The Right Way to Keep Bare Gubs

[only_human]

Originally Posted by MooMoo2

Some stats:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/up...says.html?_r=0




No, it doesn't. If you're a cop, it's almost impossible to tell the race of the driver when you're pulling him/her over. Can you tell whether the driver of the white car in the attached picture is black or white?

Do you believe that a distant peek is all a cop has to go on when pulling someone over?

Sometimes they've come from the other direction and previously looked full-on through the windshield. Sometimes they've run the plates and got a look at the registration names. Sometimes they make a socio-economic guesstimate because it is not a frikkin BMW. Sometimes because it is an old Cadillac. Just as they are trained to be situationally aware during every incident they have the ability to form an estimate.

[MooMoo2]

Originally Posted by only_human

Do you believe that a distant peek is all a cop has to go on when pulling someone over?

The picture I provided is a fairly typical situation that occurs when a cop pulls someone over. Other situations make it even harder to identify the driver. Some examples:
- Nighttime driving
- Cars having tinted windows
- Bad weather conditions (fog, glare, etc.)
- Large vehicles (semi trucks, buses, etc.)

Sometimes they've come from the other direction and previously looked full-on through the windshield. Sometimes they've run the plates and got a look at the registration names. Sometimes they make a socio-economic guesstimate because it is not a frikkin BMW. Sometimes because it is an old Cadillac. Just as they are trained to be situationally aware during every incident they have the ability to form an estimate.

I once drove ~64 mph in a 55 mph zone. It was a two lane highway with no other cars besides me and a cop car coming from the opposite direction. As soon as I noticed him (I'm assuming the cop was a man) I hit the brakes and saw the cop turn on his lights at the same time. I thought he was going to make a U-turn and pull me over since there was no center divider, but he continued on, so I'm assuming that he intended it as a warning to slow down. I have no idea what race the cop was, and I'm pretty sure he didn't know my race either. If I were a passenger and made it my sole purpose to identify the cop, I might be able to make a good guess when the cop car got really close, but there was no way I could ID him from quite far away when he turned his lights on.

At highway speeds, a car can cover the length of a football/soccer field in less than 3 seconds. When multiple cars are going that fast, a cop waiting on the side of the road or coming from the opposite direction is going to point his radar/lidar gun at any vehicle that looks like it's going faster than traffic. He's not going to be able to be run the plates or see what the driver looks like. And yes, there are exceptions, but those cases are an insignificant fraction of all cases that involve drivers being pulled over.

[only_human]

But when researchers reviewed stops made during daylight hours, when they said officers could see the race and ethnicity of drivers, Hispanics were nearly 14 percent more likely to be pulled over and blacks were about 7 percent more likely to be stopped than they were at night.

Conn. study of race, traffic stops singles out 25 cops

[MooMoo2]

Originally Posted by only_human

Conn. study of race, traffic stops singles out 25 cops
Hispanics were nearly 14 percent more likely to be pulled over and blacks were about 7 percent more likely to be stopped than they were at night.

This could easily be within the margin of error when you consider the low number of driving age blacks in Connecticut (~8% of driving age population). The percent of driving age Hispanics is even lower.

Even if the sample size were large enough to make it true, the study doesn't prove racial bias. Cops may simply be biased against younger drivers, who tend to drive more dangerously than older ones. The median age of Connecticut Hispanics (and Connecticut blacks, to a lesser extent) is much lower than the median age of Connecticut whites.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the racial issue was deliberately introduced by police unions to draw attention away from the real issue of police brutality toward citizens of all races. The former can be defused by allowing protest marches, having cultural sensitivity classes, and waiting for the public's anger to burn out. The latter requires real solutions like having body cameras on all officers and reversing the militarization of police departments.

[only_human]

Originally Posted by MooMoo2

This could easily be within the margin of error when you consider the low number of driving age blacks in Connecticut (~8% of driving age population). The percent of driving age Hispanics is even lower.

Even if the sample size were large enough to make it true, the study doesn't prove racial bias. Cops may simply be biased against younger drivers, who tend to drive more dangerously than older ones. The median age of Connecticut Hispanics (and Connecticut blacks, to a lesser extent) is much lower than the median age of Connecticut whites.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the racial issue was deliberately introduced by police unions to draw attention away from the real issue of police brutality toward citizens of all races. The former can be defused by allowing protest marches, having cultural sensitivity classes, and waiting for the public's anger to burn out. The latter requires real solutions like having body cameras on all officers and reversing the militarization of police departments.

You really can get pulled over for driving while black, federal statistics show

The Justice Department statistics, based on the Police-Public Contact Survey, show that "relatively more black drivers (12.8%) than white (9.8%) and Hispanic (10.4%) drivers were pulled over in a traffic stop during their most recent contact with police." Or, to frame it another way: A black driver is about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than a white driver, or about 23 percent more likely than a Hispanic driver. "Driving while black" is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon.

[Mini-Geek]

Originally Posted by only_human

You really can get pulled over for driving while black, federal statistics show

That's not the same as how many were pulled over, but from reading the data behind it as well as I could, I think that's just an inaccurate summary.

The interesting thing to me is that the reasons for being pulled over are so different between the races. What if the increased traffic stops on blacks aren't due to police bias, but due to socioeconomic factors making them more likely to drive with broken vehicles or expired/invalid registration? What the survey didn't record is how often people of different races drive while giving police various reasons to pull them over, and how that correlates to how often they're pulled over. If this is the case, it still represents a racial inequality, but not one that's the police's fault or their issue to fix, but a symptom of something larger: that different races sit at different economic levels, and have different behaviors when it comes to respecting various traffic laws. Of course, there's still the possibility that someone (consciously or not) said, "blacks do X more often than other races, so let's make a policy of stopping people doing X any time we can".

I'm not saying for sure that "[this race] does X, Y, and Z", but the data raises the question in my mind.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

That's a difficult statement to refute categorically, but I question its credibility. Wouldn't you expect a strong correlation between thuggishness (under any reasonable definition of that word) and racism in cops?

You do, I hope, acknowledge that racism is rampant in human societies, and that police officers are not immune from it?

You're both right:

https://theconversation.com/why-do-a...ean-cops-49696

“Racism helps explain why African Americans and Native Americans are particularly vulnerable to police violence… But racism alone can’t explain why non-Latino white Americans are 26 times more likely to die by police gunfire than Germans. And racism alone doesn’t explain why states like Montana, West Virginia and Wyoming – where both perpetrators and victims of deadly force are almost always white – exhibit relatively high rates of police lethality.”

[ixfd64]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Push people past the breaking point – which it appears the latest spate of summary executions of “living while black” unfortunates by cops have done – bad things are gonna happen. Reap the whirlwind.

I was thinking the same thing. Considering that police in the U.S. have wronged so many people and gotten away with it, someone was eventually going to snap. You can only beat a dog so many times before it bites back.

[retina]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-gun-...ry?id=41662473

I’d like to see someone take responsibility for what happened to my dad.

Yes, it is called personal responsibility. Learn to take it. Why is it never their own fault? Blame someone else and get paid millions, that will bring your dad back to life.

If they don’t change something, it’s going to happen again,

1. We must do something
2. Blaming other people is something, therefore we must do it
3. ???
4. Profit

Your dad was there voluntarily, no one was forcing him. His fault.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by retina

http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-gun-...ry?id=41662473 Yes, it is called personal responsibility. Learn to take it. Why is it never their own fault? Blame someone else and get paid millions, that will bring your dad back to life.

1. We must do something
2. Blaming other people is something, therefore we must do it
3. ???
4. Profit

Your dad was there voluntarily, no one was forcing him. His fault.

It can't be Darwin Award material, as the dead man had already reproduced. However, there was massive misjudgement and utter stupidity on the part of the instructor. He was the one who switched the gun to full auto. He had to know the recoil of the weapon, but made no preparations to guard against the result. Too bad for his family. EDIT: .....AND for the girl he handed the gun to.

[Xyzzy]

http://wgntv.com/2016/09/06/13-kille...r-day-weekend/