Can We Have A Toughtful/Respectful Discussion Of Civil Rights Versus Income Inequality ???

[JDPriestly]

200. In theory, there should be no illegal stops.

A certain low percentage of stops will be mistakes and will be "illegal" in that sense. But the people stopped will simply be stopped and go on their way.

The problems with the illegal stops in the African-American community are first that there are so disproportionately many of them.

Second, that way out of bounds high number of stops suggests racial profiling. This would not be surprising. Police officers are hired to stop crime, and one of the things that can be done to stop crime is to stop people for suspicious behavior. So if police make a lot of stops, it looks like they are doing a good job and deserve to be hired and paid. There is an incentive for police officers to stop a lot of people.

It is easy to stop people who can be easily identified. An African-American driving a really nice car is a good target. Hmmmm. African-American sets off the "possible perpetrators" in the dense and overly busy mind of the subconsciously racist officer and he stops the car. An African-American running is also a good target. "He could be running from a crime," the officer tells himself. Same for jaywalkers. "Is he jaywalking to get away from a crime scene?" All of these stops are made because the officer's gut reaction to dark skin is "criminal." The same officer seeing a white person driving a nice car or running or jaywalking might be "nice car," "in a hurry," or "got his/her reasons."

And then, after the stop of the African-American, the racist officer who probably does not think of him/herself as racist at all expects resistance, braces for it, acts therefore belligerent and frightened at the same time, and anticipating, expecting resistance to arrest, ends up in a violent or ugly confrontation. In the stop with the white person, the officer anticipates no problem, relaxes, smiles, checks the ID and goes on.

That's how those numbers get so out of proportion.

I should add that police officers may categorize neighborhoods by race. This is a Latino or a white or a black community and then if someone who is not of that race appears, the officer kind of wonders why.

Whether the civil rights of a white person were violated is not so difficult to determine on a case-by-case basis, but whether the rights of a black person were actually violated by racial profiling that was subconscious on the part of the officer (even an African-American officer can be racist and can stereotype simply because of the existence of these true but misleading statistics) is more complex because the officer may be doing what officers normally do and that may be racial profiling. In fact, it often is.

Many years ago, I was on a committee to locate a building for a non-profit organization. I callled the police to see what the crime rate was in a certain area near a certain street. The officer told me (and asked me not to tell anyone the specifics) that the street I had named was a place where the officers cruised to give tickets when they needed to make a quota. We did not buy the property. I would not claim that officers always have quotas or that they cruise areas with African-Americans or like to work in them because they can give a lot of tickets or make a lot of arrests, but it is very believable to me that they are more alert and watch more if they see an African-American. And that is not the only group of people that is likely to get a lot of attention from the police. But it is the most affected by this phenomenon and the most likely to be arrested or killed.

Those are some of the reasons the numbers are so out of proportion, so unbelievably way out of proportion.

And then, of course, there is the fact that a white person might have the money to hire a really sharp lawyer. An African-American, odds are high that he/she will settle or have to settle for the public defender with whom the prosecutor's office makes deals all the time.