I was sitting in a coffee shop today eating paninis and overheard a conversation at the next table. It was two large Hispanic men who were talking about getting pulled over by cops, and how they were mad, but never showed it to the police, just simply backed off. I couldn't hear very clearly what they were saying, and couldn't place the men. There was a certain warmth to the guys. They didn't seem like criminals. One of them wore glasses. When they left, they scrupulously cleaned up after themselves, took all their plates and plastic to the bins, and left their table immaculate.
I wondered about the prevalence of pull over of various minorities, and how they would be treated in various locales, by various police officers.
I could never of course be a police officer. I can't stand policing, and hate confrontation.
But I do it with my children, or with my students, or with anyone over whom I have authority, and am in some sense responsible for (including neighborhood kids who are playing in my house).
I try to be firm, clear, and kind, but keep the principle in mind. With kids I try to keep their safety and their overall good in mind. With students, I sometimes have to police a class: throwing out a disruptive student, or charging a student with cheating on a test, or plagiarizing a paper. I have to make sure they are learning, since that is what they are all there for, presumably, and what they will want after they have graduated. With kids, the job is to enjoy them, but to also make sure that when they are grown they are functional adults.
The Arizona law that was challenged by Obama as being out of line with the Constitution might lead to a probability of police pulling over more Hispanics than is warranted. That would be bad, if they were innocent law-aiding citizens. But if you pulled someone over and asked for their papers, simply on account of being Hispanic, how often would the probability be that they were here illegally? If there are really 20 million illegal Hispanics in the country, wouldn't the probability be at least 51-49? With a statistical probability that is that high, and with the border unrest now including kidnapping, murder, and drug infestation, it would seem that the police ought to be able to do something, even if they would sometimes capture a legal citizen in their net. Likelihood of illegality has been reached at 51%, if the numbers are what people say they are. If the citizen had papers, they would soon be released, and this would restore safety and sanity to Arizona within a matter of months.
Of course that means that up to 49% would be stopped for no good reason except that of belonging to a group that has a high prevalence of illegality, but the inconvenience to those few would be good for the majority, and majority rules.
In France, I often saw the flics busting black men at the Les Halles metro. Some would bolt and run. Once one of them knocked into me and we tangled and fell over and over, and the cops thanked me, even though my papers were themselves outdated, and I was technically illegal. My tourist visa had expired, but I still had money and I was working as an English tutor, but not for money. I was getting lunches and visits to museums paid for. I wasn't legal so I didn't ask anyone for money, since I wasn't legally entitled to work. I would not have wanted to break the law of the country. However, I was on several occasions too lazy to leave the country every three months in order to get my tourist visa updated. So there was the question of the spill. Should I have also had my papers checked? I spoke quite good French, and was polite, and hadn't run from the police officers and was cooperative, but was also from a group that wasn't hanging out in the metro mugging tourists, but was myself clearly a tourist.
I hadn't intended to stop the man since I was in my usual otherworldly state and wasn't actually aware of the world around me. I was on my way to the Pompidou Centre in order to look at a sculpture by Victor Brauner of a tricycle that had the shadow of a screw attached to it. Meanwhile, a surreal event with a criminal trying to escape the long arm of the law was taking place behind me. He just barrelled into me, and we did a cartwheel together in the year 1987. I broke my glasses in the tumult. I was low on money so for several weeks I had to use the broken glasses as well as I could to read. Then, a check arrived from some arts agency in NYC and I was able to get my glasses fixed, and go and get my visa renewed.
Pulling people over without suspicion to check their papers is somewhat like checking everyone for bombs at the airport, including patting down their private parts, and photographing their underthings.
This is fairly invasive and perhaps unfairly invasive.
Should the police and the airport people have the authority to go after specifically suspicious people? Should they just check people randomly? Who would want to do such a job? I grant that someone has to do it to keep the country and the airports safe, but I would sure hate to do it, and am very appreciative of those who do.
I personally think that checkers should use profiling, and stop persons according to their probability of being illegal or of doing something illegal. I believe in the police and think they are almost always doing the best they can not to waste their own or other people's time with unlikely stops out of sheer nastiness.
We use statistics in a positive way all the time. If a major league team wants to hire a batter they'll check the batting average and number of games played per season. They'll want a healthy batter who can hit home runs and singles on a reliable basis. They will hire pitchers who have a winning record. When you hear a hit song by a singer, you might listen to another song to see if it's another hit. We all play the percentages all the time. No one wants to marry a slut because the chance of that person remaining a slut is high.
But somehow the government isn't supposed to play percentages, and this is why I think the government doesn't work. We want the government not to hire the best person, but a person that no one in business would have hired, out of fairness. We want the government to give contracts to the lowest bidder not to the person who would do the best job, so we get crummy government work that is shortsighted economically.
We won't let the police do their jobs because we're afraid they will arrest people willy nilly and harass and rape for the sheer hell of it. There is something going on about fear of totalitarian states, and the notion of the police states of Nazi Germany, and this continues to bother the left. But if you have a government that can still vote, and if you have newspapers and other institutions that can legally stand up to the police, and if even the police can be investigated, and imprisoned, I think this can in turn keep the police in check. I think we have this. We don't have a one-party state. We have a two-party state. So, we're safe, but could be even safer if there weren't so many restrictions on the police and so much suspicion with regard to how they will behave.
I trust that the police will not behave as criminals, more often than they will arrest the bad guys and keep them off the streets. There might be some way to maximize this, but simply tying their hands with regulations isn't that. It's like saying to parents, you can't discipline your kids. Or like saying to teachers, you must tolerate any kind of malfeasance on the part of your students.
We ought to let the police do their job and police.
6 comments:
Comparing domestic, local police behavior to immigration law enforcement carries the risk of overlap. That's what a lot of people seem to fear.
Actually, what the immigrant rights advocates want has nothing to do with fairness or equality. They simply want to take advantage of American principles to exploit an economic system which they envy and want to participate in, and will break any law to join.
Countries which don't have reasonable immigration control, always risk being exploited in this way. If the immigrants rights folks had their way, we'd have open borders, and citizenship would mean nothing. They would demand special entitlements for themselves and call it our duty, even though their folks were nationals of a foreign power. We have a very generous welfare system in this country, which they eye with greed.
The illegals don't "just want to work"--they want ALL the benefits of living in America, and they'll circumvent all the hurdles to get them, including using politics to further their agenda. Much of the Southwest has become politicized around this, and the growing influence of Latino/Hispanic organizations and pressure-groups is creating a major imbalance in the power structure. Whenever Hispanic individuals are elected to positions of power, they use their foot in the door to liberalize the handling and regulation of illegals. Each wave of amnesty brings less vigilance and more "tolerance."
Ask an unemployed man--or student--in Arizona what he/she thinks about not being able to find work. Hispanics don't just "want" agricultural work or menial landscaping jobs; they want the best jobs they can find, just like we all do. They want to send their kids to college, own a big house, three cars, 30 inch television sets. Yet advocates will whine about their "just wanting to work"--bullshit!
Kirby,
I see this all the time. Now, I'm not in an area with a large Hispanic population, but I do live in a "changing" suburb of Chicago, which is to say, one with an increasing African American population. Our black friends talk about DWB -- "Driving While Black" -- the propensity of suburban cops to pull over black drivers to check ID, registration, etc.
I see a lot of this. It's a rare traffic stop around here where the person stopped is white. One of our black friends was stopped on his own street on three consecutive days, coming home from work. Different cops, but the same profile, the same MO.
I see this as hugely self-defeating. The job of the police is to maintain social order. When they act in such a way as to convince a large part of the population that the police are not impartial, that they will not protect them or defend them, they've done themselves a huge disservice.
And the whole, "the police must act as immigration officers" schtick that the right is pushing is hugely destructive. I figure we're already to the point where, in many locales, there is little legal risk in raping or robbing Hispanics, because they have no recourse through law enforcement. You need a victim's testamony to convict a rapist, but that's not going to be forthcoming if they're in Guadalajara, is it?
This is obviously a wrong, but I don't know if it's more of a perception or an actual fact. I was pulled over constantly when I had a crummy car that a prof sold me for a dollar at the U. of Washington. I think it was the crumminess of the car that alerted officers to the possible crumminess of the occupant. I had to have every paper in order constantly, because I was constantly pulled over. It was a giant green lemon Ford with dents all over it. I was once pulled three times just going to the grocery store by cutting across campus. A campus police officer pulled me over, then when I got out of the campus, a state police trooper, and pulling into the store itself, a city cop (Seattle) pulled me over. Each time I had to give them my insurance card (newly mandatory), as well as my driver's licence, and certificate of ownership of the car. It was almost laughable.
Finally I realized I was better off walking.
I think especially at night it's hard for officers to see inside of a car. They assume things from the outside of a car.
Or from your clothing, I suppose, or how you hold yourself.
If you're running around saying you'll never get my stash, and wearing pants where the waist is below your knees, and you have slouch and attitude, flashing gang signs, then you are probably more likely to be considered questionable than if you are wearing a nice suit, and carrying a briefcase, and are cleanshaven, and walking with a good posture, and have no visible tattoos.
The police probably see more or less what we see.
The one dollar car was the most expensive purchase I ever made. It cost me lots of time in terms of stops.
I finally took it to the dump, and got a used Honda Accord. It didn't work nearly as well as the elongated boat of the green Ford, and the gears were constantly in need of repair, but I was never once pulled over.
We should test the racial hypothesis by wearing blackface, and driving around in good cars, just to see if this thesis has value.
I think it is the quality of the car, rather than the race of the person inside, that triggers suspicions in the minds of police officers.
I could be wrong.
Kirby,
This is in the wrong thread, but so it goes...
But simply the implication that you'll never work in this university, or in the university system, again, would be enough for most researchers to not cross any boundaries.
Now you're being silly. This is why there's a tenure system. Consider all those skeptics that JADL likes to cite. What are their affliations? How many of them have been fired from academic positions because of their beliefs? I'm thinking that the number is zero, but if you can come up with flesh and blood examples, I'm willing to consider them.
Research that takes place under the leadership of a central department figure -- as most research does -- must comply with the stated paradigm.
Uhh. This isn't the way it works in the physical sciences, although it is to an extent the way it works in the biological sciences and some of the social sciences. This isn't to say that the chair is without influence, as the chair is often a bottleneck in the hiring/promotion process, but influence isn't control. Do exceptional claims meet skepticism? You bet. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. The former is a lot more common than the later.
It takes a very strong personality to buck an entire system that is operation on a charade that no one dares to question, because there is so much money in it.
Absolutely! But most of the scientists I know have strong personalities. And the surest way to recognition and fame in the sciences is to overturn the existing order. But since science works under strong evidence and review constraints, such upheavals are pretty rare. Anyway, there are huge incentives to be in the "tiny, but ultimately correct" minority on any issue, at least within the sciences.
Darwinism is a similar operation. It is true by definition.
No, Darwinism (which is to say, evolution by natural selection) is not true by definition. There is a creationist critique that makes this claim, but they're wrong. Indeed, the creationist view of the world (that it consists of a number of static "kinds") essentially contradicts that claim. You've been duped again
Challenge it, and you are secluded, and no longer a member in good standing, and all your research becomes dubious.
There are all kinds of challenges to darwinism, most of which are internal to the sciences, and can be thought of as refinements of the basic theory, e.g., the Eldridge-Gould punctuated equilibria theory. You are right though, there are theories which, if you hold them in all seriousness (e.g., the world was created by the flying spagetti monster) will get you read out of the scientific community. At issue here is that any new theory must be able to deal with the existing evidence as well or better than the current theory, and be falsifiable (at least in principle), or the scientific community isn't going to be bothered considering it.
I have parallel experiences with driving intercession.
At least half of all the "crazy drivers" I encounter on the freeway are young black men, speeding at 10-25 over the stated limit, weaving aggressively from lane to lane, cutting across multiple lanes, pulling off then pulling back on suspiciously. This is no less true of those driving clunkers as those driving new BMW's.
The hiway patrol, on the other hand, seems intent on stopping the "easy marks" in the slow (right) lane, and I do notice they routinely pull over blacks driving in old cars. I frankly don't know why this happens--are the odds that these black people will have contraband or drugs in their vehicles, or have expired licenses, or unpaid fines, or outstanding citations? I don't have a clue. But I do notice it happens a lot.
There's a disconnect between what the highway patrol enforces, and the real offenders. They rarely or almost never pull people over who are speeding, and (my biggest gripe) they never cite people for speed-tailgating, which is (in my opinion) the major cause of really bad accidents on our freeways. You will see a string of, say, eight cars, doing about 76 mph in the fast lane, each less than two car-lengths apart from each other. The math will tell you that if the lead car brakes hard, all seven of those tailgaters will end up in a crash. And yet the patrol does nothing. There oughtta be a law! (And there is. It just goes unenforced.) It seems obvious that law enforcement seeks the "easiest marks" for revenue and prosecution--they'll hit a "slow" speeder in a 25 mile zone over and over, while ignoring most of the violent crime taking place all around them. I don't envy the cops, but I don't trust them, either. They're corrupt.
Kirby, I'll include this source for the ever-growing number of scientific experts who demur from the recent IPCC AGW claims here:
Title:
"Climate Depot Special Report:
More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
Scientists Continue to Debunk Fading 'Consensus' in 2008 & 2009 & 2010
(Updates Previous 2009 U.S. Senate Report: 'More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims')
www.ClimateDepot.com
CFACT
Released: December 8, 2010
Presented to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, December 9, 2010
Updates U.S. Senate Report Presented at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland in 2008
Updated: December 22, 2008; January 27, 2009; March 16, 2009 & December 8, 2010
Contact: Marc Morano – Morano@ClimateDepot.com - 202-536-5052."
Pretty impressive lists, with affiliations of signers, numbers of publications, pertinent quotations, etc. often debunking the idea that governmental agencies pursue the AGW issue in a neutral manner.
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