you're straw-manning me into a bunch of things I never said or talked about.
So, do you think that whites and blacks commit the same number of crimes, or not? Should they police black neighborhoods less? White neighborhoods more?
There is no trade-off between the level of policing in black neighborhoods and the level of policing in white neighborhoods. You're arguing against assertions that no one has made. No one on this forum believes that the litany of crimes committed by white New Yorkers warrant incarceration because these crimes are largely relegated to drug use. However, the fact that white New Yorkers are not imprisoned for drug use is a clear indication that the NYPD employs racist procedures. Why are people of color locked up for possessing marijuana while white New Yorkers are not?
I gave you my thesis. I think getting arrested for marijuana possession is not totally correlated to smoking marijuana. The cops aren't necessarily trying to arrest people for marijuana possession. You can arrested for that when you have interactions with cops for some other reason.
White people in NYC have fewer interactions with cops. Their neighborhoods aren't heavily policed, they commit fewer crimes, they don't belong to gangs, they don't live in housing projects, etc. Is racism a factor? Of course it is. NYC cops are racist, I agree. But, a lot of the disparity comes from the fact that blacks are more likely to have their belongings searched, totally unrelated to racism.
I'll grant you that you may have a point on things like stoop drinking and public urination. They don't have nearly as many foot patrols in the UWS as Brownsville. But, that's because Brownsville has waaaaay more crime. Should the NYPD take cops out of dangerous neighborhoods and use them to write tickets for jaywalking in Chelsea? That's the trade-off.
Way more crime by what measure? More arrests? I'd guess that more arrests are going to happen in places that have a higher rate of foot patrols, right?
You've shown absolutely no willingness to view this issue outside of the racist lens of "Black people commit more crimes, that's all there is to it!" It's pretty gross.
Why do you think they have more police in bad neighborhoods? They have more crime. Do you think there is an equal amount of crime between Bed-Stuy and the Upper East Side. Murders are an easy metric. Do you believe there are hundreds of unreported murders in white neighborhoods going unreported?
Listen, there's no way to argue that whites and Asians commit crimes near the same rate as blacks and Hispanics. That's not a racist thing to say, it's just a statistical fact. And, it's a fact that most of the victims of crime are also black and Hispanic. Nobody seems to care about them.
And, I didn't say that's all there is to it. It's also that black and Hispanic neighborhoods have a higher police presence. Police might also be more aggressive in those neighborhoods because it's way more dangerous to police a crime infested neighborhood. And, it's also true that cops are racist. But, my point is that you can't just take a statistic with a black/white disparity and immediately assume that the main cause is racism.
Some would call this a moderate hero argument, but I think this is well thought out and well argued.
So bravo and thank you for improving the quality of Atlas Forum.
