Timelordwho wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I've been pulled over as many as 15-20 times in a year.
Wow, you drive for sh
it, dude. That's not "neighborhoods" or even skin color -- you're just one fu
cking terrible driver.
Maybe he just drives around with a lot of drug dealers?
Not one ticket in all of those pull overs btw (well, except for one, but that was a special case). This was back when I was working a mix of swing and grave shifts, and thus was driving to or from work between the hours of 10:30PM and 2:30AM. And I drove through a section of town that was well known as having a fair number of meth dealers. So yeah, merely being the only car on the road driving through that part of town late at night gets you pulled over. A lot.
What was funny was that this particular area was covered by the county sheriffs department, not a local city department. I figured out quite quickly that they rotate their personnel around the county every 6 months (spring and fall IIRC), because I'd get pulled over 1-2 times a week for like 4-5 weeks, then not get pulled over again for 6 months. Then the pattern would repeat.
They aren't supposed to pull people over for no reason other than to check out the driver, but the reality is that's exactly what the cops do. And it has nothing at all to do with the skin color of the driver. It has to do with the time and location where they see your car. They make up excuses for why they pulled you over, usually giving you a "warning" about some minor thing (mirror not adjusted properly, tail light too dim, license plate obstructed, etc). The difference is that I don't assume that my skin color was why I got pulled over. I assume that the cops see a car driving through a questionable part of town late at night, and are bored, so they pull the car over. And guess what? If it's a predominately black area, it's going to mostly be black people being pulled over. Shocking, huh? And, if the national statistics show that black people are significantly more likely to live in a questionable area, guess what that does to the national stats on this sort of thing?
Does this mean that no cop uses racial bias? Of course not. But it's not the broad systemic problem that some are trying to make it out to be. As I've been saying all along, the only real solution to these skewed stats is to fix the underlying issue of disproportionate black poverty. Until we make measurable inroads in that problem, all the training and methodological changes on the part of the cops isn't going to change the relative stats. It can't.