There's an easy fix to this. Set "reverse" quotas for conducting stops. Only stop blacks that you can be completely certain are doing bad things (hurting other members of society).

Stop white people for any reason; Hispanics for any crime other than jay-walking.

This solves it beautifully. Glad I left NYC...

> These self-styled policing sages never say
> what a "proper" stop-to-arrest ratio should be
Yeah, point taken, but....

Funny thing, how many of these advocates are living in the areas they're advocating about?

These advocates would do better for the people they're concerned with if they spent their time and money helping people to get jobs, education, and bring opportunities into these neighborhoods.

Lest someone call you a racist for pointing out that even if the Klan were banging the gavel, some races show up in crime stats out of all proportion to their contributions, here's the Bureau of Justice Statistics page.

I have no problem with police officers on duty. Mostly they are well-watched by their peers and by surrounding people, so they act accordingly.
It's when they are moonlightning, they often abuse their power, which I am sure they are supposed to leave at their presinct desks or lockers.

When they are pulling their rank for the second employer, they act in the shady area as it is, like _impersonating_ the law officers, which they are not, while not on the offiicial duty. Even worse - they are unsupervised and unobserved, they bend laws and then bend them even more, requesting the cover-ups from those colleagues who are officially working at the time, but will turn the same trick after hours and demand reciprocity when they need it too.

That is what in my mind is the real abuse of power, this is what has to be checked thoroughly.

It is unfortunately human nature to confuse causation and correlation. Correlation: The police stop someone, that person is a minority. There need be no relation between these two items, because there is a third factor: the person did something suspicious.

The real causation is suspicious --> police stop.

To prove racial bias, these organizations must control for this third factor, and show that minorities are stopped more often after accounting for different rates of suspicious activity. As a first approximation, we can assume that suspicious activity is the same as the crime rates - so checking this is not particularly hard.

Without such proof, accusations of racism are nothing but hot air. Of course, no one in the organizations has ever passed a basic statistics course, and neither have the journalists who cover this tripe.

There exists a racial grievance industry, which depends on "raising awareness" about items that don't really amount to much. This is one of those instances. When justifying its existence, that industry talks about the Civil Rights Era, Jim Crow, etc., and promotes the view that but for its existence, Amerikkka will go right back to chains, whips and snarling dogs.

Obviously, that is utter nonsense, but there you go.

My sympathy to the cops who must deal with this sort of community activist. There is no satisfying them, since for said acivist being satisfied means the end of the only job they can do.

Ugh. Once again, "The man" is the problem. Gag me.

I hate this stupid racism "awareness" bullshit. The only thing these activist groups make me aware of is their stupidity.

Waitaminute..

Weren't these same "activist" groups all up in arms about how the police weren't protecting black people in black neighborhoods because of racism?

Did they think that increasing patrols in black neighborhoods would result in increasing numbers of stops of Chinese people?

They're called black neighborhoods for a reason - and it's the same reason Chinatown is called Chinatown.

Humans suck.

This happens periodically in our city. People get in an uproar because the police pull over someone African American "in the bad part of town" and the person screams about racial profiling on the news. The police get political pressure and back off. Then drive-by shootings and crime goes up because there is reduced police stops. Then people scream "they don't care about us." They let these shootings go on and we need more police presence.

Can't have it both ways!

Brian, it's not all humans that suck. Just leftists that are so narcissistic that they demand that reality conform to their pre-conceived notions. About 15 years ago, we had a small riot at the "historically black" university here. The city police came in and broke it up, and as some of the rioters were being violent (it was a riot, after all), some of them got clubbed, manhandled, and otherwise treated like, well, violent felons. There were no serious injuries, but a bunch of the local activists got up in arms at it. When a local news person asked one of the activists how the police were supposed to handle the arrest of a person who was swinging a 2x4, the activist stuck her nose in the air and pronounced that the police needed training on "verbal commands to control violent crowds."

We had a similar situation in Maryland over State Police stops. The press had an Emily Litalla moment when it turned out that the per cent of stops that led to actual arrests was the same for all ethnic groups, even though the percent of each group that were stopped and the number of stops were different.

They could not seem to understand that the fact that the police made an arrest (and usually got convictions) meant that they were doing their jobs.

After the public started pointed this out, the stories just stopped appearing.

That's incredible Crid... never even thought about it before.

Right as I hit the "submit" button, our two weekly street sweepers rumbled down our neighborhood. You would be hard pressed to find a single leaf on these streets, but through they all come every week or two.

This reminds me of an old co-worker of mine. He claimed that he got stopped for "driving while black," Upon being pressed for details he admitted to going waaayy over the speed limit. That argument doesn't hold water, when you are driving while being a douchebag.

Maybe they should implement Random White People Stops. The RWPS program could tally the number of minorities stopped the day before and assign officers to randomly stop and frisk a white person the next day.

"Humans suck" (Brian @6:41 AM). I totally agree, Brian. You must be middle-aged like me. It's part of the mid-life crisis: the total disillusion about mankind. Boy do I ever like animals much better as a group.

I need to try to dig up the study that someone conducted on the I-285 loop in Atlanta, a notorious area for reckless driving and bad accidents. In response to citizen complaints that police were stopping black drivers disproportionately, this group set up hidden radar cameras. They didn't stop or ticket anyone -- they just took photos of drivers and the speeds they were going. What they found was that well over half of all the drivers doing > 20 MPH over the limit (prima facie reckless driving in most states) were black. The methodology has been somewhat disputed, and I certainly would not claim that this result can be generalized to other areas. But AFAIK the study hasn't been refuted either.

> never even thought about it before.

You have too... We used to squabble about it.

"They (animals) just don't have the potential humans have". My point exactly, Amy: we don't expect animals to be reasonable and show 'potential'. So they don't constantly disappoint, as do humans as a group. I stopped expecting anything reasonable from mankind now. I would live with a pack of dogs and horses if it were doable (ok, maybe a few humans too).

>>They just don't have the potential humans have.

Yeah, are you right there. Even without claws and teeth, bestiality doesn't seem like the way to go.

Cousin Dave,

I remember hearing about something exactly like that, except it was along the New Jersey Turnpike (if I recall correctly). The local black-tivists were in high dudgeon about so many 'driving while black' traffic stops that a study was done...they set up cameras that recorded speed and a photo of the driver. The photos of the speeders were examined by a panel of three people (one black, one asian (or hispanic??) and one white. Only when all three could agree on the race of the offender was it considered legitimate. The results were not what was expected by the activists, and the study was buried.

http://tinyurl.com/racespeeding

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/27/nj.speeding.study/index.html

descriptions of the study on the NJ Turnpike are above, they tried to suppress it as the data made some uncomfortable

I was in this study, a white man, going 82 on a 65mph section. I saw a white van with an extended pole, like a tv antenna, at night (2am) on the side of the road (I have great vision) and stared right at the top of the pole where the flash bulb was when the flash went off. I was blinded and almost crashed the car.

Night time studies of this type can be dangerous

No traffic stop, no ticket. I wondered what the hell was going on till the study was released.

Speeding cameras usually just take the rear shot to get the lic. plate but here they needed a clear shot of the face of the driver.

http://city-journal.org/html/eon_3_27_02hm.html

good city journal article

snip----------

The anti–racial profiling juggernaut has finally met its nemesis: the truth. According to a new study, black drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, and are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour. This finding demolishes the myth of racial profiling. Precisely for that reason, the Bush Justice Department tried to bury the report so the profiling juggernaut could continue its destructive campaign against law enforcement. What
happens next will show whether the politics of racial victimization now trump all other national concerns.

More for Eric.