The highlighted bit, people didn't start giving their counter anecdotes until you gave one that you implied meant that profiling wasn't much of a problem. Lunchdog stated that he is white. He was making the point that profiling happens to him depending on his appearance.
Any of these individual anecdotes should have been enough to show that there was too much of a problem because police forces should have zero tolerance of the behaviour described by Lunchdog and (especially) Mumbles.
However we don't need to rely on anecdotes, because there are statistics that show there is a problem, and many police departments- to their credit also agree that there is a problem.
In some areas, according to Lunchdog's posts, 90% of blacks stopped are completely innocent. Being treated as a potential criminal in such a situation would begin to grate with me.
Yea, I agree. It would grate on me too.
The issue I think which helps explain a lot of this disconnect is saturation level.
When white people hear "the cops are stopping tons of black people and questioning them" a lot of us think "omg! what in the world are they doing that for?" and we envision what it would be like if they were just stopping tons of regular white people going about their business.
But the cops tend to stop a certain sort of person. People who are milling around during the day when most people are at work. People who are dressing, walking, carrying themselves in a way that is associated with shady criminality (big bulky coat, sagging jeans, slouched posture, furtive glances around, antagonistic facial expression and many other indicators) and people who are driving certain sorts of cars, or in certain sorts of areas, or lingering in certain spots for a long time, or people the cop has seen other times being in suspicious places or with other people they know to be criminals, even if the person isn't in such a place or with such a person at that moment. Etc., etc...
Now, the unfortunate but undeniable fact is that the proportion of regular people just going about their law-abiding lives as compared to shady criminals who are skulking about within the white community is
dramatically different than the proportion in the black community, in the US.
I think so much of this disparity in police attention is explained by black people simply contributing such a very very high percentage of their total population to the "shady character" element of our society, and the criminal element of our society. Not just as a percentage of the total black community, but also in terms of raw numbers within the US as well.
The black community is really going all out in the US right now and for many decades at this point, when it comes to making sure they are well represented among our nation's thugs and criminals. There are several large cities in the US where if someone is a rapist or robber or murderer, it is almost a certainty that they're black. The market is really cornered.
So I really don't accept that the cops are routinely stopping massive numbers of totally bland worker bee black people going about their business. I'm not saying it doesn't happen at all, but I do believe the bulk of blacks being engaged by the police are the thug types.
There's a black YouTuber I'm fond of named painlessrisen and he was recently commenting on this in a few videos, and he said something very close to this paraphrase:
"I'm in my late 40's and I've lived in cities in the North and the South and I've really never been harassed by a cop. People don't believe it when I tell them that, but it's true. A big part of it I think is that I've always worked full time. I don't have a lot of time to be out in the streets getting harassed by police. The only time the police could even interact with me is when I'm coming to and from work, and on the very few occasions I've interacted with a police officer I've been respectful and personable, and have had absolutely no problems at all."
So, we all agree that a lot of black people are stopped by cops. Unfortunately though, this doesn't mean a lot of normal law-abiding black people are stopped because the percentages are such in the black community that a huge portion of blacks can be getting "harassed" by police and it can still be almost entirely restricted to the criminal element.
I agree the cops are getting some false-positives and bothering some black people they shouldn't (ideally) be bothering. I just think people exaggerate the number of false-positives by a MASSIVE amount and I think the bulk of this "harassment" is hitting those who fully deserve it, or at least behave and appear as people who wish to come across as a thug, and police attention is a natural result of insisting on looking/dressing/acting that way.
Within the white population, violent street criminals comprise a much smaller segment, and there is also far less emulation of white criminals by white-non criminals, far less sympathy for white criminals from white non-criminals, and a much clearer demarcation between the two groups. Whites tend to ostracize and "snitch" on their criminals, disown them, etc. There are always exceptions but that's why I say "tend to" and blacks tend to be much more supportive of their criminals, and the gradient between hardened criminal and average person is much more subtle without any clean break among blacks as compared to among whites. Well I guess there is eventually a clean break, but the hard-nosed, totally law-abiding, no nonsense, I will turn you in even if you're my brother type of blacks represent a much smaller percentage than among whites, and of course are relentlessly called Uncle Toms, etc.
I don't think whites have any term they've come up with to insult the hyper-law-abiding, straight-laced, no-nonsense types in their community. It isn't generally seen as something that needs insulting or discouraging, among whites.
