Study: cities rely more on fines for revenue if they have more black residents

[Associate Justice PiT]

Obviously, I haven't read the article, but the concluding paragraph you quote sounds spurious.

fake news!

Eh.

That's my way of saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The last paragraph actually directly followed the last one from the quote above it. I didn't know what you were referring to in it as incorrect. It seems accurate, although I would note that police plundering the populace for revenue is not always relegated to racial minorities. For instance, civil asset forfeiture and highway speed trap towns are equal opportunity ventures.

"The study does not prove causation," in the third paragraph, followed later in the final paragraph with the assertion "Time and time again, we’ve seen that when cash-strapped cities need revenue, they use their police departments to ticket vulnerable populations, particularly racial minorities." While, no doubt, people can be all kinds of heels, this seems to take a statistical finding to infer the motivations of administrative decisions, conjuring up the image of some slimed looking councilman muttering in the midst of a deficit discussion, "Well, we have the Blacks..." Far less sinister would be the idea that (1) for reasons that cannot be controlled at the city level, high minority municipalities may be more poor or, in friendlier language, have a smaller tax base; (2) that "cash-strapped" cities resort to short-sighted attempts to make up for revenue losses. Bringing in Michael Brown who, as far as I can remember, was involved in a robbery, further dilutes this article's point.

EDIT: Havimg skimmed the article you linked to (though not the study itself), I can't say any of my impressions have changed. Interesting findings, for sure. That said, an issue that was only touched on in about one sentence was the pressure on officers to perform [tasks that came to constitute, in one form or another] revenue intake, which I think we can both agree is ineffective and unjust toward multiple parties. The article mentioned variables that were controlled for, but did not mention economic factors (perhaps more a fault of the author than those undertaking the study; such remains to be seen). A more descriptive research methodology that demonstrated the circumstances and mechanics by which a municipality might see a loss of revenue, institute more and greater fines, and so on might clarify this. Of course, racism is in many instances non-rational, and findings showing increased targeting of minorities for fines in cities that clearly did not need the revenue would be just as compelling.

     Vox articles aren't known for their logically rigorous writing. What's more, I can't promise that this extends to the social sciences (though I would be surprised if it were fully inoculated from this effect), but journalistic popularizations of work in the natural sciences range from embarrassingly poor at worst to merely misleading at best. This applies to even leading publications that should have the means to enlist actual expertise to assist them in understanding these papers.

     I haven't really had the chance to read through the study either, but that's where the good content would be.