“...black cyclists were almost four times as likely to receive a citation for violating the helmet rule as white cyclists...”
Are they saying that black cyclists without helmets get tickets and white cyclists without helmets don’t???
Or are they saying that four times MORE black cyclist ride without helmets than do white cyclists???
They mean blacks are four times less likely to get off their bikes and wait until the cop passes to avoid being stopped. Something other ethnicities seem to have a better grasp of, if you flagrantly break the law in front of a cop, he might actually do something.
The heartburn is probably directed at the Whren stop, aka a “pretextual stop”. SCOTUS said, in 1996, that a “detention is a detention”, and if an officer decides to stop, say, a bicyclist for a traffic violation, and, say again, in a subsequent “pat down” search pursuant to Terry V. Ohio contraband (dope, gun, illegal knife) is found, that’s admissable.
Back in the day, when cops were encouraged to be pro-active, but subject to certain legal procedural requirements, they might choose to check out a dude on a bike at zero dark thirty. They might further notice “hmm...no helmet. I’d best warn this citizen of the traffic laws here in the fine state of Washington”. Lots of mooks got the message not to bother the neighborhood in that fashion.
Sometimes people don’t like the idea of the “pretextual stop”, and there are good Libertarian arguments against it. We’re about to see Seattle put into place an experiment to test that hypothesis that we’d be better of, as a society, letting drug dealers carry on their business uninterrupted.