O-Tay!
Posted on 06/04/2005 5:33:52 PM PDT by Crackingham
For a fifth year, Missouri police departments produced numbers showing that, statewide, black motorists are stopped proportionately way more often than whites. But also for a fifth year, those who venture to interpret the numbers cannot agree on what they mean.
Russell Gunn, a former state representative from St. Louis, said his observations of police interacting with young black men convinced him long ago that racial profiling is real and that officers target minorities unfairly.
"The data back up what has been said all along," Gunn, a Democrat, said after the 2004 figures on 1.36 million stops were released last week by Attorney General Jay Nixon. But Nixon isn't so sure.
"It is vital to keep in mind that statistical disproportion does not prove that law enforcement officers are making traffic stops based on the perceived race or ethnicity of the driver," he said in an analysis accompanying the figures.
"Racial profiling, whether as an agency policy or as a practice by individual officers, cannot be proved or disproved by statistics alone," he said.
The crux of the latest report seems simple. Missouri officers must list the race of drivers they stop. And the proportion of blacks stopped in 2004 was 34 percent higher than the proportion of blacks age 16 or older in the 2000 census. They were stopped about 38 percent more often than whites. On its face, it suggests a problem.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
Law enforcement officers will typically stop people who are driving older or junky cars. I have never been stopped in my Lexus, I have been frequently stopped in my 1985 Toronado however.
Cops also will typically stop cars with darker tint more than they stop cars lacking tint, and many African-Americans put tint on their cars, as do many whites.
Customized cars (think that MTV show where they fix cars up) are also a target for cops because they assume the person they are ticketing is young and unconnected (and therefore, will have no way to get out of the ticket)
Most cops have ticket quotas which they have to fulfill, and they don't want to ticket people who they think are going to be likely to get out of tickets, and as a result, they are prone to targeting people driving cars which makes cops think the person is not conncected, and disproportionately, this leads to blacks being stopped.
Drive around the DC beltway and look at the race of the driver driving the Jap car that just passed you doing 90.
75% of the time it is black . Profiling is a BS attempt to hide the fact that Blacks dont obey the law.
If you really want to see something even better drive down Md. 210 and watch the crotch rockets at 100 mph with the front wheel off the ground and see what color their riders are.
imo
Your experience is like mine.
I think it is the kind of car one drives that makes the most difference. For years, I drove a red convertible, and I was stopped countless times. Then I bought a 4 door sedan, and all of a sudden, my driving was perfect. :-)
I'd like to see a study on which cars get stopped the most often. I think that would be more telling than the race of the driver.
O-Tay!
Blacks not obeying the law? Mercy sakes alive. Say it isn't so.
***They change lanes and never signal to get the jump on you,****
You answered that one yourself. If they signal you would speed up to cut them off , Getting the jump on them.
I drive a little in traffic too. The ones who think they own the left lane get to me.
How about they call it what it is...Criminal Profiling. All races are subject to that.
I must be getting old...I remember a time when there was such a thing as common sense.
Goodness.
Please direct me to a study, a source document, some sort of data that you reply on to allege those statements are "typical"
Or, if not a study, then you must be a cop because you make those statements as if they are typical ticketing behavior of police officers.
Study or your own experience issuing tickets, doesn't matter to me as long as you can cite the documentation.
Unfortunately (well not for me, but..) I know people at Government Plaza, meaning, I can't remember the last time I've actually had to pay a ticket
But, bad drivers are the primary reason I have never even considered living in the suburbs. Granted, it costs money to put my kids in Catholic school, and where I live, you don't talk to your neighbors (this is a rich area though, it's just, well, you can't see any house from the street, it's waterfront). But on the plus side, I don't have to worry about the garden club like I did in Midtown, I can let my grass be overgrown all I want without worrying about the property value going down. The other plus is, even with 3 school zones in the way, it only takes me 10 minutes at best to get on I-10, and my exit on 10 is less than a 5 minute drive away from the downtown exit.
The truth is, you don't save any money by living in the suburbs (my opinion) because the money that you aren't paying for school or the more expensive gas, you end up paying for in having to buy cars more frequently, and having to buy gas more frequently.
"What I think is missing from the debate is the question 'What can we do about this?'" said Scott Decker, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis"
Ban assault vehicles
I'll be waiting to see the results of this study too.
Every teenage boy on my son's basketball team was ticketed for speeding except for two. Both of them drove their family's mini-van and neither ever got pulled over. And I don't think it was because they drove any better in the vans than the other kids did.
I believe that! I have friends who are a Black family with 2 teen-age boys. Dad likes funky cars - he has a 60-something monster, an old VW van with stickers on it, and an old sports car right now. They make the boys drive Mom's Honda.
Dad gets pulled over fairly often - the kids wouldn't be able to pass even one police car in those crates. But they're ok in the Honda.
O-Tay!
Did you ever see Eddie Murphy way back when on SNL, when he did "White Like Me"? One of the funniest skits ever done on TV (along with the Job Interview with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor).
My son wants to drive my mustang - I asked him, any idead how many tickets you would get in that?
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