de Blasio continues to run Bloomberg's racist, drug warrior police department

[bedstuy]

I don't know how much you can chalk that up to racism though. 

First off, I'm not sure anyone knows whether whites use marijuana more than blacks or latinos.  How do you get data on that? 

Secondly, how are these arrests happening?  I would guess it's often that marjiuana is found on the person of someone who's being arrested for some other reason.  White people in NYC don't tend to commit crimes in general so they're just less likely to interact with police.

The real answer is to legalize marijuana and cut down the overpolicing in general. 

[bedstuy]

Secondly, how are these arrests happening?  I would guess it's often that marjiuana is found on the person of someone who's being arrested for some other reason.  White people in NYC don't tend to commit crimes in general so they're just less likely to interact with police.

They get caught less because of racial profiling.

The same reason why the number of arrested non whites are so high.

That's not true though.  If you take a crime like misdemeanor assault, 11% of the suspects were white, 11% of the arrestees were white.  That's the basic pattern for every crime.  And, whites are also rarely victims of crime.  For misdemeanor assault, 14% of the victims were white.  Are whites just assaulting non-whites at a crazy disproportionate rate or are whites much less likely to report crimes?  The numbers just don't add up for racial profiling to make up the difference.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/2012_year_end_enforcement_report.pdf

[bedstuy]

@bedstuy: another issue when you look at the problem on a national level is that blacks live in urban areas that are more easily/heavily policed.  I'd imagine that this explains part of the disparity even within NYC (think Queensbridge vs Staten Island).  I can dig up some sources for you on these questions if you'd like, I went into some depth on the topic in 2011.

About 44% of NYC is white.  9% of the murder suspects are white.

About 23% of NYC is black.  53.7% of the murder suspects are black.

So, we have to assume that there are actually many, many more unreported murders happening in NYC, all committed by whites.  Do you think like 150 people in NYC per year are murdered by white people, but none of the murders are reported to police?  Obviously that's ridiculous. 

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.

[bedstuy]

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? 

[bedstuy]

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.

[bedstuy]

I'm not arguing that we ignore the numbers. I'm arguing that they be put into context. You say blacks and Hispanics commit crimes at vastly higher rates than whites and Asians. I'd say first, you have to remove (or at least acknowledge) the effect of blacks and Hispanics getting caught committing crimes at higher rates than whites and Asians, or being in close proximity to police more than those other groups. If the police believe your thesis, chances are they're going to be stopping, searching, rousting those groups more than others (which is, in fact, just what we see). If after accounting for that we find that there is still a disparity, then it's on us, if we're being rigorous, to examine why.

That can't possibly explain the disparity though.  Take murders for the year 2013:

Whites represented 6.5% of the murder arrestees, but 5.8% of the suspects.
Blacks represented 54% of the murder arrestees, but 55% of the suspects. 

So, whites were actually more likely to get caught for some crimes.  And, those numbers just demonstrate the disparity.  Over 90% of the murders are committed by black and Hispanic people.  If white people are actually committing the same about based on their population, there are hundreds of people getting murdered every year who nobody reports as murdered.  And, the geographic distributions also show this.  The neighborhoods with no white or Asian residents have the highest murder rates.  In the 80% white areas of Manhattan, murders are extremely rare.  Are people pretending to get murdered by black people?  Is the NYPD framing people for murder?

You're also assuming that most crime is discovered by the police randomly searching people.  That's blatantly false.  A tiny percentage of the NYPD stop and frisk resulted in an arrest.  That's why people thought it was a bad policy.  Most of what the police do is respond to crimes that people report.  And, with crimes like murder, you can't really fake it, there are either dead bodies or not.  The geographic distribution of crimes is more evidence of this point.  There are way more reports by victims of violent crime in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods.  Are those people in poor neighborhoods just reporting that they've been raped or assaulted at a much higher rate than people in white neighborhoods?

Also, if you look at those stop and frisk stats, whites were 11% of the people stopped vs. 5.5% of the violent crime suspects.  Blacks were 65.2% of the violent crime suspects and 55.7% of the stops.  If you just look at the numbers, there's no basis for what you're saying. 

The way you tell it, it's that blacks and Hispanics have a greater propensity to commit crime period. But race and class are linked pretty tightly. Could it be that poorer people are more likely to commit (or be caught committing, or be charged with) crime, and poor people are disproportionately black and Hispanic? Could it be that even middle class blacks and Hispanics tend to live in much greater proximity to poverty than white people?

Stopping where you stopped is the problem.

Obviously, I never said that.  That's ridiculous and insulting.  And, I agree that poverty is a major determinant.

But, if we're taking the NYPD to task for arresting more black people than white people, the fact that black people commit way more crimes is relevant.  We can talk about why that is, obviously it's not intrinsic to blacks as a race.  What kind of idiot would say that?  Unfortunately, you're so worried about that crazy leap in logic that you're demanding that we ignore facts.

[bedstuy]

Slow your roll, guy. Nobody's demanding anybody ignore facts. But it hadn't been at all clear from what you'd said before, until the tail end of that last post, that you weren't saying there was something intrinsic to black people that made them commit more crimes.

You said black people are poorer in America and you didn't say that it wasn't because black people are intrinsically poor.  Racist much?

How do you like that dumb logic applied to you?

[bedstuy]

Oh good Lord. Enough.

EDIT: Let me try again. If there is not something intrinsic about black and Hispanic people that make them commit more crimes, then they must commit more crimes for other reasons than their race, which makes racial profiling and systems that bias their results in racist ways problematic, correct?

You seemed to pooh-pooh that the cause of that disparity was racism. Which implied, to me, that you weren't interested in digging deeper. But your last post says (but doesn't explain) that you don't think there exists such an intrinsic disparity. So what is to be done? What's your point in all this, if you don't think blacks and Hispanics are intrinsically predisposed to crime?

The police should be color-blind.  They should just work on reducing crime, whether there's a white victim, a black victim, a black suspect, a white suspect, etc.  Race shouldn't matter. 

I don't think the NYPD lives up to that, largely because some of their officers are racist.  But, my point was disagreeing with the thesis that the only reason there's a disparity between whites and blacks in terms of drug arrests in NYC is the racism of law enforcement. 

[bedstuy]

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.

Murdered people for one.

Crime =/= Murder.

Murder is a crime though and it's certainly indicative of the trends in violent crime in general.

Think about who commits crime. Generally poor young men. How many poor white people are there in New York City?  Not many.

[bedstuy]

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.

Murdered people for one.

Crime =/= Murder.

Murder is a crime though and it's certainly indicative of the trends in violent crime in general.

Think about who commits crime. Generally poor young men. How many poor white people are there in New York City?  Not many.

Now we're getting somewhere! Are you saying poor people commit more crimes, and that you think "black and Hispanic" is a completely reasonable shorthand for "poor" in NYC?

What's your point? 

[bedstuy]

Yeah, how dare I inject race into a discussion of racism...

And, if you're discussing race, you look at race.  My whole point is responding to the overboard criticism of the NYPD. People act like police are a negative in poor neighborhoods.  Police save people's lives. They get dangerous people off the street. Want to see the real racism of the NYPD, go back to the 80s and early 90s, police just never went to Bed-Stuy or Brownsville and the residents were prisoners to out of control violence and crime.  The vast majority of black people are the victims here, and you shouldn't exclusively care when a police officer is the victimizer.  That's the kind of racism we're blind to, how we only care about black people when their plight gives self-righteous liberals a chance to decry racism. Racism is bad, so is getting shot.