Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWookie
And yes, I consider the idea that two people should be able to do the same thing and be treated the same and suffer identical consequences regardless of race to be a pretty normal idea. I know it's not currently that way. That's racist, and it should change. One should be outraged that it is this way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wil318466
Black people have it worse than other races when dealing with cops. We all know this.
But race doesn't play as big a factor as you think.
Wil,
Do you agree or disagree with what Wookie said here? Which option best characterizes your view:
A) A black person, on average, is likely to be treated worse by a police officer than an otherwise-identical white person in the same situation.
B) A black person, on average, is likely to be treated worse by a police officer than a white person, but it's basically due to correlated "legitimate" factors like demeanor, offense severity, prior record (which may in turn be driven by factors like education, poverty, etc.)
C) Black people and white people receive the same treatment from police.
D, I guess to be fair) Black people receive better treatment from the police than white people.
It's hard to tell what you're actually arguing here. My best interpretation of what you're saying is that yes (A) is partially true, but not as much as some people claim. But I don't think anyone here has ever really quantified, as if it's even possible, how much of the observed racial disparity is driven by A vs. B.** So, to me at least, you're coming off as saying, "Stop talking so much about race", but it's not clear why it bothers you so much that people are focusing on race. To me, if A is true to any significant degree, then it's a problem that's worth talking about and addressing.
**I don't do research in this area, but a large 2011
Criminology study (Kochel et al.) seems pretty emphatic about the arrest decision:
Quote:
By focusing solely on arrest and doing so systematically and quantitatively, we help to fill the gap in knowledge reported by the National Research Council and by the American Sociological Association. From our findings, we can conclude more definitively than prior nonsystematic reviews that racial minority suspects experience a higher probability of arrest than do Whites. We report with confidence that the results are not mixed. Race matters. Our finding is consistent with what most of the American public perceives, and that finding holds over time, research site, across data collection methods, and across publication types. Furthermore, controlling for demeanor, offense severity, presence of witnesses, quantity of evidence at the scene, the occurrence or discovery of a new criminal offense during the encounter, the suspect being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, prior record of the suspect, or requests to arrest by victims does not significantly reduce the strength of the relationship between suspect race and arrest. It remains possible that unaccounted for legal aspects of the police–citizen encounter could explain the race–arrest relationship, reducing the observed effect even to zero. However, it seems unlikely that improvements in the measurement of legally relevant factors will meaningfully change the strength of the observed relationship, given the robustness of the evidence examined in this meta-analysis to existing attempts at accounting for these factors. Thus, the most credible conclusion based on the evidence examined is that race does affect the likelihood of an arrest.
Statistically, the effect is clearly significant, but interpreting the effect size requires broader contextual considerations. On average, the chances of a minority suspect being arrested were found to be 30 percent greater than a White suspect (rising from the sample average of .20 for Whites to .26 for minorities). This finding is larger than most race effects found in a meta-analysis of court sentencing, with the exception of non-federal drug offenses and federal property offenses (Mitchell, 2005). Several of the overall mean effects in the court sentencing area were substantially smaller, such as an odds ratio of 1.09 for nonfederal courts’ sentencing of property offenses and 1.08 federal courts’ sentencing of drug offenses. Because of the interconnectedness of decisions made in the criminal justice system, even small racial differences that occur at many points in the criminal justice process will compound and produce profound effects further along in the system (Kempf-Leonard, 2007).