Cops search more non-whites than whites for drugs but find drugs on a larger percentage of the whites they do search. That should be enough to start your research, let me know if it doesn't get you there.
No, it doesn't get me there, since there is a simple explanation that has nothing to do with faulty indicators or even racism. I've explained it at least twice before on this forum. The explanation is that blacks tend to live in high crime areas where the drug trade is industrialized and particularly violent. Whites tend to live in low crime areas where drugs are generally consumed and not traded or smuggled for profit. Since the police, as they should, focus more on cracking down on violence than drug consumption, they spend most of their efforts in black communities where the drug trade is particularly violent. In order to stop a person in a white community for drug possession, the suspicion has to be pretty strong. In a black community, since the effort is to disrupt the drug trade and perhaps harass known participants in the drug trade, stops will happen as part of a strategy even if their chance of catching somebody with his pants down, so to speak, is low. Furthermore, there is a bit of a cat and mouse game where the criminals in the drug trade are pretty savvy about tracking the police and/or keeping the merchandise in the hands of lower level people unknown to the police. If you watch The Wire, which allegedly depicts the reality of the Baltimore drug trade quite accurately, you can see this dynamic with your own eyes.
Yep. Theory v. practice, practice usually prevails.
And yet you did know that it is hard to remove bad cops.
How can we not have an unacceptable percentage of bad cops if we know that the system for removing bad cops is broken?
They could be weeded out at the beginning of their training, before they're accepted into (and protected by) the union. Or it could be that the training is so good that the percentage of bad cops is extraordinarily low to begin with.
Nice move from encounters to arrests. Reset and play that one over again and you'll see I'm closer to right.
Ah. Well, it wasn't intentional, but I did conflate encounters with arrests.
And did you mean less than 0.2%?
No, I meant that the 20% of dangerous arrests would result in an assault on a police officer, which means that there will be 5 times as many dangerous arrests as actual incidents of assault.
And there is less reason for cops to be afraid of citizens unless they routinely escalate the situation. That doesn't mean there aren't good cops who are afraid of citizens, but I think their fear is irrational. Etc.
Find someone who does know and get back to us on this one.
I ask because I have had many encounters with cops that did not seek any form of compliance and those encounters were uniformly less stressful for all involved.
Agreed, either is edited to being useless. But in this case it is pretty clear that protocol was not followed, so it seems a bit hollow to say they were restrained by protocol.
Agreed, but going into every encounter with a cloud of fear and a need for compliance will have that result, whether intended or not. As I mentioned upthread, this can be an unintended consequence of training focused solely on officer safety. It colors every encounter.
Well, overall I am skeptical that malfeasance by the police is so bad that it cries out for a remedy. I am even more skeptical that any practical remedy would result in a better quality of life and a lower homicide rate for any group, blacks included.
Ironically, I think things have probably improved dramatically because of the ubiquity of video recording. That discourages bad cops from acting badly and rewards good cops for acting goodly. Unfortunately, more video + sensationalist media + cognitive error = greater social unrest.
