant’s blood type, closing price of the S&P that day, whether the Red Sox won their last game.
Regressions are how we find this function. We take a bunch of cases and pull out all the information and see how much things contribute to removing the unexplained part, i.e. if we know some piece of information about a case, how well can we guess the outcome. Here, we’re trying to see how much of the difference is explained by race of the defendant.
We could do as you suggest, and limit the study to “first time offenders with similar backgrounds who have clean records”. We could do a thousand separate studies: first time offenders with background x, second time offenders with background x, first time offenders with background y, second time offenders with background y, etc. But regressions let us look at all those cases at the same time. Assuming that race is a factor that operates similarly in all those cases, we can get an idea of the general impact of race.
It should be acknowledged that this method isn’t perfect. We could be missing variables and it’s always possible that even where race helps reduce the error, it’s doing so by acting as a proxy for something else that we haven’t included. For example, if this study didn’t control for the geographical area (it does), race might be a acting a proxy for geographic area, e.g. if most black defendants come from certain areas, and those areas also have tougher sentencing in general. But it’s still a reliable method, and when we have hypotheses about other things that could be resulting in what looks like racial bias, we can plug them into the regression and see if they remove the effect of race. In this case, we controlled for geographic area, and we still see race as playing a role in determining sentence length.
Again, we’re trying to compare like to like. Where we know that the criminal justice system produces vastly different outcomes for men and women, we need to control for that variable, and compare male back defendants to male white defendants, and female black defendants to female white defendants. You’re assuming that “they had no case to unfold regarding racial disparities in treatments of women”, but that’s unfounded, the study doesn’t say that, it says it focused on men because the two populations are different men are 80% of prisoners.
As for why defendant sex wasn’t just plugged into the regression, it could be that sex is such a major factor in sentencing that it’s effectively not the same process. It could also be that the number of cases for women for which the relevant data was available was just insufficient to include in any meaningful way (for example, data from some states was excluded). It could be that intersectionality matters, and race really does do something different from women than it does for men. I don’t think we can assume that, and in any case it isn’t necessary to speculate in order to interpret this study: this study provides strong evidence that black men are given longer prison sentences because they are black.
They aren’t. After noting that a specific data set only indicates severity directly as a distinction between misdemeanors and felonies, the report notes that “charges are simply recorded as the detailed section of the criminal code a defendant is charged with violating”, i.e. the law that the defendant broke. The authors use those code sections to assess severity. This doesn’t resolve all ambiguity, but it gives a much finer-grained severity assessment than the misdemeanor/felony distinction.
As you note, this requires making “realistic assumptions” about how those code sections are applied. They are assuming, for example, that most convictions under a specific code section is not being sentenced based on some obscure aggravating factor mentioned in the code section. The assumptions are realistic in that they reflect how the code section is most likely to be applied.
I get the way you are upset with assumptions, but you can’t not make assumptions (I made this same mistake in my post above, but I caught it a few days ago!), and they state what their assumptions are. The right criticism can’t be “bullshit, they’re making assumptions!”, it needs to be “this specific assumption is unreasonable for these reasons, and if it’s false it undermines the findings in these ways.” There’s just no way to “have all the blanks filled in by factual data”, there are always blanks in any causal story.
