Short but sweet, thank you very much for this, Matt.
I also like this short essay format for holidays. It's fine if you still want to use the purpose for a holiday in taking a day off and unpaywalling an old article, but a format like this could continue to work out well in the future when you're up to it.
On the stop and frisk comment, I agree mostly. but is there a line you'd be willing cross. If a certain group (race, age, sex, religion etc) committed twice as many murders as others, should we stop and frisk? From your piece i would say you would think it a bad policy. But what if they were ten times, 100 times, 1000 times more likely. Isn't there some number at which it becomes ludicrously pc not to treat that group differently?
Let's say there are 10 terrorist attacks per year.
Let's say every single one of them was committed by a person professing a particular faith F.
We have: probability of belonging to faith F given that the person committed a terrorist attack = 1
Let's say there are 2 billion people who profess faith F. Or 1 billion. Or 500 million.
We have: probability of committing a terrorist attack given the person professes faith F = 10/2 billion or 10/1 billion or 10/500 million, etc. i.e. 0.0000005% which is close to the odds of winning the powerball jackpot.
This logic leads to Germany imprisoning women who speak out against rape longer than rapists. Islam is fundamentally illiberal. Secular “cultural Muslims” can assimilate to the west but not devout Muslims.
Edit: and why is speaking out against rape an offense that leads to imprisonment? Leftists, as opposed to left-liberals, have always hated free speech. Cancel culture is just Marcuse’s liberalizing tolerance.
What if we are talking about carrying an illegal firearm? At what threshold would we be ok with stop and frisk? 1% chance of getting it right? 5%? I think personally at 20% I would probably start to be more ok with it.
If it were 20%, maybe. Although you'd want the following caveats:
1) You still do stop-and-frisk people not in that group sometimes, so if they start trending up to their own 20% you know.
2) You stop when it drops down low enough again (and use point 1 to catch it again)
Really, the key here is I'd expect this to rapidly change behavior, and keeping the policy going evenly at #1 should help keep it lower. It might still stay higher (3% for a group instead of 0.5% or something), but this incentive effect would also change behavior to make it short-lived.
I'd worry about the police abusing it with bad statistics, so I'd also want good watch dog agencies to check on it.
I'm not sure how I'd feel in that actual hypothetical case. I think at best it would be the "lesser of two evils", but having the supporters/police acknowledge the negative effects might help.
I think you run into a "speed cameras" situation here where being stopped and frisked is so intrusive that if you were required to do it to it to everyone, rather than an unpopular minority, they would stop doing it.
(I think speed cameras are fine; if they weren't proven to actually increase safety I would be against them but they do increase safety.)
Speed cameras also only get you if you're actually speeding. The intrusiveness for non-speeders is at most that they are a camera.
I previously kind of opposed them on a privacy (are they photographing you even when not speeding) basis but the seeming decline in people obeying traffic laws has changed my weighting to value their deterrence more than the limited privacy change.
Also, it's not just about who is frisked, but how often. Terry stops are practiced by police all over the US, and black men are overrepresented in them all over the US too.
But NYC under Bloomberg ramped them to a crazy high level. I don't think there was necessarily more racial disproportionality in NYC's Terry stops than most other cities, but because there were so many more of them, they had a much bigger impact on young black men in high-crime neighborhoods compared to other cities, eventually leading to a backlash and a court case stopping them (which the city, at that point run by Bill de Blasio, did not appeal).
Luckily for NYC, it seems to have turned out these very high levels of stops had little to do with the city's success in reducing crime, as crime continued to drop after their reduction. I think it's really important to separate out the debate over how racist the stop decisions are from the impact they have. It's a really unpleasant thing to go through when you haven't committed any crime at all.
I can totally believe that the majority of the racial disproportionality in stop-and-frisk was due to focusing the stops in high-crime neighborhoods rather than individual racial targeting, but even so, that doesn't lessen the impact on the people who were stopped or make it a good policy.
That is pretty close to what courts have said (in practice; they don't put a number on it)
Note that in the NYC stop and frisk a few years back, "52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found." Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 (SD NY 2013)
So, police were clearly frisking far too many people -- i.e., they did not have probable cause. It is harder to determine whether there were too many stops, though 12% of stops led to either an arrest of a summons, so they might actually have been conducting stops based in reasonable cause. (Note that a stop requires only reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity, while a frisk requires reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed).
??? The Warren Court held in 1968 that probable cause is not needed for a stop. Only reasonable suspicion is needed, a lower standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio
And frisks for weapons can be done with reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed.
right, and the numbers are even worse if you define the group as Nobel prize winners. Selection bias is a real thing. Anyway, i knew as soon as i posted it i would get a statistics lesson and wanted to change it to percentage as in if x percent of nobel prize winners were murderers, but i was too lazy so took the stats lesson instead.
The argument doesn't work even with percentages! Lets say 100% of terrorist attacks or 100% of homicides are committed by people of a certain characteristic. If terrorist attacks or homicides are a low probability event to begin with (as they are) the prior probability of that event happening is already low. And if the characteristic is somewhat widely shared in the population, the conditional probability will be low too.
Which might be dumb! Or a good opportunity for a crime syndicate. Years ago, I lived in a city where an elderly woman in a quilted winter coat was holding up banks. It took a while to catch her because she caught everyone off guard. "She looked like my grandma!"
The problem with this argument is that even if people with, say, blue eyes were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder than people with brown eyes, the overall likelihood that a particular individual with blue eyes is a murderer would still be extremely low because murder is so rare.
Right but there are other correlations that are much higher. For example about 75% of ex prisoners go on to get arrested again within three years of being released. So yes it works with some groups and not others.
Prisoner isn’t an in-born characteristic. I think most people are fine with stereotyping someone for their own past conduct, just not for what group they were born into.
And maybe i wasn't clear but i wasn't making a distinction between inborn characteristics and acquired or chosen characteristics (age or religion in my hypothetical, or more concrete things like gang tattoos or something). The triggering group isn't important for me, it's just do people feel stop and frisk is out of bounds regardless of the circumstances.
You're missing another category here: characteristics that are neither inborn nor chosen, but are placed upon you by society--hence, social constructs. That's the category that's been troubling me in the hypothetical you're positing here.
The relevant data point is not the percent of ex-prisoners who eventually get arrested. It is the percent of ex-prisoners who are committing a crime or carrying evidence of a crime at the time of the stop and/or search. That is still going to be very low.
I have no problem profiling people based on their own past conduct. But that’s very different than profiling people based a physical characteristic they were born with.
As it happens the US murder rate is 5/100,000, so if blue eyed people were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder, fully half of them would be murderers and I would, even as a blue eyed person, be okay with us being watched closely, because I don't want to be a victim of blue-on-blue crime.
It isn't mass shootings, which make up a trivial percent of total murders. The Brady Center says one percent of all gun-related deaths, so maybe three percent of homicides, based on the rest of their data. https://www.bradyunited.org/resources/statistics
But it is true that one cannot assume that one murder = one murderer. One murder could = 2+ murders (eg gang murders), and one or two people can commit murders on separate occasions (again, eg gang murders) https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03x.php
Right. I wasn’t really thinking of Columbine type shootings. More like a guy kills his wife and kids or robs a liquor store and kills the cashier and a cop, etc.
If you decide the problem is so bad that we need to use profiling as a tool, there are ways to make the interactions more humane and polite. Having masked thugs with guns doing racial profiling is a terrible combination.
Civil rights law does allow some permitted discrimination in cases where the accommodations required would not be "reasonable." Like a knowledgeable lawyer friend once explained to me that a school district with gay students could probably fire a teacher for belonging to Westboro baptist church. In that case you either have to discriminate on basis of religion or monitor the person's behavior and grading so closely that it's an unreasonable burden on you.
The kind of case you're imagining might verge into that territory. My one objection to Matt's piece is that I feel similarly about visas for eg low income Syrians. Such a high proportion of that demographic consists of people who reject liberal values, and it's so hard to individually test for that trait, that I would be fine with a blanket denial of visas to a group like that.
But that's what i was saying about a blanket condemnation of stop and frisk as a method. As i said above, ca 75% of ex prisoners commit more crimes upon release. So is there a percentage of any group however defined where people are comfortable with the stop and frisk concept? Or is it just unacceptable as a policing practice regardless of its utility?
That's a definitional situation when you're dealing with people that have actually established a history of committing crimes.
What troubles me is that you're positing a hypothetical that I have doubts on actually existing substantially. Maybe I'm wrong, so that's why I'm pondering what types of groups could meet this hypothetical.
I understand, but i'm not sure why you're excluding ex criminals as a possible group? i have no idea what the numbers are for other groups but maybe gang members drug addicts, i don't know but it was really meant to be an open ended question: is stop and frisk immoral at all costs, like many people feel about the death penalty or is it just the efficacy that makes people balk?
If a school shooter in on the loose , and he happens to be an X guy in a red sweatshirt (insert whatever race you are for X) then virtually no one will complain when the police stop you for questioning. But if you're just looking for a generic murderer, then stopping and frisking every person of the highest murder-rate race really isn't effective by any stretch of the imagination.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the stop-and-frisk program was much less racially targeted then Matt is implying above. The police were stopping and frisking young men in **neighborhoods** that had experienced a lot of shooting. In early 2000s NYC, these were almost all Black and Latino neighborhoods, and you can get into arguing whether or not that made the targeting itself racist. But to me it sounds somewhat close to hotspots policing methods that smart liberals like Matt usually argue in favor of.
Sincere question: is (was?) stop and frisk effective? I haven't looked into it in depth. But if we're contemplating such an illiberal policy, at minimum we ought to know if it does any good.
My understanding is that it *helped* with the fall in crime in the Bloomberg/Giuliani years, but wasn't necessarily the main cause given the national decline in crime at the same time
Any GOP policies ever? Seems a pretty tough standard, and precludes anyone from ever changing their mind. So if the GOP starts shooting Jews, no criticism is possible because of things said 30 years ago?
If someone supported the equivalent of Numerus clausus until 2020, it is going to be very difficult for them to ever gain the moral highground on racial issues.
It wasn’t 30 years ago that the left was rejecting color-blindness though. It was at best only a few years ago! Each and every dem-appointed SCOTUS judge ruled in favor of continued racial discrimination in college admissions (they would probably dispute that characterization, but I am uninterested in euphemisms here). If the dems want to try to embrace color-blindness now, they frankly have an uphill battle to get anyone to believe them, regardless of anything the right does
So you agree that the GOP policies are bad, and you just think the Democratic policies are worse? Or do you affirmatively agree with the GOP policies? I assume not the latter, otherwise why rely on the tu quoque? Just trying to get you to be more forthcoming.
Why? Like had we simply just removed segregation and nothing else in 1964 it doesn’t seem clear to me that we’d have given anyone much of anything.
It would have been reconstruction all over again and would have just created a race to find a new lawyerly way to say blacks should forever live in islands of poverty in a vast ocean of prosperity.
Despite being born in SF, most of my growing up happened in a small town instead, one of those places where common local professions were "farmer" or "handyman", there's still no movie theatre, and the chromatographic spectrum is heavily centred around two shades only. It wasn't a question of I Have Black Friends, it was I'm Friends With Literally The Only Black Guy. Or like my family was The Asians. (What do you mean there are different kinds, they all look the same and are really smart in school, everyone knows that? Yeah, positive discrimination isn't fun to live through either.)
I hated that small and small-minded place, was ecstatic to get the hell out via college, go live in Real Civilization. But the sad thing about only ever appreciating diversity as an abstract concept is that it's something of a shock to actually end up living it. Certainly it's easy to pick and choose the neat parts, the wages of arm's-length rootless cosmopolitanism: dinner a few hours ago was kisoji ontake soba boiled in drunken chicken marinade, while listening to Andalusian music. There are actual people tied to cultural artifacts though - they aren't separable from your poor, your tired, your huddled masses at the gate! I can try and try and try again to only ever judge individuals by the content of their character, discard all the metadata of stereotypes and heuristics formed by past negative interactions. It's certainly virtuous to at least try.
It's so hard to truly believe in though. It's hard to be raised on proprietous Middle Class Values(tm) and then end up being roommates and coworkers and neighbors with...people who have vastly different standards on cleanliness, on noise, on respecting the commons, on the boundaries of personal space, on public decency, on professionalism, on crime and disorder, on respect for laws and norms. I'd love to believe the leftist intuition that such things fundamentally stem from material conditions, and if we got a transformative economic reform like King envisioned, people of all stripes really could peacefully coexist. In many ways this is *easy* - we have multiple viable roadmaps for Number Go Up, and just need to pick one consistently, instead of playing footsie with retroactive wealth taxes or whatever.
The fear is that culture isn't actually a superstructure though. That people will mostly continue to self-segregate even once you remove the economic barriers to it. That gaps in outcomes will stubbornly persist nevertheless, even with surface-level economic parity. That I'll still only be able to mealy-mouth the catechisms of valuing all peoples equally highly, while continuing to gravitate towards neoliberals and rationalists, both of which are whiter than the rice I eat daily. Obviously this is preferable to being outwardly racist, and that's not nothing! But going through the motions without the heart being into it, while the opposing party is free to wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the armbands...that's just not a good battlefield to fight on. It's a Good shooting, sir. Does anyone even remember Heather Heyer? Hence the impulse to deflect to Medicare and ACA subsidies, no matter how inauthentic and coldhearted that seems. You've got to give the people hope, and all too often that takes the form of self-interest rather than high-minded principles.
There's a lot in here. Thank you for this comment. +1 for "culture isn't ....a superstructure..." Yeah, everyone will continue to self-segregate once you remove the economic barriers. BUT....if those barriers ARE removed, the levels of: jealousy / squabbling / outright violent fighting & other insanity will simmer down, simmer back down to the best we can do — a dull roar, instead of the current rabid raccoon fang slashing we're having lately. It sorta / kinda usta function like that, leastwise in my small experience in a relatively integrated, assimilated time and place, small pockets in Brooklyn in the early 70s. Hard to think at the time that I'd ever look back and see that as a time when "integration", and not just racial integration, but social & economic, actually kinda functioned at a peak. I thought that was finally the beginning. That's the best it ever was in my lifetime, and FFS, what happened? (well I know what happened, too tiresome to repeat here)
A lot of these differences do stem from “fundamentally stem from material conditions” though? When I meet people through work (who are all materially comfortable), I’m pretty confident they’ll have reasonably similar standards regarding professionalism, public decency, crime and disorder, laws and norms, etc., regardless of what race they are or even what country they are from or currently in. Some people individually have betrayed that trust but it isn’t one identity group more likely to do it and it’s rare enough that “trust everyone” is still a default.
Other things like cleanliness are more personal preference, people have disputes over that with their own spouses, I think that’s variation that should just be tolerated.
Whatever King said, colorblind enforcement of the law is the right thing to do, and equality of results is a foolish thing to force. With that said, this Republican flies his flags today (a special sacrifice because I had to switch out the Mardi Gras ones) because MLK represented another small step on Western Civilization’s (and thus the world’s) march from the darkness of barbarism towards individual rights.
What good is equality before the law if it doesn’t yield results? We did that in 1865 and we just created a time bomb for lawyers to think of new ways to codify second class citizenship. Absent an active ethic to bring everyone into real material equality people will find creative ways to keep people Down.
But it does yield results - just not the ones your philosophy expects. People achieve in proportion to their ambition, their self-discipline and their talent. You can get rid of these differences in achievement but not without killing the drive to achieve. That’s why the USSR had wheat fields with only the outside rows producing much wheat. The laborers only cultivated the rows that could be seen by the inspectors who were too lazy to walk the fields. THAT’s the world you will force us all into.
So if we run a race and I start 100 meters behind you the only distinction is the amount of ambition and talent? It's like genuinely hard to believe you believe this. I don't believe in getting rid of differences in achievement but a kid born to no account parents who attends no account schools, who at best attends middling post secondary education for trades or practical skills when does he or she get a chance to rise to the level of someone born to exceptional parents with exceptional resources?
This is a reconstruction playbook by suitable for television means. No violent spectacle but keeping people down all the same.
That may be true once you get stopped and detained, but you are much more likely to be stopped or detained because of your color. I can't speak to Minneapolis, but in Chicago second and third generation Latinos were often getting stopped. Yes, they didn't get deported, but having to worry about this happening every time you head out the door is no small thing. Even at the most practical level, you have to build in extra time any time you go somewhere, you miss your train, etc.
So? The claim is that people are getting hauled down to the courthouse (or sent to a detention facility out of state) because of their color, even if they ultimately get released.
“The claim is that people are getting hauled down to the courthouse (or sent to a detention facility out of state) because of their color”
That’s the claim. Is it true? Or are they talking about situations where a legal immigrant was in a place with a bunch of illegal aliens that was raided?
"I agree with King’s view that we should judge people based on their individual attributes rather than statistical inferences based on their skin color."
Conservatives like to think of themselves as bold truth-tellers when they identify race-based statistical trends, but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist, nor even whether these statistical trends are based on qualities that are somehow inherent to the races, but rather, how society may or should treat individuals in response to those statistical trends even if they do exist.
(Of course, if you go far enough to the right, you'll find conservatives who want to get rid of Indian-Americans or whatever, even though they statistically perform better than white Americans on basically every metric. Because at its root it isn't really about crime or intelligence or anything else, it's just tribalism.)
"but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist"
Necessary preamble: "Conservativism" these days has overwhelmingly degenerated into an utter sewer of racism.
That said, I would simultaneously suggest that a substantial part of the problem of the past 20 or so years, and which in my view has contributed to the aforementioned sewer of racism situation, has been that there has been a major (not sure how one would define "core") disagreement over whether these statistical trends exist.
All those shootings that occur in Chicago every weekend, are not HS Band members going to band camp.
Being a member of a criminal gang kind of says it all. Most Islamic Terrorists are, in fact, adherents of Islam.
Guys with Nazi tats, bald heads, profess fealty to white supremacy, are, in fact, White Supremacists.
Matt, IMHO, you are conflating policing with social justice. Not every person of color is a criminal, but everyone who belongs to a drug gang is likely involved with criminal behavior.
If you cannot distinguish that difference, it makes policy very difficult.
NYC teens, who were stopped and frisked because they wore clothes that echoed prison, were a style that teens emulated. A cultural thing, which NWA captured. Not every teen who dressed like a prisoner was a drug gang member.
That is a big difference. Policing gang members, good. Random stop and frisks because they were black and dressed like hoods living in the hood was wrong.
Now here is another big difference. The confiscation of guns found in half a million stop-and-frisk stops? About 1.5%. Minuscule. I’ll bet, however, if you targeted gang members for stop and frisk, you’d find more guns. It is the application of targeting that matters. Oh, and by the way, I’d keep a watch on those guys with Nazi tats and resentment of Jews and Blacks....Just sayin'
Most urban police have gang units; their job is to identify members. Did you never see the HBO series called The Wire?
If you are asking me how to identify gang members? Sometimes it is as easy as having a gang tat, like MS 13. Behavior, driving around, and visiting kids on street corners selling dope. It really isn’t that hard. In fact, my solution is for the US Attorney in Chicago to Rico the various gangs. Through observation, it shouldn't be too hard to prove a conspiracy.
I agree with the sentiment in a general way, though I suppose I am one of the people who thinks immigration policy should be focused on, as MY put it, skills and human capital. In addition to disfavoring family reunification and refugees/low skill labor I would also give strong preference for ease of assimilation, which I understand may make some uncomfortable here, but I think the most stable and most obviously positive sum immigration to the voters is that which is noticed least.
Regarding racial profiling I think it's morally wrong, tends to undermine trust in the government by citizens, and often is just a lazy and not necessarily effective form of policing. The solution to that to me is an expectation of high standards and accountability from law enforcement. There's nothing stupid or bad going on with ICE that local and state law enforcement isn't fully capable of matching (and indeed it often has and does) when left without strong leadership and oversight.
Where I would maybe dissent a bit is towards the implicit idea that everyone is a blank slate, and even more so that all choices are equal. There's a lot of evidence out there that if you (i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married, your chances of poverty in America are statistically tiny. You can probably add a couple other things, including not being convicted of a felony. Further, the outcomes for children born and raised out of wedlock are statistically worse across numerous metrics most people would associate with a successful life. What really needs to be internalized is that, while the state can (and should!) do things like guarantee people have health insurance, a means of savings, and access to a basically functioning school system, it never can, and never will, create statistical parity (equity of you will) between those people and families that do things the right way and those that don't. We need to stop obsessing over the idea that it can. The question should be 'have we done right by this person as an individual?' That's all that matters.
Btw the original study that found that people who “(i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married” did find a fourth factor, and it was being black. And it’s all correlational, not causation—I’m sure most upper-middle-class women who decide to be single moms by surrogacy will do just fine. A more recent update finds that around 27% of white people who follow all 3 are low-income compared to 41% of black people: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/following-the-success-sequence-success-is-more-likely-if-youre-white/
A lot of this also depends on where exactly you set the poverty line, which is pretty arbitrary. No one in America is in absolute poverty while relative poverty is inherently relative so it makes no sense to say no one will be in it.
ICE harssment of working class Hispnics is not the same as (at least some version of) Stop and Frisk. The latter is about the actual -in the instant comissionof a crime - carying a firearm. ICE is about having at some time in the past having comitted the "crime" of entering the US w/o a Visa.
Yes you can construe remaiing in the US without a Visa as an additional crime, but that is not the same thing. THAT crime, remaining w/o other violations, does no harm -- indeed it produces net benefits for citizens -- so that is is counterproductive to expend resources enforcing it.
[One could make failure to self report speeding as an additonal offense but it would not make sense to enforce it by stopping cars with charactersitics similar to those of those with unpaid fines becasuse the non-report is causing no additional harm.]
Stop and frisk is about frisking people for whom the only reason to suspect they have guns is their skin color and their dress. It's just like stopping Hispanic people because those same kinds of clues suggest they might be an illegal immigrant (and Hispanic people are statistically more likely to be illegal immigrants than the people stopped by stop and frisk were to be carrying guns). I agree that remaining in the country without authorization is less bad than carrying illegally but neither of these approaches is remotely acceptable.
This is why the left can’t cheer for Iran. They’ve chosen the most misogynistic ideology/religion (NOT race) ever invented over liberal democracy. They’ve chosen FGM. They’ve chosen coerced marriage. They’ve chosen not educating girls. They’ve chosen legal rape and honor killings.
We’ve already seen this script in Europe where people who criticize rape go to jail longer than Muslim rapists.
The desire to score short-term points by calling conservatives racist will doom leftists in history.
Let's talk about the type of fraud committed in the autism cases in Minnesota.
It's not just that some individual Somalians are committing fraud - it requires that parents bring their kids in to get fraudulently diagnosed with autism so that the doctors can overbill and the parents can get kickbacks. How are the parents finding out about this opportunity? Presumably they hear about it from other people in their community -- it's not like that can be advertised to the general public. If they are hearing about it from the community, there's a level of acceptance of the fraud in the community that should be totally unacceptable.
Does that mean that every single Somalian is guilty? Obviously not. But there's a level of community culpability that goes way beyond the level of fraud in your typical American or immigrant community, and sorry, it's reasonable to not want to increase the size of immigrant communities that allow stuff like this.
Old people were far more likely to die of covid back in 2021 - should we have blinded ourselves to that fact when determining who got first access to vaccines? Men are vastly more likely to commit violent crime than women - should we blind ourselves to that fact?
I agree with most of this post, except that the speeding cameras in DC are abhorrent. The posted speed limits are often ridiculous--clearly meant only for revenue generation-- and allow for no discretion, such as traffic conditions on early Sunday morning.
That seems bad to me, you'd want some sort of separation of revenue usage, similar to how police departments shouldn't benefit from civil asset forfeiture.
But even then, I'm still asserting my three points above.
Well sure, but that is not the system we have. So you can hopefully understand why people think low speed limits + automated enforcement is a cash grab.
And again, even if I stipulate that that's actually the case, drivers still have agency to completely thwart that cash grab. This isn't a robbery where a weapon is aimed at you forcing you to speed.
Obviously - but people should also be able to drive in normal course at the pace that a road was designed for, without worrying that it might cost them a couple hundred bucks. Especially as cameras and/or speed limits are often not well marked.
If scaffolding was collapsing onto pedestrians walking under it on a regular basis, I doubt you’d say “well I know the risks and have agency to walk on the other side of the street.” You’d say “I expect to be able to walk normally without having to think about collapsing scaffolding.”
The idea of Vision Zero and 20 is plenty is that cars should be driving so slow that if they run into a pedestrian, that pedestrian will probably survive, which is about 20 mph. It's an aggressive stance to take on speed limits, and reasonable people can disagree about the tradeoffs. But it's not a revenue generation scheme, and it's backed by safety data.
I would like to see stats. My city introduced speed cameras in school zones last year, and people say the same thing. I admit I can find them annoying, especially around schools on roads that were obviously built for higher speeds. I have gotten a couple of tickets. However, the number of accidents, including pedestrian- vehicle accidents, have decreased.
For your tickets, did you feel it was easy to tell you're in a school zone but hard to mentally drive that slow or did you feel it was hard to tell you're in a school zone?
Despite what I've asserted in this subthread, I do agree that traffic cameras should be as transparent as possible about their existence. One idea I keep thinking about is to paint or light up the cameras in bright blue to make it real obvious that they're there, as blue isn't otherwise a color that's used much in transportation regulation.
Curious, do they issue tickets during non school hours? I would be a lot more supportive if so. Where I live the cameras in school zones give out tickets 24/7/365. At that point it’s clearly not a safety issue.
The school zones here have beacons that flash when students are arriving and leaving, and that's the indication that lower speed limits only apply when they're flashing.
If true, I think it would be fine to (1) change certain specific speed limits on a case-by-case basis, and/or (2) substantially lower fines in exchange for having more cameras. But that's not what congressional Republicans are doing.
I wonder what's going to happen when all the surveillance, and AI analysis, and general invasions of privacy by corporations and government working together, result in pretty good guesses about whether a specific individual needs to be stopped and frisked.
Short but sweet, thank you very much for this, Matt.
I also like this short essay format for holidays. It's fine if you still want to use the purpose for a holiday in taking a day off and unpaywalling an old article, but a format like this could continue to work out well in the future when you're up to it.
On the stop and frisk comment, I agree mostly. but is there a line you'd be willing cross. If a certain group (race, age, sex, religion etc) committed twice as many murders as others, should we stop and frisk? From your piece i would say you would think it a bad policy. But what if they were ten times, 100 times, 1000 times more likely. Isn't there some number at which it becomes ludicrously pc not to treat that group differently?
Let's say there are 10 terrorist attacks per year.
Let's say every single one of them was committed by a person professing a particular faith F.
We have: probability of belonging to faith F given that the person committed a terrorist attack = 1
Let's say there are 2 billion people who profess faith F. Or 1 billion. Or 500 million.
We have: probability of committing a terrorist attack given the person professes faith F = 10/2 billion or 10/1 billion or 10/500 million, etc. i.e. 0.0000005% which is close to the odds of winning the powerball jackpot.
This logic leads to Germany imprisoning women who speak out against rape longer than rapists. Islam is fundamentally illiberal. Secular “cultural Muslims” can assimilate to the west but not devout Muslims.
Edit: and why is speaking out against rape an offense that leads to imprisonment? Leftists, as opposed to left-liberals, have always hated free speech. Cancel culture is just Marcuse’s liberalizing tolerance.
'and why is speaking out against rape an offense that leads to imprisonment?'
Is it? Could you link to some examples of this (or at least one) so we can see what it's about?
I have a hard time believing 'speaking out against rape' is a crime under German law but if you prove it then fair enough.
Right. Muslims are fine. As long as they're not too Muslim. Mighty liberal of you.
What if we are talking about carrying an illegal firearm? At what threshold would we be ok with stop and frisk? 1% chance of getting it right? 5%? I think personally at 20% I would probably start to be more ok with it.
If it were 20%, maybe. Although you'd want the following caveats:
1) You still do stop-and-frisk people not in that group sometimes, so if they start trending up to their own 20% you know.
2) You stop when it drops down low enough again (and use point 1 to catch it again)
Really, the key here is I'd expect this to rapidly change behavior, and keeping the policy going evenly at #1 should help keep it lower. It might still stay higher (3% for a group instead of 0.5% or something), but this incentive effect would also change behavior to make it short-lived.
I'd worry about the police abusing it with bad statistics, so I'd also want good watch dog agencies to check on it.
I'm not sure how I'd feel in that actual hypothetical case. I think at best it would be the "lesser of two evils", but having the supporters/police acknowledge the negative effects might help.
I think you run into a "speed cameras" situation here where being stopped and frisked is so intrusive that if you were required to do it to it to everyone, rather than an unpopular minority, they would stop doing it.
(I think speed cameras are fine; if they weren't proven to actually increase safety I would be against them but they do increase safety.)
Speed cameras also only get you if you're actually speeding. The intrusiveness for non-speeders is at most that they are a camera.
I previously kind of opposed them on a privacy (are they photographing you even when not speeding) basis but the seeming decline in people obeying traffic laws has changed my weighting to value their deterrence more than the limited privacy change.
This might be the take that Matt has changed my mind on the most.
Also, it's not just about who is frisked, but how often. Terry stops are practiced by police all over the US, and black men are overrepresented in them all over the US too.
But NYC under Bloomberg ramped them to a crazy high level. I don't think there was necessarily more racial disproportionality in NYC's Terry stops than most other cities, but because there were so many more of them, they had a much bigger impact on young black men in high-crime neighborhoods compared to other cities, eventually leading to a backlash and a court case stopping them (which the city, at that point run by Bill de Blasio, did not appeal).
Luckily for NYC, it seems to have turned out these very high levels of stops had little to do with the city's success in reducing crime, as crime continued to drop after their reduction. I think it's really important to separate out the debate over how racist the stop decisions are from the impact they have. It's a really unpleasant thing to go through when you haven't committed any crime at all.
I can totally believe that the majority of the racial disproportionality in stop-and-frisk was due to focusing the stops in high-crime neighborhoods rather than individual racial targeting, but even so, that doesn't lessen the impact on the people who were stopped or make it a good policy.
That is pretty close to what courts have said (in practice; they don't put a number on it)
Note that in the NYC stop and frisk a few years back, "52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found." Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 (SD NY 2013)
So, police were clearly frisking far too many people -- i.e., they did not have probable cause. It is harder to determine whether there were too many stops, though 12% of stops led to either an arrest of a summons, so they might actually have been conducting stops based in reasonable cause. (Note that a stop requires only reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity, while a frisk requires reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed).
I think stop and frisk is the easier question. It's clearly unconstitutional, no matter what the percentage.
You can't stop somebody without probable cause.
??? The Warren Court held in 1968 that probable cause is not needed for a stop. Only reasonable suspicion is needed, a lower standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio
And frisks for weapons can be done with reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed.
right, and the numbers are even worse if you define the group as Nobel prize winners. Selection bias is a real thing. Anyway, i knew as soon as i posted it i would get a statistics lesson and wanted to change it to percentage as in if x percent of nobel prize winners were murderers, but i was too lazy so took the stats lesson instead.
The argument doesn't work even with percentages! Lets say 100% of terrorist attacks or 100% of homicides are committed by people of a certain characteristic. If terrorist attacks or homicides are a low probability event to begin with (as they are) the prior probability of that event happening is already low. And if the characteristic is somewhat widely shared in the population, the conditional probability will be low too.
No, percentages applied to the group, not the offense. As per below, 75% of ex prisoners re offend. That's the percentage I'm talking about.
Ah, got it!
Also extremely low: your chance of catching the one terrorist with the practice, which is another good argument against.
I think this is a fair point.
What if we're talking about immigration, though?In the percentages we're talking about is the percentage of people that are antisemitic?
Or should we bring in people that are say, eighty percent likely to be antisemitic
This is an argument against randomly searching people but not against profiling per se.
I do think it is just an insincerely held view, no one is advocating stopping and searching elderly women for guns.
Which might be dumb! Or a good opportunity for a crime syndicate. Years ago, I lived in a city where an elderly woman in a quilted winter coat was holding up banks. It took a while to catch her because she caught everyone off guard. "She looked like my grandma!"
The problem with this argument is that even if people with, say, blue eyes were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder than people with brown eyes, the overall likelihood that a particular individual with blue eyes is a murderer would still be extremely low because murder is so rare.
Right but there are other correlations that are much higher. For example about 75% of ex prisoners go on to get arrested again within three years of being released. So yes it works with some groups and not others.
And that’s fine if there’s a standard monitoring or follow up on ex-prisoners. But not skin color or tattoos or dress.
Prisoner isn’t an in-born characteristic. I think most people are fine with stereotyping someone for their own past conduct, just not for what group they were born into.
And maybe i wasn't clear but i wasn't making a distinction between inborn characteristics and acquired or chosen characteristics (age or religion in my hypothetical, or more concrete things like gang tattoos or something). The triggering group isn't important for me, it's just do people feel stop and frisk is out of bounds regardless of the circumstances.
You're missing another category here: characteristics that are neither inborn nor chosen, but are placed upon you by society--hence, social constructs. That's the category that's been troubling me in the hypothetical you're positing here.
The relevant data point is not the percent of ex-prisoners who eventually get arrested. It is the percent of ex-prisoners who are committing a crime or carrying evidence of a crime at the time of the stop and/or search. That is still going to be very low.
I have no problem profiling people based on their own past conduct. But that’s very different than profiling people based a physical characteristic they were born with.
As it happens the US murder rate is 5/100,000, so if blue eyed people were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder, fully half of them would be murderers and I would, even as a blue eyed person, be okay with us being watched closely, because I don't want to be a victim of blue-on-blue crime.
Ok. Let’s say 1000. Also, the murder rate doesn’t closely track the number of murderers because of mass shootings.
It isn't mass shootings, which make up a trivial percent of total murders. The Brady Center says one percent of all gun-related deaths, so maybe three percent of homicides, based on the rest of their data. https://www.bradyunited.org/resources/statistics
But it is true that one cannot assume that one murder = one murderer. One murder could = 2+ murders (eg gang murders), and one or two people can commit murders on separate occasions (again, eg gang murders) https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03x.php
Right. I wasn’t really thinking of Columbine type shootings. More like a guy kills his wife and kids or robs a liquor store and kills the cashier and a cop, etc.
Still, the average murders/murderer in a given year is probably below 1.1 or so.
If you decide the problem is so bad that we need to use profiling as a tool, there are ways to make the interactions more humane and polite. Having masked thugs with guns doing racial profiling is a terrible combination.
Civil rights law does allow some permitted discrimination in cases where the accommodations required would not be "reasonable." Like a knowledgeable lawyer friend once explained to me that a school district with gay students could probably fire a teacher for belonging to Westboro baptist church. In that case you either have to discriminate on basis of religion or monitor the person's behavior and grading so closely that it's an unreasonable burden on you.
The kind of case you're imagining might verge into that territory. My one objection to Matt's piece is that I feel similarly about visas for eg low income Syrians. Such a high proportion of that demographic consists of people who reject liberal values, and it's so hard to individually test for that trait, that I would be fine with a blanket denial of visas to a group like that.
Are there any identity groups out there that are examples of being many orders of magnitude greater of committing really bad acts?
Men and young people (18-25) are an order of magnitude more violent than women or old people (55+).
Sure, these are biological traits that we have a handful of policies on. Let's amend this to focus on social constructs.
But that's what i was saying about a blanket condemnation of stop and frisk as a method. As i said above, ca 75% of ex prisoners commit more crimes upon release. So is there a percentage of any group however defined where people are comfortable with the stop and frisk concept? Or is it just unacceptable as a policing practice regardless of its utility?
That's a definitional situation when you're dealing with people that have actually established a history of committing crimes.
What troubles me is that you're positing a hypothetical that I have doubts on actually existing substantially. Maybe I'm wrong, so that's why I'm pondering what types of groups could meet this hypothetical.
I understand, but i'm not sure why you're excluding ex criminals as a possible group? i have no idea what the numbers are for other groups but maybe gang members drug addicts, i don't know but it was really meant to be an open ended question: is stop and frisk immoral at all costs, like many people feel about the death penalty or is it just the efficacy that makes people balk?
It's more about circumstances then rates.
If a school shooter in on the loose , and he happens to be an X guy in a red sweatshirt (insert whatever race you are for X) then virtually no one will complain when the police stop you for questioning. But if you're just looking for a generic murderer, then stopping and frisking every person of the highest murder-rate race really isn't effective by any stretch of the imagination.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the stop-and-frisk program was much less racially targeted then Matt is implying above. The police were stopping and frisking young men in **neighborhoods** that had experienced a lot of shooting. In early 2000s NYC, these were almost all Black and Latino neighborhoods, and you can get into arguing whether or not that made the targeting itself racist. But to me it sounds somewhat close to hotspots policing methods that smart liberals like Matt usually argue in favor of.
Well, sure, if they were 1000x more likely. Yes. Are you happy now?
Sincere question: is (was?) stop and frisk effective? I haven't looked into it in depth. But if we're contemplating such an illiberal policy, at minimum we ought to know if it does any good.
My understanding is that it *helped* with the fall in crime in the Bloomberg/Giuliani years, but wasn't necessarily the main cause given the national decline in crime at the same time
Democrats who ever supported Affirmative Action don't have a leg to stand when criticising GOP policies.
Any GOP policies ever? Seems a pretty tough standard, and precludes anyone from ever changing their mind. So if the GOP starts shooting Jews, no criticism is possible because of things said 30 years ago?
If someone supported the equivalent of Numerus clausus until 2020, it is going to be very difficult for them to ever gain the moral highground on racial issues.
It wasn’t 30 years ago that the left was rejecting color-blindness though. It was at best only a few years ago! Each and every dem-appointed SCOTUS judge ruled in favor of continued racial discrimination in college admissions (they would probably dispute that characterization, but I am uninterested in euphemisms here). If the dems want to try to embrace color-blindness now, they frankly have an uphill battle to get anyone to believe them, regardless of anything the right does
So you agree that the GOP policies are bad, and you just think the Democratic policies are worse? Or do you affirmatively agree with the GOP policies? I assume not the latter, otherwise why rely on the tu quoque? Just trying to get you to be more forthcoming.
Why? Like had we simply just removed segregation and nothing else in 1964 it doesn’t seem clear to me that we’d have given anyone much of anything.
It would have been reconstruction all over again and would have just created a race to find a new lawyerly way to say blacks should forever live in islands of poverty in a vast ocean of prosperity.
Despite being born in SF, most of my growing up happened in a small town instead, one of those places where common local professions were "farmer" or "handyman", there's still no movie theatre, and the chromatographic spectrum is heavily centred around two shades only. It wasn't a question of I Have Black Friends, it was I'm Friends With Literally The Only Black Guy. Or like my family was The Asians. (What do you mean there are different kinds, they all look the same and are really smart in school, everyone knows that? Yeah, positive discrimination isn't fun to live through either.)
I hated that small and small-minded place, was ecstatic to get the hell out via college, go live in Real Civilization. But the sad thing about only ever appreciating diversity as an abstract concept is that it's something of a shock to actually end up living it. Certainly it's easy to pick and choose the neat parts, the wages of arm's-length rootless cosmopolitanism: dinner a few hours ago was kisoji ontake soba boiled in drunken chicken marinade, while listening to Andalusian music. There are actual people tied to cultural artifacts though - they aren't separable from your poor, your tired, your huddled masses at the gate! I can try and try and try again to only ever judge individuals by the content of their character, discard all the metadata of stereotypes and heuristics formed by past negative interactions. It's certainly virtuous to at least try.
It's so hard to truly believe in though. It's hard to be raised on proprietous Middle Class Values(tm) and then end up being roommates and coworkers and neighbors with...people who have vastly different standards on cleanliness, on noise, on respecting the commons, on the boundaries of personal space, on public decency, on professionalism, on crime and disorder, on respect for laws and norms. I'd love to believe the leftist intuition that such things fundamentally stem from material conditions, and if we got a transformative economic reform like King envisioned, people of all stripes really could peacefully coexist. In many ways this is *easy* - we have multiple viable roadmaps for Number Go Up, and just need to pick one consistently, instead of playing footsie with retroactive wealth taxes or whatever.
The fear is that culture isn't actually a superstructure though. That people will mostly continue to self-segregate even once you remove the economic barriers to it. That gaps in outcomes will stubbornly persist nevertheless, even with surface-level economic parity. That I'll still only be able to mealy-mouth the catechisms of valuing all peoples equally highly, while continuing to gravitate towards neoliberals and rationalists, both of which are whiter than the rice I eat daily. Obviously this is preferable to being outwardly racist, and that's not nothing! But going through the motions without the heart being into it, while the opposing party is free to wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the armbands...that's just not a good battlefield to fight on. It's a Good shooting, sir. Does anyone even remember Heather Heyer? Hence the impulse to deflect to Medicare and ACA subsidies, no matter how inauthentic and coldhearted that seems. You've got to give the people hope, and all too often that takes the form of self-interest rather than high-minded principles.
There's a lot in here. Thank you for this comment. +1 for "culture isn't ....a superstructure..." Yeah, everyone will continue to self-segregate once you remove the economic barriers. BUT....if those barriers ARE removed, the levels of: jealousy / squabbling / outright violent fighting & other insanity will simmer down, simmer back down to the best we can do — a dull roar, instead of the current rabid raccoon fang slashing we're having lately. It sorta / kinda usta function like that, leastwise in my small experience in a relatively integrated, assimilated time and place, small pockets in Brooklyn in the early 70s. Hard to think at the time that I'd ever look back and see that as a time when "integration", and not just racial integration, but social & economic, actually kinda functioned at a peak. I thought that was finally the beginning. That's the best it ever was in my lifetime, and FFS, what happened? (well I know what happened, too tiresome to repeat here)
A lot of these differences do stem from “fundamentally stem from material conditions” though? When I meet people through work (who are all materially comfortable), I’m pretty confident they’ll have reasonably similar standards regarding professionalism, public decency, crime and disorder, laws and norms, etc., regardless of what race they are or even what country they are from or currently in. Some people individually have betrayed that trust but it isn’t one identity group more likely to do it and it’s rare enough that “trust everyone” is still a default.
Other things like cleanliness are more personal preference, people have disputes over that with their own spouses, I think that’s variation that should just be tolerated.
Whatever King said, colorblind enforcement of the law is the right thing to do, and equality of results is a foolish thing to force. With that said, this Republican flies his flags today (a special sacrifice because I had to switch out the Mardi Gras ones) because MLK represented another small step on Western Civilization’s (and thus the world’s) march from the darkness of barbarism towards individual rights.
What good is equality before the law if it doesn’t yield results? We did that in 1865 and we just created a time bomb for lawyers to think of new ways to codify second class citizenship. Absent an active ethic to bring everyone into real material equality people will find creative ways to keep people Down.
But it does yield results - just not the ones your philosophy expects. People achieve in proportion to their ambition, their self-discipline and their talent. You can get rid of these differences in achievement but not without killing the drive to achieve. That’s why the USSR had wheat fields with only the outside rows producing much wheat. The laborers only cultivated the rows that could be seen by the inspectors who were too lazy to walk the fields. THAT’s the world you will force us all into.
So if we run a race and I start 100 meters behind you the only distinction is the amount of ambition and talent? It's like genuinely hard to believe you believe this. I don't believe in getting rid of differences in achievement but a kid born to no account parents who attends no account schools, who at best attends middling post secondary education for trades or practical skills when does he or she get a chance to rise to the level of someone born to exceptional parents with exceptional resources?
This is a reconstruction playbook by suitable for television means. No violent spectacle but keeping people down all the same.
No one is getting deported because of their color.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
That may be true once you get stopped and detained, but you are much more likely to be stopped or detained because of your color. I can't speak to Minneapolis, but in Chicago second and third generation Latinos were often getting stopped. Yes, they didn't get deported, but having to worry about this happening every time you head out the door is no small thing. Even at the most practical level, you have to build in extra time any time you go somewhere, you miss your train, etc.
So? The claim is that people are getting hauled down to the courthouse (or sent to a detention facility out of state) because of their color, even if they ultimately get released.
(Ah, SD scooped me on this one.)
“The claim is that people are getting hauled down to the courthouse (or sent to a detention facility out of state) because of their color”
That’s the claim. Is it true? Or are they talking about situations where a legal immigrant was in a place with a bunch of illegal aliens that was raided?
"I agree with King’s view that we should judge people based on their individual attributes rather than statistical inferences based on their skin color."
Conservatives like to think of themselves as bold truth-tellers when they identify race-based statistical trends, but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist, nor even whether these statistical trends are based on qualities that are somehow inherent to the races, but rather, how society may or should treat individuals in response to those statistical trends even if they do exist.
(Of course, if you go far enough to the right, you'll find conservatives who want to get rid of Indian-Americans or whatever, even though they statistically perform better than white Americans on basically every metric. Because at its root it isn't really about crime or intelligence or anything else, it's just tribalism.)
"but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist"
Necessary preamble: "Conservativism" these days has overwhelmingly degenerated into an utter sewer of racism.
That said, I would simultaneously suggest that a substantial part of the problem of the past 20 or so years, and which in my view has contributed to the aforementioned sewer of racism situation, has been that there has been a major (not sure how one would define "core") disagreement over whether these statistical trends exist.
All those shootings that occur in Chicago every weekend, are not HS Band members going to band camp.
Being a member of a criminal gang kind of says it all. Most Islamic Terrorists are, in fact, adherents of Islam.
Guys with Nazi tats, bald heads, profess fealty to white supremacy, are, in fact, White Supremacists.
Matt, IMHO, you are conflating policing with social justice. Not every person of color is a criminal, but everyone who belongs to a drug gang is likely involved with criminal behavior.
If you cannot distinguish that difference, it makes policy very difficult.
NYC teens, who were stopped and frisked because they wore clothes that echoed prison, were a style that teens emulated. A cultural thing, which NWA captured. Not every teen who dressed like a prisoner was a drug gang member.
That is a big difference. Policing gang members, good. Random stop and frisks because they were black and dressed like hoods living in the hood was wrong.
Now here is another big difference. The confiscation of guns found in half a million stop-and-frisk stops? About 1.5%. Minuscule. I’ll bet, however, if you targeted gang members for stop and frisk, you’d find more guns. It is the application of targeting that matters. Oh, and by the way, I’d keep a watch on those guys with Nazi tats and resentment of Jews and Blacks....Just sayin'
Just to be clear, the people with Nazi tats and resentment of Jews and Blacks are currently being hired by ICE to do kavanaugh stops in Minneapolis.
Well, they are a perfect fit, aren't they?
Exactly how do you target gang members and only gang members for stop and frisk?
Most urban police have gang units; their job is to identify members. Did you never see the HBO series called The Wire?
If you are asking me how to identify gang members? Sometimes it is as easy as having a gang tat, like MS 13. Behavior, driving around, and visiting kids on street corners selling dope. It really isn’t that hard. In fact, my solution is for the US Attorney in Chicago to Rico the various gangs. Through observation, it shouldn't be too hard to prove a conspiracy.
I agree with the sentiment in a general way, though I suppose I am one of the people who thinks immigration policy should be focused on, as MY put it, skills and human capital. In addition to disfavoring family reunification and refugees/low skill labor I would also give strong preference for ease of assimilation, which I understand may make some uncomfortable here, but I think the most stable and most obviously positive sum immigration to the voters is that which is noticed least.
Regarding racial profiling I think it's morally wrong, tends to undermine trust in the government by citizens, and often is just a lazy and not necessarily effective form of policing. The solution to that to me is an expectation of high standards and accountability from law enforcement. There's nothing stupid or bad going on with ICE that local and state law enforcement isn't fully capable of matching (and indeed it often has and does) when left without strong leadership and oversight.
Where I would maybe dissent a bit is towards the implicit idea that everyone is a blank slate, and even more so that all choices are equal. There's a lot of evidence out there that if you (i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married, your chances of poverty in America are statistically tiny. You can probably add a couple other things, including not being convicted of a felony. Further, the outcomes for children born and raised out of wedlock are statistically worse across numerous metrics most people would associate with a successful life. What really needs to be internalized is that, while the state can (and should!) do things like guarantee people have health insurance, a means of savings, and access to a basically functioning school system, it never can, and never will, create statistical parity (equity of you will) between those people and families that do things the right way and those that don't. We need to stop obsessing over the idea that it can. The question should be 'have we done right by this person as an individual?' That's all that matters.
Btw the original study that found that people who “(i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married” did find a fourth factor, and it was being black. And it’s all correlational, not causation—I’m sure most upper-middle-class women who decide to be single moms by surrogacy will do just fine. A more recent update finds that around 27% of white people who follow all 3 are low-income compared to 41% of black people: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/following-the-success-sequence-success-is-more-likely-if-youre-white/
A lot of this also depends on where exactly you set the poverty line, which is pretty arbitrary. No one in America is in absolute poverty while relative poverty is inherently relative so it makes no sense to say no one will be in it.
There are exceptions. There are nuances. And then there is the idea that nothing anyone does has any impact on their outcomes in life.
ICE harssment of working class Hispnics is not the same as (at least some version of) Stop and Frisk. The latter is about the actual -in the instant comissionof a crime - carying a firearm. ICE is about having at some time in the past having comitted the "crime" of entering the US w/o a Visa.
Yes you can construe remaiing in the US without a Visa as an additional crime, but that is not the same thing. THAT crime, remaining w/o other violations, does no harm -- indeed it produces net benefits for citizens -- so that is is counterproductive to expend resources enforcing it.
[One could make failure to self report speeding as an additonal offense but it would not make sense to enforce it by stopping cars with charactersitics similar to those of those with unpaid fines becasuse the non-report is causing no additional harm.]
Stop and frisk is about frisking people for whom the only reason to suspect they have guns is their skin color and their dress. It's just like stopping Hispanic people because those same kinds of clues suggest they might be an illegal immigrant (and Hispanic people are statistically more likely to be illegal immigrants than the people stopped by stop and frisk were to be carrying guns). I agree that remaining in the country without authorization is less bad than carrying illegally but neither of these approaches is remotely acceptable.
This is why the left can’t cheer for Iran. They’ve chosen the most misogynistic ideology/religion (NOT race) ever invented over liberal democracy. They’ve chosen FGM. They’ve chosen coerced marriage. They’ve chosen not educating girls. They’ve chosen legal rape and honor killings.
We’ve already seen this script in Europe where people who criticize rape go to jail longer than Muslim rapists.
The desire to score short-term points by calling conservatives racist will doom leftists in history.
Let's talk about the type of fraud committed in the autism cases in Minnesota.
It's not just that some individual Somalians are committing fraud - it requires that parents bring their kids in to get fraudulently diagnosed with autism so that the doctors can overbill and the parents can get kickbacks. How are the parents finding out about this opportunity? Presumably they hear about it from other people in their community -- it's not like that can be advertised to the general public. If they are hearing about it from the community, there's a level of acceptance of the fraud in the community that should be totally unacceptable.
Does that mean that every single Somalian is guilty? Obviously not. But there's a level of community culpability that goes way beyond the level of fraud in your typical American or immigrant community, and sorry, it's reasonable to not want to increase the size of immigrant communities that allow stuff like this.
Old people were far more likely to die of covid back in 2021 - should we have blinded ourselves to that fact when determining who got first access to vaccines? Men are vastly more likely to commit violent crime than women - should we blind ourselves to that fact?
I strongly agree with Matt, but I don't think there's a group wielding power that does.
Who in the US today is promoting celebration of MLK? Who is cancelling those celebrations?
I agree with most of this post, except that the speeding cameras in DC are abhorrent. The posted speed limits are often ridiculous--clearly meant only for revenue generation-- and allow for no discretion, such as traffic conditions on early Sunday morning.
Are there credible reports out there that make it clear that they're meant only for revenue generation?
And even if that is what they're meant for, there is a pedal in the car that can be used to completely thwart that revenue generation scheme.
And if the posted speed limit is ridiculous in any given location, then we should lobby the road authority to raise the limit.
And what if the road authority that sets the speed limit is the same authority that benefits from the revenue generation scheme?
That seems bad to me, you'd want some sort of separation of revenue usage, similar to how police departments shouldn't benefit from civil asset forfeiture.
But even then, I'm still asserting my three points above.
Well sure, but that is not the system we have. So you can hopefully understand why people think low speed limits + automated enforcement is a cash grab.
And again, even if I stipulate that that's actually the case, drivers still have agency to completely thwart that cash grab. This isn't a robbery where a weapon is aimed at you forcing you to speed.
Obviously - but people should also be able to drive in normal course at the pace that a road was designed for, without worrying that it might cost them a couple hundred bucks. Especially as cameras and/or speed limits are often not well marked.
If scaffolding was collapsing onto pedestrians walking under it on a regular basis, I doubt you’d say “well I know the risks and have agency to walk on the other side of the street.” You’d say “I expect to be able to walk normally without having to think about collapsing scaffolding.”
The idea of Vision Zero and 20 is plenty is that cars should be driving so slow that if they run into a pedestrian, that pedestrian will probably survive, which is about 20 mph. It's an aggressive stance to take on speed limits, and reasonable people can disagree about the tradeoffs. But it's not a revenue generation scheme, and it's backed by safety data.
https://www.cityofmadison.com/transportation/initiatives/vision-zero/vision-zero-projects/20-is-plenty
Did the posted speed limits change when they added the speed cameras? Are people you hit less injured on Sunday mornings?
I would like to see stats. My city introduced speed cameras in school zones last year, and people say the same thing. I admit I can find them annoying, especially around schools on roads that were obviously built for higher speeds. I have gotten a couple of tickets. However, the number of accidents, including pedestrian- vehicle accidents, have decreased.
For your tickets, did you feel it was easy to tell you're in a school zone but hard to mentally drive that slow or did you feel it was hard to tell you're in a school zone?
Despite what I've asserted in this subthread, I do agree that traffic cameras should be as transparent as possible about their existence. One idea I keep thinking about is to paint or light up the cameras in bright blue to make it real obvious that they're there, as blue isn't otherwise a color that's used much in transportation regulation.
Curious, do they issue tickets during non school hours? I would be a lot more supportive if so. Where I live the cameras in school zones give out tickets 24/7/365. At that point it’s clearly not a safety issue.
The school zones here have beacons that flash when students are arriving and leaving, and that's the indication that lower speed limits only apply when they're flashing.
If true, I think it would be fine to (1) change certain specific speed limits on a case-by-case basis, and/or (2) substantially lower fines in exchange for having more cameras. But that's not what congressional Republicans are doing.
I wonder what's going to happen when all the surveillance, and AI analysis, and general invasions of privacy by corporations and government working together, result in pretty good guesses about whether a specific individual needs to be stopped and frisked.