Race-Biased Police Violence

First, let me take a step back so we don’t lose sight of the broader discussion: you seem willing to commit fully to hypotheses with no evidence (like that every unarmed black person that’s shot to death must have had their hands in their pockets and refused to cooperate), while for a study that does present evidence, and that attempts to control for a reasonable set of variables (including the one that you’d original suggested to explain sentencing disparity), you won’t accept it unless it eliminates every possible assumption. You’re holding competing hypotheses to wildly different standards of proof.

My impression is that that’s a running theme, and pretty flagrant in this case. You suggested that sentencing disparities could be explained by failure to control for criminal history. You provided no evidence, no data set, no methodology, nothing to support that conjecture. I provided a study that took the data we have, applied a reasonable methodology to do exactly what you were saying wasn’t done, and found that the sentencing disparity still exists. There may be other things we want to know from the data, more studies using the same data sets and looking at different questions could tease out different information. But “this study isn’t perfect and doesn’t tell us absolutely everything we might be curious about” is not the same as “my baseless conjecture is supported”.

Hispanic isn’t a race, so whatever the influence on sentencing of being Hispanic, it is separate from the role of race in sentencing.

First, there would absolutely still be assumptions or ambiguities. If we limited it to just first time offenders, we still need to control for the type of crime, i.e. compare murderers to murders. We need to control for the nature of the crime, e.g. murder with a knife is different from murder with poison. We need to control for the victim, e.g. child or adult, white or black, rich or poor. No two crimes are exactly identical, they all all differ in the details, and it’s impossible to create a data set that captures every detail that might be relevant. So we take the data we have, we make reasonable assumptions about how these differences average out, and we compare based on the data we have. That’s true even if we remove everyone from the data set except first time offenders.

Further, it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that race acts differently on first time offenders than it does on third time offenders. We could look at different racial disparities for different types of crime (and this study does a little of that, noting that disparities are much greater at the high end). But that’s just a different question. By combining all the data, we can see that there’s a racial disparity across all types of criminals, whether first-timers or repeat offenders.

But the disparity-in-disparities, even if it exists, would just mean that the overall disparity that this study finds is masking a much greater disparity in some specific subset of crimes. While that may be the case, it’s still sufficient to show that across all crimes, there is a disparity.

I think we’ve been conflating “criminal history” and “charge severity”. “Criminal history” appears to be a term of art used by the sentencing guidelines, that uses a point system to categorize defendants into 6 categories. I think the charge severity calculated in this paper was only applied to the charge for which the defendant is sentenced, and then they relied on the criminal history categorization that was used at the sentencing.

Why would assumptions make a study valid?

That hypothesis doesn’t need a bunch of evidence for it is based on common police procedure which is to verbalize orders to a suspect and either the suspect complies with the officers orders or he doesn’t. When a suspect does not comply with an officers orders, the situation escalates, often into areas of violent confrontation between the officer and the suspect and the suspect is arrested for failure to comply, resisting arrest, etc. If you want to make correlations between behaviors between blacks and whites when stopped by the police, lets look at the number of arrests made for each type of defiant behavior for blacks and for whites and see where we stand. That shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Show me that study. :evilfun:

I do not believe that a reasonable methodology was applied for it is still not clear exactly what was represented by criminal history, if it included the entire history which it doesn’t, nor does it include the time served or even sentenced for each prior offense.

If Hispanics are not a race then why are they considered a minority called Hispanics or Latinos? Why are American born Hispanic children classified as Hispanic and not white? I understand that the government is playing games with the differences between ethnicity, race, and minority status. On college applications, drivers license, medical forms, census forms, etc. when asked for race/ethnicity, Hispanic/Latino is a category, but I can’t explain why the government plays games with race.

From reading the choices above, what race is a shorter than caucasian, brown skinned, brown haired, brown eyed Mexican? Like I said, I see the games the government is playing with race, but I’ll let what Wiki deems race to be true ( :laughing: ). You know it’s not true, don’t you? :evilfun:

Did this study compare for all these differences? I did not read where they say they do.

Where does the study say that they include the entire criminal history of each person sampled? From what I read it was only up to 5 previous offenses, wouldn’t 6, or 15 previous offenses matter greatly?

Also, why wasn’t time previously sentenced and time previously served included? Those are huge aspects of someone’s criminal history which both prosecutors and judges see and both would greatly affect a new sentence suggestion and ultimately its length. Sentence length discrepancies happened here and were not due to blackness, but rather due to the stupidity of being a repeat offender!

Why would a complete study looking at disproportionate sentence lengths not look at sentence lengths already served or assigned for repeat offenders? There would be a significant correlation between them. Instead, that is incorporated somehow into the study based on severity, not incorporated accurately but rather an assumptive approximation? LOL

Where is this evidenced? I didn’t see any distinction made.

A subject simply tops out at 13 points at level 6. Their criminal history can be a mile long and real ugly, but it stops at 13/level 6 or were the actual points tallied rather than just the level? Only 5 prior offenses…not very specific to get the true gist of how much prison time an offender has already served.

Carleas, I understand that this is an official study, but it could have been done differently and with more accuracy taking all the important aspects of criminal history into account rather than glossing over them or it could have been about first time offenders so there would be less assumptions and ambiguities regarding the criminal history. The study does point to racial disparity which is what it set out to do and they came up with a way in this study to depict the disparity, nevermind that it is an incomplete assessment of the offenders criminal history which discredits its accuracy from the get go. If you are happy with faulty studies because they show how white police officers set out to break the law and jeopardize their livelihood not to mention take the risk of themselves going to jail, I am happy for your happiness. Find a better study or we remain in disagreement. I’ve been unable to find any studies that set out with the intent to prove that whites do not mistreat blacks. Why do social scientists only wish to prove that white people are racist?

While I found articles by the police who are commenting on the ever growing epidemic of non compliance of offenders with the police, the comments were not race specific for whites only condemn themselves, rather than defend themselves so it’s doubtful that the behavior of the black community’s conduct will ever be called into the light and have a research study done to measure it.

It would be valid given those assumptions. If the assumptions are reasonable, then the outcome is reliable.

Ah, so your position is that there is no racial bias in policing, and that claim does not need to be backed up by evidence…

While I don’t take your position as a reasonable prior, given what we know about the history of racial discrimination in the US (including and especially official discrimination by the police), even if we were to take it as a prior, evidence like the study presented, where behavior is controlled for, should make you question your priors. We have evidence that race, when isolated as a causal factor, is playing a role in peoples treatment by the justice system. In light of that, it’s not reasonable to accept, without evidence, that race does not play a role. Everywhere that people are making judgement calls (including when police decide that someone is being aggressive, or resisting, or not cooperating, etc.), race can enter as a factor.

Lefties are minority, are they a race?

Technically, Hispanic is not the same as Latino. While that technical meaning may not always track colloquial use, for the purpose of interpreting this survey and the data on which it relied, I think it’s safe to assume (!) that a study looking at demographic statistics is using the technical and not the colloquial meaning.

I think you’re making unreasonable demands. Studies into these questions are limited by the data we have. We can’t get an infinite amount of data on each case, and we can’t control for an infinite number of variables. But “could have been done differently and with more accuracy” is not the same as “is no good and inaccurate”.

And let me say, I may be coming off as too dismissive of your deep dive into methodology and demand for rigor. I don’t mean to be, it’s a good instinct and I applaud it. But it’s only valuable where it places realistic demands on researchers, where it is applied evenly to reject any study no matter the conclusion, and where the methodological problems you find can reasonably be expected to affect the answer to the question presented.

This study is limited by the data, it makes some assumptions about the nature of crimes based on the statute under which they are prosecuted, and it does not answer any questions about the independent role that Hispanic ethnicity plays in sentencing. But you don’t have a study that goes farther and finds a different answer. You asked for a study that looked at sentencing disparities controlling for criminal history. This study does.

That shouldn’t be the goal. Though I’m not so naive to think that researchers don’t set out with an end in mind, that doesn’t mean that we have to do the same. Look for studies that solve the methodological problems you have with this study, and then see what they find.

Let’s keep going. I think we’ll find that there’s a pattern where you reject reasonable studies for not meeting your impossible standards, present no competing studies – studies that 1) meet your standards, and 2) show that meeting your standards was sufficient to change the finding-- and then claim that you need no evidence for your position. Which is what you’ve done for this study. Let’s see if the pattern holds.

Let’s look at the study listed under “Findings of the Use of Handcuffs”. The link in that article is to a WaPo summary, but the study is here, and the ~300 page technical deep dive into Oakland PD data is here. It has different methodology from the report we were discussing previously, addresses some of your concerns about behavioral differences, and presents similar findings (racial bias in policing) from different evidence. I think we should stick with the shorter report, but I include the latter because I know you appreciate rigor. I’ll refer to the two documents as SfC (‘Strategies for Change’, the summary report) and DfC (‘Data for Change’, the technical report). Page references are to pdf pages, rather than the number written on the page.

A few things that stand out to me:

  • Related to your earlier claim, this study found race-bias in the rate of stops, even controlling for the fact that they are more active in areas with a higher black population: “we found no evidence that the OPD was specifically targeting African American neighborhoods. Instead, the OPD does target neighborhoods with higher crime rates. As the first analysis revealed, however, once in a neighborhood, OPD officers tend to stop more African Americans than is proportional to their representation in the neighborhood.” (SfC 11)
  • On a related note, the disparity was greater when the officers knew the race of the suspect prior to making the stop, suggesting that race played a role in the interpretation of behavior: “We also found that when officers were able to identify the race of the person before stopping him or her, they were much more likely to be stopping an African American (62%), as compared to when they couldn’t tell the race of the person (48%).” (SfC 11)
  • Handcuffing was much more common of black people than white people, even when they weren’t arrested: “We found that African American men were handcuffed in one out of every four stops, as compared to one in every 15 stops for White men. Even after controlling for neighborhood crime rates, demographics, and many other factors, our analyses showed that OPD officers handcuffed significantly more African Americans than Whites. This African American-White handcuffing gap was especially pronounced for vehicle stops and stops made because of traffic violations.” (SfC 11)
  • Searches were also more common for black people than white people: “Excluding low-discretion searches, we found that officers searched African American men in one out of every five stops, as compared to one out of every 20 stops for White men. Even after controlling for neighborhood crime rate, racial demographics, and many other factors, our analyses showed that OPD officers were more likely to search African Americans than Whites.” (SfC 12)
  • The police body camera language analysis is pretty interesting, showing that police used less formal language when speaking to black people, and used more severe legal language. That’s true even controlling for whether there was a parole-justified stop, and for the severity of the justification for the stop. (SfC 18-19)

Regarding our last study debate, I will continue to stress that the criminal history used did not paint the whole picture of the offenders previous prison sentences nor did it compare that to their current sentence which is a biggie to see the why blacks were sentenced for the 10% longer sentences. I say that blacks were assigned the longer sentences that they deserved based on their criminal histories.


Jennifer Eberhardt, a co-author of the studies you cited.

Does Jennifer’s being black have anything to do with why she has interests in racial discrimination and racial profiling against blacks during incidents with the police? My reasonable assumption is yes. Would her racial bias as a black person be the deciding factor in her choice of study and the methodology used to prove that blacks are mistreated in many ways by the criminal justice system? My reasonable assumption is yes.

What is also interesting is the fact that the Oakland Police Department had a racially diverse force of nearly 60% non-white officers around the time of her study, so it would be safe to say that all races and ethnicities which make up the OPD practice racial bias against blacks, even the 18% black police officers who were serving on the force at the time of the study.

Her study does not try to explain why blacks are targeted by the racially diverse Oakland police for worse treatments by the police, only that they are targeted by white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American police officers in the city of Oakland, California, correct Carleas? So it’s not a white versus black thing, it’s all races/ethnicities in the police force versus blacks.

Why are black Oakland community members mistreated by the police in general? And why are Asians treated so well by the same police? Do Asians obey the laws and the police more and more often than whites, Hispanics, and blacks? Is the conduct of Asians cooperative with the police? Are blacks not as cooperative with the police as Asians? Do Asians maintain their vehicles better than blacks who are mostly pulled over for problems with their vehicles rather than moving violations?

The chart above breaks down the racial demographics for the Oakland area, and the racial/ethnic diversity of the Oakland police department in 2013 and 2014 when the study was conducted. As you can see, the OPD was racially diverse in 2013 and 2014 to reflect the demographics in the greater Oakland area, not perfectly, but close enough to be reasonable.

There’s a lot to pick through in the 300 page version so this may take awhile.

This study counters your Ferguson study where you played dumb to the idea that the police were only doing their jobs in high crime areas that happened to be black. So, the OPD doesn’t target black areas, it’d be reasonable for me to say that the Ferguson police did not target black areas either, they were simply doing their jobs responding to high 911 areas in mass to keep the peace. It’s time to kiss my high heels for my being right! :evilfun: I like when you bring up studies that prove my earlier points in other studies. Keep it up.

Back to reading. :techie-studyingbrown:

I’m glad you’re still considering this, I thought maybe I was a little too fresh in my last post and you lost interest!

This is not a proper logical inference. I think it’s a fair to point out that criminal history could have been more precisely specified. There could have been 60 categories, or 6000. But you can’t just conclude anything you want from a lack of precision. The most precise data you’ve ever seen contradicts your hypothesis that differences in criminal history are what accounts for differences in sentencing. Either acknowledge that that’s true, or present more precise data.

No. Her methodology is fully disclosed, if you find something wrong with it, by all means point it out.

It doesn’t have to. The point is to show that there is a racial bias in policing. And I don’t think framing it as anyone “versus” anyone is productive. As I’ve said, I think most officers are acting in good faith.

As I pointed out here, you offered three unsupported hypotheses to explain the disparities in policing, all of which have to be true for your explanation to work.

This study shows that the third is false in Oakland: black people are stopped at a rate greater than what we should expect given the demographics. So even if this study supports 1 and 2, it still undermines your position.

Are all those stops supposed to be random in the egalitarian fantasy land or would police officers in that land also stop cars and people with suspicious behaviour more often?

In other words, if the police are doing a good job and try to catch the criminals and not just be blind random stopping tools, I’d expect the racial stop rate to somehow reflect the crime rate of different racial groups.

I guess it’s after all not about catching criminals but about social engineering to try and make all those different racial groups equal, at least when it comes to (perceived) beneficial qualities among Whites.

For the coalition of against Whitey sometimes a Mexican is White, sometimes he isn’t.
To understand why and how, you simply need to ask yourself whether or not it is good for Whites.

Wrong. Carleas’ studies show that blacks are singled out for no reasonable reason. In his studies, blacks are targeted by the white gestapo who rough them up at every chance they get, in fact, the whites go out of their ways to mistreat law abiding blacks while they pat the criminal whites on the backs for good behavior. It’s the white man keepin’ the blacks down law enforcement and legal system conspiracies, haven’t ya heard?

If only five offenses are counted out of 50 that an offender previously served time for, then sure his next sentence based on only 5 crimes in his criminal history being accounted for will make his latest sentence look like overkill to study observers, but to prosecutors and judges who have seen the other 45 unaccounted for crimes (the total 50 crimes committed and sentenced for) and those previous 50 sentence lengths, their most recent sentence recommendations and decisions will reflect the criminals past criminal history and sentences in full, the full 50, not just 5.

So your study is not inaccurate for what little evidence of offender’s criminal histories it presented, it just wasn’t the full picture and the full picture, the full criminal history, is what both the prosecutor and judge were going off of when they assessed the criminal’s latest offense and the length of his latest sentence. Nice try with that study and also the suggestion that I find better evidence to make my hypothesis more accurate and true than the study you presented. I suppose that you have to be offensive to goad me to become some kind of unheard of white social scientist out to prove the racial bias of blacks against whites in other social science studies by pointing out the flaws in the racist methodologies they are purposely incorporating to slant biases in their favor like the frequent use of whites in their comparisons rather than Asians or Hispanics. I can’t find any studies that show racial disparities between blacks and Asians even though Asians are treated the best by the police and the justice system.

Your studies, Carleas, have black racist researchers and liberal retards trying to point to white racists which just isn’t the case when using the police and their procedures as evidence. The real evidence lies in the why the black person was considered law breaking or suspicious in the first place and I argue that it is based on their past in the criminal justice system among other reasonable reasons.

Never fear, I’ll point out all the flaws in their methodologies.

Requested a copy of this study from the authors…wait-n-see.

Only 3% end up in prison. 53.8% of state prisoners were guilty of violent crimes. Blacks commit more crimes of all stripes even though they only make up 13% of the population and this is known due to witness and surveillance evidence identifying the perpetrator.

Don’t mind me as I gather evidence to support my hypothesis. :evilfun:

That same study shows that the disparities in traffic stops of black people are significantly higher in cases where the officer knew the race of the suspect before the stop. In other words, in those cases where it was possible for race to affect police behavior, we see an effect of race on police behavior. So the hypothesis that the disparity is based on differences in suspect behavior is undermined: where suspects are judged on their behavior and not their race, we see less racial disparity.

This is an argument in bad faith. I’ve repeatedly acknowledged that this doesn’t depend on the race of the officer, and it doesn’t depend on officers being evil. The only argument I’ve made is that black people are unfairly targeted by the police. The studies I’ve provided back that point up.

You know that’s not what the study is doing, because the study tells you what it is doing. The criminal history that was used in the study is the same criminal history that’s used in federal sentencing guidelines that judges use during sentencing.

The fact that you’re attacking strawmen should give you pause.

My point is that the best effort you’ve ever seen to actually control for the thing that you’re asking to control for undermines your position. It’s not that your position has been made impossible, but if you’re looking at the evidence in good faith, you need to acknowledge that the Bayesian inference from this study is that it’s less likely that your hypothesis is true.

To your “studies”

  1. This isn’t a study, it’s an opinion piece.
  2. When you get the full text, I hope that you apply to this study the same skeptical eye you apply to the other studies we’ve discussed. There are apparently significant methodological flaws that surely wouldn’t pass your high standards:
  1. In what way does this contradict any position I’m supporting in this thread?

I haven’t read this yet. I’d be interested in knowing how they acquired the officer’s visual knowledge of the suspect pre-stop through a questionnaire or on a stop report.
Most officers are moving in traffic so it would be more difficult for them “to see” from behind a car seats headrest in the rear and if it was in oncoming traffic, the car would be noticed in a moving violation before the driver. If they are parked to stop speeders, then they would have a better view of the driver, but in town cops don’t set up speed traps as much as they used to, that’s left more for state troopers now and days. However, they would “see” if they first ran the plates and the plates were owned by a black driver, particularly a driver on probation or parole. Isn’t it part of police procedure to run plates first thing?

That is not true when taking a studies intent and methodology into consideration, its not difficult to omit important deciding factors as to the nature of what appears to be a disparity when it is less evidenced or completely omitted.

You have brought up racism perpetrated by whites in our nation’s past and also used it as a means by which to imply that due to our history of prejudice, it continues today across the spectrum of the criminal justice system from prejudiced police intent through prejudiced sentencing.

You so badly want them to be targeted unduly and treated unfairly, but they are not and just because several different studies decrying racial prejudice against blacks exists does not validate them automatically. We are discussing why they are not valid.

From what I read they had only one specific about the past crimes and that was their codes.

Quote where they used all past codes for each subject. They used 5.

Quote where they incorporated past sentence lengths into the study…not what the guidelines recommend but the actual sentence as assigned.

Don’t you think that if violent criminals keep behaving violently after serving each sentence, the prosecutor is going to recommend the maximum minimum. Where was that taken into account in the study?

I don’t understand what citation you are talking about…is it about the study I haven’t received access to yet?

Can you refer me to those studies?

Or actually seeing the suspect is what made it easier to discern suspicious behaviour which if such a thing as suspicious behaviour exists, would prompt police officers to stop more Blacks because being more criminal.

But just to be clear, I don’t expect police officers to proportionally stop as many Whites as Blacks. Just as I would not be surprised to see them stop even less Asians, (Chinese and Japanese mostly, not the Britcuck definition including Pakistanis and such), proportionally. And all that after having discerned their race before stopping them.
I see nothing wrong with that per se.
Racial differences are real and they will remain real until the day the races have disappeared, because that’s what different races are about, actual differences.

So is it OK to discount your arguments because you’re white and therefore your intent is dubious? And my arguments count for double because I’m white and arguing that black people are discriminated against! Looks like you have to present like 4x as much evidence to make your case…

I am, of course, being facetious.

You’re making an ad hominem argument, a literal, fallacious, ad hominem argument. Where the author is telling you 1) what data they looked at and 2) how they analysed that data, and that person’s data and analysis have been reviewed by her peers to confirm their validity, it’s absolutely fallacious to reject the study because the author is black.

My argument in this thread is only that black people on average are discriminated against by the criminal justice system.

I agree with this. But the codes are used by the federal sentencing guidelines, and they capture past crimes as well as behavior during incarceration.

Yes. The link you provided, which points to the abstract of the study, also has excerpts from other studies that cite that paper (keep scrolling down to the section labelled “citations”). The first citation listed criticizes the methodology of the paper, and does so in a way that it seems you would need to take issue with to maintain a consistent standard. Of course, we’ll see when we have the full study before us, but so far it looks flawed.

If you’re going to argue that doing X while being black is just more suspicious than doing X while not being black, it seems like you’re conceding the point.

Nor do I. As we’ve established, there are racial differences in e.g. the rate of 911 calls across neighborhoods. Races also differ greatly across many other demographic factors that are correlated with criminality, including wealth, education, family status, nutrition, etc. All of those should be expected to produce differences in the rate of police stops independent of race. But here we’re looking at studies that are trying to control for those differences and find an independent effect of race itself. If police interpret behavior as more or less suspicious solely based on race, that would strongly support that claim.

I’d expect and hope that being of a particular race is part of what informs the judgement of police officers.
Is it just a pretentious Whigga or is it the real deal, the usually more impulsive variation, which will prompt more caution.

Let’s hope their judgement is informed through experiences with different races and not through Hollywood and media propaganda which is trying to create a pseudo egalitarian, actually anti-White perception.

I’m not rejecting it due to her blackness, but her prejudiceness. :evilfun:

She chose her methodology to prove racial discrimination against blacks because she was black, she chose what evidence to use in her methodology and chose to omit important aspects in regards to determining and comparing past and present sentence lengths and I have no problem pointing out that her intent was to show that blacks are treated disproportionately worse than whites (all of her efforts reek of her own prejudices since she didn’t choose Asians, Hispanics, or any other racial group who are all treated differently, better, than blacks. Admit it, it’s a black vs. white thing like all those studies are and that’s why you have no studies of racial discrimination between blacks vs. Asians because it’s whitey’s that are the unstated problem.) If her peers are SJW blacks and all SJW, then of course it was given a passing grade. I’m not saying that it doesn’t prove what she wants to prove, but I am saying that she left out important evidence, specific important evidence, that would have told a different story, a more truthful story.

Blacks commit more crimes which is justly represented by the criminal justice system.

Only 5 past crimes were used, why can’t you concede that point which is stated in the study?

:confusion-waiting:

All-in-all blacks are treated differently due to their different behaviors, their defiant and criminal behaviors.

This claim is undermined by multiple studies discussed above that show that blacks are the majority of searches, but whites are the majority of contraband found incident to search. That says that the police judgement that leads them to view race as evidence of suspicious conduct is prejudiced, not informed.

This isn’t any part of the chain of reasoning though. Blacks face more stops, searches, and arrests, and more severe punishments, even given differences in the rate of commission. That’s what these studies show.

You seem to have specific methodological problems with this specific study. Fortunately, this question has been examined repeatedly, with different methodologies, and with the same result.
people.terry.uga.edu/mustard/sentencing.pdf
ncids.org/systems%20evaluation%2 … smeier.pdf
www2.law.columbia.edu/fagan/cour … otypes.pdf
ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs.umd.edu … on2003.pdf
researchgate.net/profile/Ro … c8c0c8.pdf
emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/ … aphics.pdf

This is like two seconds of looking, turning up a half dozen studies that support the conclusion that blacks face harsher sentences when for controlling for whatever you want (and zero undermining it).

You’re picking and choosing, and coming up with ad hoc reasons to reject what the best evidence tells us: black defendants face harsher sentences because they are black.

https://www.amren.com/archives/reports/the-color-of-crime-2016-revised-edition/

The above link is to a summary of the study only.

Long story short, this study takes all the sensationalism out of the ones you listed. I saw someone mention this one earlier but nobody addressed it. Can you tell me why we should believe the studies you listed and not this one? As far as I can tell anyone writing this sort of study has an agenda. So one study , 50 studies, if they are all products of the same agenda then what’s the significance?

Hmmm? What’s the agenda, Carleas?

In one study they compare those who were searched without consent which doesn’t factor in the different rates of compliance among the races which would change the real meaning of those ‘success’ rates.
Furthermore I’m not sure how carrying a loaded gun in a vehicle factors into all of this talk of ‘contraband’ which might be a common reason why they search vehicles.

All these ‘studies’ look more like reports where they pick some seemingly favourable stats out of a whole catalogue on their quest for moral outrage.
When they mix Whites with Hispanics when convenient for the desired narrative then all this study pretentiousness has already lost my good will.

Ironically enough, I can’t look at amren.com at work because it’s flagged as racist and blocked by the webfliter.

If you’re going to object to any article written by a black person because they might be biased, consistency demands that you object to articles written by avowed racists because they might be biased.

That was my point Carleas. The thing of it is though, I understand and recognize the bias. The idea that you can list a bunch of “studies” and overload the topic with “information” so the opposition is lost in the quagmire of sifting through it all, is transparent, and typical. Of course, this is also convenient because it is used to shift the onus, and because no matter how carefully someone sifts through the “material”, there is so much there that all one has to do is make a one-liner retort, kind of like this whole thread, and to the lay person it may appear that you have a stronger argument. The problem is that this whole discussion is controlled by you. You’ve framed everything right from the start, and when the conversation started shifting in a direction away from your ideal, you felt it necessary to post just to “re-frame” the discussion. This is how for me personally, I know when someone is trying to sell me something against my best interest. The conversation always has to start and stay within the frame that the left sets. When it goes outside the lines, the left always has to rein it in. Interesting how you want everybody to acknowledge your studies and “truth”, but all you do is say “racist” and BOOM, no more opposing study.

Very disingenuous debate, no?