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.