The people "complaining" like the billionaire driving a nice car he bought with his own money? Or the numerous cases where people are searched unconstitutionally and without cause? You have facts in these stories and in the data, yet you are still repeating lies about black motorists.
The data itself demonstrates that claims of criminal activity or possessing contraband is pulled out of thin air and directly contradicts the facts. Nonetheless, when the facts knock down the myths some seek to propagate, they continue to argue about the higher criminal activity of black motorists.
What the Data Really Says About Police and Racial Bias
- A report by retired federal and state judges tasked by the San Francisco district attorney’s office to examine police practices in San Francisco found “racial disparities regarding S.F.P.D. stops, searches, and arrests, particularly for Black people.” The judges, working with experts from five law schools, including Stanford Law School, found that “the disparity gap in arrests was found to have been increasing in San Francisco.” (Officers in San Francisco were previously revealed to have traded racist and homophobic text messages, and those working in the prison system had reportedly staged and placed bets on inmate fights.)
In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).” In 2015, whites searched without consent were found to be carrying contraband at nearly two times the rate as blacks who were searched without consent.
- The Department of Justice’s investigation into the behavior of police in Ferguson, Missouri, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.” The scathing report found that the department was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines. “Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority,” the report’s authors wrote. “They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence.”
“African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers, suggesting officers are impermissibly considering race as a factor when determining whether to search,” the authors wrote. Nearly 90 percent of documented uses of force by the Ferguson Police Department were used on African-Americans, and every documented use of a police canine bite involved African-Americans.
- In Chicago, a 2016 Police Accountability Task Force report found that “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet [the Chicago Police Department’s] own data show that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers.” The police department’s own data, the report found, “gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”
- A 2014 analysis of Illinois Department of Transportation data by the American Civil Liberties Union found the following: “African American and Latino drivers are nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be asked during a routine traffic stop for ‘consent’ to have their car searched. Yet white motorists are 49% more likely than African American motorists to have contraband discovered during a consent search by law enforcement, and 56% more likely when compared to Latinos.”
- A 2015 analysis by The New York Times found that in Greensboro, North Carolina, police officers “used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists—even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.” That pattern held true for police departments in four states. In Greensboro, “officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.”
- A 2013 ruling by a New York Federal District Court judge found that the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” practices violated the constitutional rights of minority citizens of the city. Between January 2004 and June 2012, the city conducted 4.4 million stops. Eighty-eight percent of those stops resulted in no further action, and 83 percent of the stopped population were black or Hispanic, despite the fact that those minority groups, together, made up just over half of the city’s overall population. (The number of stop-and-frisk stops has dropped dramatically since its peak in 2011.)
- A 2011 investigation by the Justice Department found that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, headed by Joe Arpaio, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos,” and that the office also tried to interfere with the department’s investigation. The sheriff’s office “engages in racial profiling of Latinos; unlawfully stops, detains, and arrests Latinos; and unlawfully retaliates against individuals who complain about or criticize [the office’s] policies or practices,” the report’s authors said. (Arpaio responded by saying, “We are proud of the work we have done to fight illegal immigration.”)
But yes avail us of all the tales of the evil black motorists to evil black crimes in black crime areas.