I am not white myself and have never committed anything anyone sane would consider a crime. Yet I have been picked up and thrown in jail several times. Last time was because I was walking my dog at the park without a leash. I have never heard of a white person arrested for this. If someone was raped in the park the week I was walking my dog there, I know I would have been the primary suspect because that's how this works.
Where do you live? I can't even conceive of something like that happening here in Phoenix, AZ.
Seriously, until I started reading stories like this on the Internet, I thought people were needlessly indulging in fake drama when they talked about racism.
The dog arrest incident happened in a smallish town in the southeast where I was doing some work. It turns out having a dog not on a leash is a Class C Misdemeanor, but it's one of those sorts of laws that even locals don't know about because it's only enforced against people they want to enforce it against. So for a Class C Misdemeanor, which is a pretty serious crime, you have to be booked. At the time I was carrying a US passport which the locals decided was not a valid form of ID, so I was held without bail or hearing until trial. I managed to get word to an attorney I trusted, he had to come in from the other side of the state, and was able to negotiate with the district attorney to allow me to be free until trial by threatening to file a Habeas Corpus. My attorney also acquired from one of my family members a folder with my credentials and newspaper articles and other citations about my company and work, which he laid out for the local authorities there which suggested the possibility of deep embarrassment in the media if they continued with this nonsense. When I returned for trial the charges were rendered "Nolle Prosequi", which means the charges are not dismissed and you're not acquitted or convicted, but you're free to go until they decide to bring you back in, it's sometimes used as a sort of a warning you are not welcome.
This sort of routine, being rousted and brought in on some bogus charges that are never applied to whites, is a common experience among non-model minorities in the USA. It's also very similar to the story of the man in the article. It's obvious to me he did not run the stop sign that was used as a pretense to bring him in for a rape line up.
This story incites anger and hatred in me. I feel powerless against the authorities that did this to you. I don't have an answer to what we can do about this, other than offer my sympathy. I am sorry.
It is my understanding that police must first have a "reasonable suspicion" in order to stop you, and only then under the new law, if they have "reason to suspect" that you are an illegal immigrant, that they are then required to ask for papers.
I wasn't really concerned with that law so much as the one enforcing it. Everyone who tangles with him ends up with legal trouble for some reason. It's a very strange coincidence because it happens regularly.
First of all, I think you are conflating prior and posterior probabilities. P(brown skin | illegal) != P(illegal | brown skin). The standard for a police stop is reasonable suspicion. Do you think having brown skin in Arizona is reasonably suspicious?
But much more importantly, the statistical evidence (which you haven't shown) would only be a consideration if justice were a statistical property. But if justice were a statistical property, there should be no objection to giving police arbitrary discretion to make stops and searches, since statistically speaking it is overwhelmingly likely that a citizen chosen at random has committed some illegal act for which they have not yet been convicted. But somehow that reasoning does not seem as appealing when we are the ones staring down the barrel of it.
The problem with the law is that people who are US Citizens get pestered frequently based on a trait they cannot change. In order to be useful, a test must be sensitive enough to match the trait you're looking for.
Suppose you have a test that could detect something with a 1% false positive rate and which never produces false negatives. Further suppose that the trait you're looking for occurs in 0.001% of the population tested.
Using that test, you would flag 99 innocent people for every guilty person.
I agree that we want to avoid false positives as much as possible, even to the point where we miss true positives.
But the law we're talking about is for after police have already stopped a suspect for a different reason, a reason that is not allowed to have anything to do with skin color.
I think it could still be an issue, however, because officers have been known to stop people for silly reasons, such as "rolling through a stop sign," when they really want to stop them because their skin color looks suspicious. I think this is a problem, it's really hard to fight against. So this is an argument against that law.
There's also a perception problem. If both parties expect to have problems, they probably will have problems. If you get stopped by cops frequently, especially if they're under pressure to justify why they stopped you, well, they can probably find something. And if you get stopped for small stuff (like the walking a dog without a leash) thing enough times, it'll get on your nerves. Doubly so, because there's nothing you can do to avoid it. So it's hard for people to be calm, which doesn't help anyone.
Please don't misunderstand, though. I came here from a small town and, due to unfortunate circumstances, we ended up getting frequent friendly visits from the police. The word "friendly" is not a euphemism. I mean that Darwin and the other guys on the force cared about us and wanted to make sure that everything was okay and that we weren't having any problems. They were great guys. They do a hard job, so when they have a bad day, things can really go to hell fast. So there are a lot of problems and the cops do have to take a lot of crap, both directly and from people second-guessing them. I do understand and respect that, but that's why I care to see that more attention is paid to avoiding perverse incentives in the law itself.
I think you've nipped it in the bud. There are always going to be good guys and bad guys. The best thing we can do (which is actually pretty effective) is set up the system such that the people are rewarded for the good and not for the bad.
Oops. The effect is real, but I typed one of the numbers wrong and the math of my example is incorrect. It's called the "Base Rate Fallacy" if you want to look it up, though.
