Race-Biased Police Violence

In other words, “Give Black violent men free reign, else people might stop calling 911.:confused:

In regards to the study you linked, taken from first paragraph of the report

So is the report talking about first time offenders of any crimes in both cases: black and white? Not made clear!

In 1st paragraph on page 2.

What does this mean?

Page 2, paragraph 2.

So racial disparity does not occur against black females enough to make their case. Why would it only be against black males and not against black females equally if race is indeed the factor for such disparity?

Due to a headache, I’ll let you get back to me on my questions and comments so far about this study before I keep going.

I think there are a few ways to design studies to try to address this, depending on what data is available and what we’re willing to treat as proxies for what:

  • If we have access to a lot of body camera footage, we could try score incidents to determine if suspect behavior really does account for the difference. If we want to be super rigorous about it, we could replace people with wire-frames or otherwise mask race prior to scoring. Either way, this would be hard and incredibly time consuming. It also depends on the quality of body cam data, which right now doesn’t seem that great; officers often have discretion to turn off their body cameras, and footage seems to go missing when convenient (but here I may be overrelying on anecdote).
  • We could look at how often resisting arrest charges are filed when a body camera is present vs. when one is not. We could also look at racial disparities in cases where a body camera is present vs. when one is not. We could look at trends in arrest statistics in areas as they roll out body cameras and that shapes officer behavior. We could look at how often cases are dismissed when a body camera is present, and any racial disparity there.
  • We could compare resisting arrest statistics between wealthy and poor areas, and (if data is available), between wealthy and poor defendants. There, wealth or income would act as a proxy for self-control, and we could see what if any difference that makes on race disparities.
  • We could control for intoxication, since intoxication is likely to be a good proxy for lack of self-control. If it’s an issue of behavior and cooperation, we should expect racial disparities to be reduced when comparing intoxicated black suspects to intoxicated white suspects, since we’d expect those populations to be both pretty uncooperative.

But I think a better question is what to do since we don’t have any of these studies in front of us. I’m saying, let’s turn to the studies we do have, and try to make sure our hypotheses are consistent.

What question are you looking to answer here? If a black person murders someone and a white person doesn’t, you can bet there will be some disparate police treatment, since murder is illegal and not-murder isn’t. That doesn’t tell us anything about race. Again, we need to compare like to like.

The “first paragraph” is the abstract, you need to look at that part of the report. From page 17:

I don’t agree that that’s how the report should be interpreted. The report is trying to compare like to like, and it recognizes that the criminal justice system as experienced by women is different from the criminal justice system as experienced by men. That’s clear just from the proportion of incarcerated people who are men (more than 80%, according to this report), but it is probably also reflected in the types of crimes, the lengths of sentences, and the factors that are considered. There may not be enough data on women to compare like to like for black women and white women. And in any case, looking at how race affects men is looking at how race affects the substantial majority of prisoners.

I gave a scenario that is alike, the police gave the same order to two people to raise their hands, one did as directed, the other did not which would escalate the policeman’s further reactions immediately. The type of crime does not matter, the defendants behavior does.

Page 17

Where are the specifics in criminal history discussed? What does behavior mean?

What’s different…the officers (NO!), the prosecutors (NO!), the judges (NO!)?

Right, so you are comparing different reactions to different behaviors. If we want to see what the effect of race is, we want to see what the reactions are to the same behavior. If you are right that race plays no part, then when two people of different races behave the same, they are treated the same. Comparing like to like means controlling for other things that could explain differential treatment (e.g. differences in behavior).

Page 9 and 10, also the data appendix starting on page 38 (page 40 in the pdf, the data appendix pages aren’t numbered). They discuss the calculation of charge severity beginning on page 45. So they accounted for both the number of previous charges and the severity of those charges.

The define behavior as “arrest offense, multiple-defendant case structure, and criminal history”. They are other variables they controlled for, attempting to isolate race.

The sex of the defendant.

If race is the consistent issue, it would be evident in a majority of cases for both genders where race differences are found, but like I mentioned, they had no case to unfold regarding racial disparities in treatments of women, which must be included to seal a case of racism. Racism against only men makes no sense and defies what racism means. Racism does not differentiate between male and female, being a racist is against all people of color, no matter sex, attire, age, etc.

Bottom of page 14

When they make claims like this I don’t understand why they are making the assumption that the same crimes were being committed when the charges are actually lumped into only two categories: misdemeanors and felonies. The type of felony would definitely weight a prosecutors actions and also a judges actions, but I cannot find where they have these specific stats, comparing a specific crime done by a white to the same crime done by a black. In other words, they are pulling facts and figures from all over the place and making these regressions (which I don’t understand) to try to come up with even sample sizes. If white people are not committing as much criminal activity or as severe criminal activity, why is that being fabricated to equal the sample sizes between blacks and whites? And how can a fabrication speak to real content and context? For example, they are not tracking 100 specific cases from start to finish for a homicide charge for a black man against 100 specific cases from start to finish for a homicide charge for a white man where both men share the same backgrounds, ages, education, economic status, county/state, etc. The clincher is the criminal history and when that is not specific it invalidates the entire study. Why aren’t they using first time offenders with similar backgrounds who have clean records and dispensing with all the other bullshit? Why?

Page 44

Assumptions vs ambiguities…seriously?

I thought this study was based on definitive statistics and case specifics, the information required to formulate a comprehensive study not based on assumptions…educated guesses which could be wrong in many cases.
This is what I was having problems with…guesswork. Why would you conduct a study that doesn’t have all the blanks filled in by factual data? Why base aspects of a study on assumptions, doesn’t that defeat the purpose and results of the study?

I’ll keep reading this study thing, but it’s admitted that it is sketchy several times over.

I don’t understand why they keep making assumptions concerning what I consider the most important aspect of all the cases…the criminal history.

What does this mean?

What is the binary variable?

Hispanics were counted where? They didn’t have their own category, except for in one aspect of the study, which I’m having trouble finding again???Seriously, Hispanics are floating in the white, black, Asian, Indian, and other categories? How is this even possible, let alone actual?

Not specific, not in-depth, and not linked through all the aspects of the study. How much extremely pertinent information is missing? What was this sample size for blacks and for whites?

Earlier in the study they brought up the record of criminal history being available through the AOUSC coding as either a misdemeanor or a felony but not any specifics, but not here. What gives?

Forgive me for the following hand-wavey explanation, I sort of understand statistical regression in the abstract, but I couldn’t do one myself.

Regressions are a mathematical tools that help match like to like. They’re the method by which the authors are controlling for things like criminal history and severity of the crime. The basic idea is that there’s some function that produces the measured outcome, in this case the length of a prison sentence. The function is something like,

(number if prior offenses)*x+(severity of offense)*y+(type of crime)*z+(some remaining unexplained factor)=(length of sentence)

That remaining unexplained factor is the error in the function. If we know the other things, we can guess the length of the sentence plus-or-minus that remaining bit. We can add other factors to try to reduce that remaining unexplained factor. Maybe length of sentence is affected by where in the country the case took place, or how good a lawyer the defendant had, or when the judge last ate. Adding those things to the function would reduce the error, i.e. if we know them for a case we can guess the prison sentence better. Other things we could add probably wouldn’t: defendant’s blood type, closing price of the S&P that day, whether the Red Sox won their last game.

Regressions are how we find this function. We take a bunch of cases and pull out all the information and see how much things contribute to removing the unexplained part, i.e. if we know some piece of information about a case, how well can we guess the outcome. Here, we’re trying to see how much of the difference is explained by race of the defendant.

We could do as you suggest, and limit the study to “first time offenders with similar backgrounds who have clean records”. We could do a thousand separate studies: first time offenders with background x, second time offenders with background x, first time offenders with background y, second time offenders with background y, etc. But regressions let us look at all those cases at the same time. Assuming that race is a factor that operates similarly in all those cases, we can get an idea of the general impact of race.

It should be acknowledged that this method isn’t perfect. We could be missing variables and it’s always possible that even where race helps reduce the error, it’s doing so by acting as a proxy for something else that we haven’t included. For example, if this study didn’t control for the geographical area (it does), race might be a acting a proxy for geographic area, e.g. if most black defendants come from certain areas, and those areas also have tougher sentencing in general. But it’s still a reliable method, and when we have hypotheses about other things that could be resulting in what looks like racial bias, we can plug them into the regression and see if they remove the effect of race. In this case, we controlled for geographic area, and we still see race as playing a role in determining sentence length.

Again, we’re trying to compare like to like. Where we know that the criminal justice system produces vastly different outcomes for men and women, we need to control for that variable, and compare male back defendants to male white defendants, and female black defendants to female white defendants. You’re assuming that “they had no case to unfold regarding racial disparities in treatments of women”, but that’s unfounded, the study doesn’t say that, it says it focused on men because the two populations are different men are 80% of prisoners.

As for why defendant sex wasn’t just plugged into the regression, it could be that sex is such a major factor in sentencing that it’s effectively not the same process. It could also be that the number of cases for women for which the relevant data was available was just insufficient to include in any meaningful way (for example, data from some states was excluded). It could be that intersectionality matters, and race really does do something different from women than it does for men. I don’t think we can assume that, and in any case it isn’t necessary to speculate in order to interpret this study: this study provides strong evidence that black men are given longer prison sentences because they are black.

They aren’t. After noting that a specific data set only indicates severity directly as a distinction between misdemeanors and felonies, the report notes that “charges are simply recorded as the detailed section of the criminal code a defendant is charged with violating”, i.e. the law that the defendant broke. The authors use those code sections to assess severity. This doesn’t resolve all ambiguity, but it gives a much finer-grained severity assessment than the misdemeanor/felony distinction.

As you note, this requires making “realistic assumptions” about how those code sections are applied. They are assuming, for example, that most convictions under a specific code section is not being sentenced based on some obscure aggravating factor mentioned in the code section. The assumptions are realistic in that they reflect how the code section is most likely to be applied.

I get the way you are upset with assumptions, but you can’t not make assumptions (I made this same mistake in my post above, but I caught it a few days ago!), and they state what their assumptions are. The right criticism can’t be “bullshit, they’re making assumptions!”, it needs to be “this specific assumption is unreasonable for these reasons, and if it’s false it undermines the findings in these ways.” There’s just no way to “have all the blanks filled in by factual data”, there are always blanks in any causal story.

What about all the Hispanics? In 2015, that was 17.6% of the US population which is a larger percent than the black population at 13%. pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/f … s-latinos/

How did the study filter out the Hispanics from the get-go? From what I read it did not, but did (and I don’t understand how) include one aspect of information about Hispanics they did have? How do you conclude a study about blacks and whites when Hispanics are mixed into both racial samples in unknown numbers?

Why wouldn’t they simplify the study so that criminal histories which are the most significant aspect would not be relevant? There would be no assumptions or ambiguities then.

Is this off their actual regression or is what’s above your made up version?

Checking if I understand…
Type of prior offenses(A,B,C) X severity(X,Y,Z) X current offense type (1) X (Unexplained factor/how did they calculate such a thing? a.b.c.)=actual length of sentence

Where was the amount of time already served for previous offenses included? This seems like an important factor for amounts of time served would influence how much harsher a sentence would be the next time around and might explain why a prosecutor would ask for the minimum sentence to be fulfilled.

If they are actually Hispanics lumped in with blacks, how do you figure a strong case against a tainted black sample? The unknown degree of Hispanic inclusion negates the entire study.

They divided it into what 6 sections of severity? Was that done for each previous offense? Then those numbers were added together? And what subsumed back into the six sections of overall severity? Somethings missing there. Then what about gang offenses when several people were involved? I didn’t understand how they measured and weighted those past offenses or if that past information was even known which would have also impacted previous sentencing which is another imperative part of their equation that seems missing.

The study wasn’t done correctly. Hispanics cannot be contaminating the samples. Their criminal history and past sentencing figures are missing, both very important aspects that needed to be calculated properly. Also, how did they come up with equal sample sizes when blacks and whites do not commit the same number of like crimes. Did they pick and choose certain cases to include and exclude?

Where was time served figured into the equation? If both the prosecutor and judge see that so and so served a good amount of time but didn’t learn from it, they may be punishing stupidity rather than blackness by asking for and giving the minimum sentence or worse.

Also the length of a criminal history may weigh against an offender before even taking the types of offenses into account, so how was that included? If the history for the study only took five offenses into account, but the prosecutor and judge saw many more offenses, that would have definitely given those with the longest records, the longest sentences.

But the fact that they didn’t use first time offenders for this study, which would erase the ambiguities and assumptions, doesn’t make sense unless it would have made a different case that racial disparity in sentence lengths between blacks and whites (and hispanics LOL)was no different.

First, let me take a step back so we don’t lose sight of the broader discussion: you seem willing to commit fully to hypotheses with no evidence (like that every unarmed black person that’s shot to death must have had their hands in their pockets and refused to cooperate), while for a study that does present evidence, and that attempts to control for a reasonable set of variables (including the one that you’d original suggested to explain sentencing disparity), you won’t accept it unless it eliminates every possible assumption. You’re holding competing hypotheses to wildly different standards of proof.

My impression is that that’s a running theme, and pretty flagrant in this case. You suggested that sentencing disparities could be explained by failure to control for criminal history. You provided no evidence, no data set, no methodology, nothing to support that conjecture. I provided a study that took the data we have, applied a reasonable methodology to do exactly what you were saying wasn’t done, and found that the sentencing disparity still exists. There may be other things we want to know from the data, more studies using the same data sets and looking at different questions could tease out different information. But “this study isn’t perfect and doesn’t tell us absolutely everything we might be curious about” is not the same as “my baseless conjecture is supported”.

Hispanic isn’t a race, so whatever the influence on sentencing of being Hispanic, it is separate from the role of race in sentencing.

First, there would absolutely still be assumptions or ambiguities. If we limited it to just first time offenders, we still need to control for the type of crime, i.e. compare murderers to murders. We need to control for the nature of the crime, e.g. murder with a knife is different from murder with poison. We need to control for the victim, e.g. child or adult, white or black, rich or poor. No two crimes are exactly identical, they all all differ in the details, and it’s impossible to create a data set that captures every detail that might be relevant. So we take the data we have, we make reasonable assumptions about how these differences average out, and we compare based on the data we have. That’s true even if we remove everyone from the data set except first time offenders.

Further, it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that race acts differently on first time offenders than it does on third time offenders. We could look at different racial disparities for different types of crime (and this study does a little of that, noting that disparities are much greater at the high end). But that’s just a different question. By combining all the data, we can see that there’s a racial disparity across all types of criminals, whether first-timers or repeat offenders.

But the disparity-in-disparities, even if it exists, would just mean that the overall disparity that this study finds is masking a much greater disparity in some specific subset of crimes. While that may be the case, it’s still sufficient to show that across all crimes, there is a disparity.

I think we’ve been conflating “criminal history” and “charge severity”. “Criminal history” appears to be a term of art used by the sentencing guidelines, that uses a point system to categorize defendants into 6 categories. I think the charge severity calculated in this paper was only applied to the charge for which the defendant is sentenced, and then they relied on the criminal history categorization that was used at the sentencing.

Why would assumptions make a study valid?

That hypothesis doesn’t need a bunch of evidence for it is based on common police procedure which is to verbalize orders to a suspect and either the suspect complies with the officers orders or he doesn’t. When a suspect does not comply with an officers orders, the situation escalates, often into areas of violent confrontation between the officer and the suspect and the suspect is arrested for failure to comply, resisting arrest, etc. If you want to make correlations between behaviors between blacks and whites when stopped by the police, lets look at the number of arrests made for each type of defiant behavior for blacks and for whites and see where we stand. That shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Show me that study. :evilfun:

I do not believe that a reasonable methodology was applied for it is still not clear exactly what was represented by criminal history, if it included the entire history which it doesn’t, nor does it include the time served or even sentenced for each prior offense.

If Hispanics are not a race then why are they considered a minority called Hispanics or Latinos? Why are American born Hispanic children classified as Hispanic and not white? I understand that the government is playing games with the differences between ethnicity, race, and minority status. On college applications, drivers license, medical forms, census forms, etc. when asked for race/ethnicity, Hispanic/Latino is a category, but I can’t explain why the government plays games with race.

From reading the choices above, what race is a shorter than caucasian, brown skinned, brown haired, brown eyed Mexican? Like I said, I see the games the government is playing with race, but I’ll let what Wiki deems race to be true ( :laughing: ). You know it’s not true, don’t you? :evilfun:

Did this study compare for all these differences? I did not read where they say they do.

Where does the study say that they include the entire criminal history of each person sampled? From what I read it was only up to 5 previous offenses, wouldn’t 6, or 15 previous offenses matter greatly?

Also, why wasn’t time previously sentenced and time previously served included? Those are huge aspects of someone’s criminal history which both prosecutors and judges see and both would greatly affect a new sentence suggestion and ultimately its length. Sentence length discrepancies happened here and were not due to blackness, but rather due to the stupidity of being a repeat offender!

Why would a complete study looking at disproportionate sentence lengths not look at sentence lengths already served or assigned for repeat offenders? There would be a significant correlation between them. Instead, that is incorporated somehow into the study based on severity, not incorporated accurately but rather an assumptive approximation? LOL

Where is this evidenced? I didn’t see any distinction made.

A subject simply tops out at 13 points at level 6. Their criminal history can be a mile long and real ugly, but it stops at 13/level 6 or were the actual points tallied rather than just the level? Only 5 prior offenses…not very specific to get the true gist of how much prison time an offender has already served.

Carleas, I understand that this is an official study, but it could have been done differently and with more accuracy taking all the important aspects of criminal history into account rather than glossing over them or it could have been about first time offenders so there would be less assumptions and ambiguities regarding the criminal history. The study does point to racial disparity which is what it set out to do and they came up with a way in this study to depict the disparity, nevermind that it is an incomplete assessment of the offenders criminal history which discredits its accuracy from the get go. If you are happy with faulty studies because they show how white police officers set out to break the law and jeopardize their livelihood not to mention take the risk of themselves going to jail, I am happy for your happiness. Find a better study or we remain in disagreement. I’ve been unable to find any studies that set out with the intent to prove that whites do not mistreat blacks. Why do social scientists only wish to prove that white people are racist?

While I found articles by the police who are commenting on the ever growing epidemic of non compliance of offenders with the police, the comments were not race specific for whites only condemn themselves, rather than defend themselves so it’s doubtful that the behavior of the black community’s conduct will ever be called into the light and have a research study done to measure it.

It would be valid given those assumptions. If the assumptions are reasonable, then the outcome is reliable.

Ah, so your position is that there is no racial bias in policing, and that claim does not need to be backed up by evidence…

While I don’t take your position as a reasonable prior, given what we know about the history of racial discrimination in the US (including and especially official discrimination by the police), even if we were to take it as a prior, evidence like the study presented, where behavior is controlled for, should make you question your priors. We have evidence that race, when isolated as a causal factor, is playing a role in peoples treatment by the justice system. In light of that, it’s not reasonable to accept, without evidence, that race does not play a role. Everywhere that people are making judgement calls (including when police decide that someone is being aggressive, or resisting, or not cooperating, etc.), race can enter as a factor.

Lefties are minority, are they a race?

Technically, Hispanic is not the same as Latino. While that technical meaning may not always track colloquial use, for the purpose of interpreting this survey and the data on which it relied, I think it’s safe to assume (!) that a study looking at demographic statistics is using the technical and not the colloquial meaning.

I think you’re making unreasonable demands. Studies into these questions are limited by the data we have. We can’t get an infinite amount of data on each case, and we can’t control for an infinite number of variables. But “could have been done differently and with more accuracy” is not the same as “is no good and inaccurate”.

And let me say, I may be coming off as too dismissive of your deep dive into methodology and demand for rigor. I don’t mean to be, it’s a good instinct and I applaud it. But it’s only valuable where it places realistic demands on researchers, where it is applied evenly to reject any study no matter the conclusion, and where the methodological problems you find can reasonably be expected to affect the answer to the question presented.

This study is limited by the data, it makes some assumptions about the nature of crimes based on the statute under which they are prosecuted, and it does not answer any questions about the independent role that Hispanic ethnicity plays in sentencing. But you don’t have a study that goes farther and finds a different answer. You asked for a study that looked at sentencing disparities controlling for criminal history. This study does.

That shouldn’t be the goal. Though I’m not so naive to think that researchers don’t set out with an end in mind, that doesn’t mean that we have to do the same. Look for studies that solve the methodological problems you have with this study, and then see what they find.

Let’s keep going. I think we’ll find that there’s a pattern where you reject reasonable studies for not meeting your impossible standards, present no competing studies – studies that 1) meet your standards, and 2) show that meeting your standards was sufficient to change the finding-- and then claim that you need no evidence for your position. Which is what you’ve done for this study. Let’s see if the pattern holds.

Let’s look at the study listed under “Findings of the Use of Handcuffs”. The link in that article is to a WaPo summary, but the study is here, and the ~300 page technical deep dive into Oakland PD data is here. It has different methodology from the report we were discussing previously, addresses some of your concerns about behavioral differences, and presents similar findings (racial bias in policing) from different evidence. I think we should stick with the shorter report, but I include the latter because I know you appreciate rigor. I’ll refer to the two documents as SfC (‘Strategies for Change’, the summary report) and DfC (‘Data for Change’, the technical report). Page references are to pdf pages, rather than the number written on the page.

A few things that stand out to me:

  • Related to your earlier claim, this study found race-bias in the rate of stops, even controlling for the fact that they are more active in areas with a higher black population: “we found no evidence that the OPD was specifically targeting African American neighborhoods. Instead, the OPD does target neighborhoods with higher crime rates. As the first analysis revealed, however, once in a neighborhood, OPD officers tend to stop more African Americans than is proportional to their representation in the neighborhood.” (SfC 11)
  • On a related note, the disparity was greater when the officers knew the race of the suspect prior to making the stop, suggesting that race played a role in the interpretation of behavior: “We also found that when officers were able to identify the race of the person before stopping him or her, they were much more likely to be stopping an African American (62%), as compared to when they couldn’t tell the race of the person (48%).” (SfC 11)
  • Handcuffing was much more common of black people than white people, even when they weren’t arrested: “We found that African American men were handcuffed in one out of every four stops, as compared to one in every 15 stops for White men. Even after controlling for neighborhood crime rates, demographics, and many other factors, our analyses showed that OPD officers handcuffed significantly more African Americans than Whites. This African American-White handcuffing gap was especially pronounced for vehicle stops and stops made because of traffic violations.” (SfC 11)
  • Searches were also more common for black people than white people: “Excluding low-discretion searches, we found that officers searched African American men in one out of every five stops, as compared to one out of every 20 stops for White men. Even after controlling for neighborhood crime rate, racial demographics, and many other factors, our analyses showed that OPD officers were more likely to search African Americans than Whites.” (SfC 12)
  • The police body camera language analysis is pretty interesting, showing that police used less formal language when speaking to black people, and used more severe legal language. That’s true even controlling for whether there was a parole-justified stop, and for the severity of the justification for the stop. (SfC 18-19)

Regarding our last study debate, I will continue to stress that the criminal history used did not paint the whole picture of the offenders previous prison sentences nor did it compare that to their current sentence which is a biggie to see the why blacks were sentenced for the 10% longer sentences. I say that blacks were assigned the longer sentences that they deserved based on their criminal histories.


Jennifer Eberhardt, a co-author of the studies you cited.

Does Jennifer’s being black have anything to do with why she has interests in racial discrimination and racial profiling against blacks during incidents with the police? My reasonable assumption is yes. Would her racial bias as a black person be the deciding factor in her choice of study and the methodology used to prove that blacks are mistreated in many ways by the criminal justice system? My reasonable assumption is yes.

What is also interesting is the fact that the Oakland Police Department had a racially diverse force of nearly 60% non-white officers around the time of her study, so it would be safe to say that all races and ethnicities which make up the OPD practice racial bias against blacks, even the 18% black police officers who were serving on the force at the time of the study.

Her study does not try to explain why blacks are targeted by the racially diverse Oakland police for worse treatments by the police, only that they are targeted by white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American police officers in the city of Oakland, California, correct Carleas? So it’s not a white versus black thing, it’s all races/ethnicities in the police force versus blacks.

Why are black Oakland community members mistreated by the police in general? And why are Asians treated so well by the same police? Do Asians obey the laws and the police more and more often than whites, Hispanics, and blacks? Is the conduct of Asians cooperative with the police? Are blacks not as cooperative with the police as Asians? Do Asians maintain their vehicles better than blacks who are mostly pulled over for problems with their vehicles rather than moving violations?

The chart above breaks down the racial demographics for the Oakland area, and the racial/ethnic diversity of the Oakland police department in 2013 and 2014 when the study was conducted. As you can see, the OPD was racially diverse in 2013 and 2014 to reflect the demographics in the greater Oakland area, not perfectly, but close enough to be reasonable.

There’s a lot to pick through in the 300 page version so this may take awhile.

This study counters your Ferguson study where you played dumb to the idea that the police were only doing their jobs in high crime areas that happened to be black. So, the OPD doesn’t target black areas, it’d be reasonable for me to say that the Ferguson police did not target black areas either, they were simply doing their jobs responding to high 911 areas in mass to keep the peace. It’s time to kiss my high heels for my being right! :evilfun: I like when you bring up studies that prove my earlier points in other studies. Keep it up.

Back to reading. :techie-studyingbrown:

I’m glad you’re still considering this, I thought maybe I was a little too fresh in my last post and you lost interest!

This is not a proper logical inference. I think it’s a fair to point out that criminal history could have been more precisely specified. There could have been 60 categories, or 6000. But you can’t just conclude anything you want from a lack of precision. The most precise data you’ve ever seen contradicts your hypothesis that differences in criminal history are what accounts for differences in sentencing. Either acknowledge that that’s true, or present more precise data.

No. Her methodology is fully disclosed, if you find something wrong with it, by all means point it out.

It doesn’t have to. The point is to show that there is a racial bias in policing. And I don’t think framing it as anyone “versus” anyone is productive. As I’ve said, I think most officers are acting in good faith.

As I pointed out here, you offered three unsupported hypotheses to explain the disparities in policing, all of which have to be true for your explanation to work.

This study shows that the third is false in Oakland: black people are stopped at a rate greater than what we should expect given the demographics. So even if this study supports 1 and 2, it still undermines your position.

Are all those stops supposed to be random in the egalitarian fantasy land or would police officers in that land also stop cars and people with suspicious behaviour more often?

In other words, if the police are doing a good job and try to catch the criminals and not just be blind random stopping tools, I’d expect the racial stop rate to somehow reflect the crime rate of different racial groups.

I guess it’s after all not about catching criminals but about social engineering to try and make all those different racial groups equal, at least when it comes to (perceived) beneficial qualities among Whites.

For the coalition of against Whitey sometimes a Mexican is White, sometimes he isn’t.
To understand why and how, you simply need to ask yourself whether or not it is good for Whites.

Wrong. Carleas’ studies show that blacks are singled out for no reasonable reason. In his studies, blacks are targeted by the white gestapo who rough them up at every chance they get, in fact, the whites go out of their ways to mistreat law abiding blacks while they pat the criminal whites on the backs for good behavior. It’s the white man keepin’ the blacks down law enforcement and legal system conspiracies, haven’t ya heard?

If only five offenses are counted out of 50 that an offender previously served time for, then sure his next sentence based on only 5 crimes in his criminal history being accounted for will make his latest sentence look like overkill to study observers, but to prosecutors and judges who have seen the other 45 unaccounted for crimes (the total 50 crimes committed and sentenced for) and those previous 50 sentence lengths, their most recent sentence recommendations and decisions will reflect the criminals past criminal history and sentences in full, the full 50, not just 5.

So your study is not inaccurate for what little evidence of offender’s criminal histories it presented, it just wasn’t the full picture and the full picture, the full criminal history, is what both the prosecutor and judge were going off of when they assessed the criminal’s latest offense and the length of his latest sentence. Nice try with that study and also the suggestion that I find better evidence to make my hypothesis more accurate and true than the study you presented. I suppose that you have to be offensive to goad me to become some kind of unheard of white social scientist out to prove the racial bias of blacks against whites in other social science studies by pointing out the flaws in the racist methodologies they are purposely incorporating to slant biases in their favor like the frequent use of whites in their comparisons rather than Asians or Hispanics. I can’t find any studies that show racial disparities between blacks and Asians even though Asians are treated the best by the police and the justice system.

Your studies, Carleas, have black racist researchers and liberal retards trying to point to white racists which just isn’t the case when using the police and their procedures as evidence. The real evidence lies in the why the black person was considered law breaking or suspicious in the first place and I argue that it is based on their past in the criminal justice system among other reasonable reasons.

Never fear, I’ll point out all the flaws in their methodologies.

Requested a copy of this study from the authors…wait-n-see.

Only 3% end up in prison. 53.8% of state prisoners were guilty of violent crimes. Blacks commit more crimes of all stripes even though they only make up 13% of the population and this is known due to witness and surveillance evidence identifying the perpetrator.

Don’t mind me as I gather evidence to support my hypothesis. :evilfun:

That same study shows that the disparities in traffic stops of black people are significantly higher in cases where the officer knew the race of the suspect before the stop. In other words, in those cases where it was possible for race to affect police behavior, we see an effect of race on police behavior. So the hypothesis that the disparity is based on differences in suspect behavior is undermined: where suspects are judged on their behavior and not their race, we see less racial disparity.

This is an argument in bad faith. I’ve repeatedly acknowledged that this doesn’t depend on the race of the officer, and it doesn’t depend on officers being evil. The only argument I’ve made is that black people are unfairly targeted by the police. The studies I’ve provided back that point up.

You know that’s not what the study is doing, because the study tells you what it is doing. The criminal history that was used in the study is the same criminal history that’s used in federal sentencing guidelines that judges use during sentencing.

The fact that you’re attacking strawmen should give you pause.

My point is that the best effort you’ve ever seen to actually control for the thing that you’re asking to control for undermines your position. It’s not that your position has been made impossible, but if you’re looking at the evidence in good faith, you need to acknowledge that the Bayesian inference from this study is that it’s less likely that your hypothesis is true.

To your “studies”

  1. This isn’t a study, it’s an opinion piece.
  2. When you get the full text, I hope that you apply to this study the same skeptical eye you apply to the other studies we’ve discussed. There are apparently significant methodological flaws that surely wouldn’t pass your high standards:
  1. In what way does this contradict any position I’m supporting in this thread?

I haven’t read this yet. I’d be interested in knowing how they acquired the officer’s visual knowledge of the suspect pre-stop through a questionnaire or on a stop report.
Most officers are moving in traffic so it would be more difficult for them “to see” from behind a car seats headrest in the rear and if it was in oncoming traffic, the car would be noticed in a moving violation before the driver. If they are parked to stop speeders, then they would have a better view of the driver, but in town cops don’t set up speed traps as much as they used to, that’s left more for state troopers now and days. However, they would “see” if they first ran the plates and the plates were owned by a black driver, particularly a driver on probation or parole. Isn’t it part of police procedure to run plates first thing?

That is not true when taking a studies intent and methodology into consideration, its not difficult to omit important deciding factors as to the nature of what appears to be a disparity when it is less evidenced or completely omitted.

You have brought up racism perpetrated by whites in our nation’s past and also used it as a means by which to imply that due to our history of prejudice, it continues today across the spectrum of the criminal justice system from prejudiced police intent through prejudiced sentencing.

You so badly want them to be targeted unduly and treated unfairly, but they are not and just because several different studies decrying racial prejudice against blacks exists does not validate them automatically. We are discussing why they are not valid.

From what I read they had only one specific about the past crimes and that was their codes.

Quote where they used all past codes for each subject. They used 5.

Quote where they incorporated past sentence lengths into the study…not what the guidelines recommend but the actual sentence as assigned.

Don’t you think that if violent criminals keep behaving violently after serving each sentence, the prosecutor is going to recommend the maximum minimum. Where was that taken into account in the study?

I don’t understand what citation you are talking about…is it about the study I haven’t received access to yet?

Can you refer me to those studies?

Or actually seeing the suspect is what made it easier to discern suspicious behaviour which if such a thing as suspicious behaviour exists, would prompt police officers to stop more Blacks because being more criminal.

But just to be clear, I don’t expect police officers to proportionally stop as many Whites as Blacks. Just as I would not be surprised to see them stop even less Asians, (Chinese and Japanese mostly, not the Britcuck definition including Pakistanis and such), proportionally. And all that after having discerned their race before stopping them.
I see nothing wrong with that per se.
Racial differences are real and they will remain real until the day the races have disappeared, because that’s what different races are about, actual differences.

So is it OK to discount your arguments because you’re white and therefore your intent is dubious? And my arguments count for double because I’m white and arguing that black people are discriminated against! Looks like you have to present like 4x as much evidence to make your case…

I am, of course, being facetious.

You’re making an ad hominem argument, a literal, fallacious, ad hominem argument. Where the author is telling you 1) what data they looked at and 2) how they analysed that data, and that person’s data and analysis have been reviewed by her peers to confirm their validity, it’s absolutely fallacious to reject the study because the author is black.

My argument in this thread is only that black people on average are discriminated against by the criminal justice system.

I agree with this. But the codes are used by the federal sentencing guidelines, and they capture past crimes as well as behavior during incarceration.

Yes. The link you provided, which points to the abstract of the study, also has excerpts from other studies that cite that paper (keep scrolling down to the section labelled “citations”). The first citation listed criticizes the methodology of the paper, and does so in a way that it seems you would need to take issue with to maintain a consistent standard. Of course, we’ll see when we have the full study before us, but so far it looks flawed.

If you’re going to argue that doing X while being black is just more suspicious than doing X while not being black, it seems like you’re conceding the point.

Nor do I. As we’ve established, there are racial differences in e.g. the rate of 911 calls across neighborhoods. Races also differ greatly across many other demographic factors that are correlated with criminality, including wealth, education, family status, nutrition, etc. All of those should be expected to produce differences in the rate of police stops independent of race. But here we’re looking at studies that are trying to control for those differences and find an independent effect of race itself. If police interpret behavior as more or less suspicious solely based on race, that would strongly support that claim.