You don't have to be racist to participate in systemic racism. US policing produces racist outcomes even from "not-racist" people. I'm going to explain (again):
* why I've probably been pulled over way more times than most people you know, even though most of the times I'm pulled over, I get no ticket (because I did nothing wrong)
* how I stopped getting pulled over so much (because I understand the system)
* And why lots of cops say that the average voter is more racist than the average cop
Imagine yourself as a police officer. Hopefully you don't consider yourself racist! You're all ready to fix the system "from the inside" by being a good cop.
Your police chief tells you that you must write 200 tickets a month. If you fail to write 200 tickets a month you will be fired.
Imagine you write a ticket for a rich white lawyer that lives in Atherton. They can easily afford the $80 ticket; they bill out at $800/hr! But they will take a day off work just to go fight the ticket in court🤡
If they overturn that ticket, it doesn't count to your total. If they show up in court and you don't, they win by default. If you go to court to make sure the ticket sticks, you're in court, and not out writing more tickets. As a police officer, you lose.
You're incentivized to write tickets that "stick."
If you wrote an $80 ticket for a Black janitor in East Palo Alto, they can't afford the ticket, but they *really* can't afford to take a day off of work. And they don't like courthouses...
If you write 220 tickets and 30 get overturned, you only wrote 190 tickets. Your job is at risk. If you write 210 tickets and only 2 get overturned, you're good!
Not all Black folk are poor, but your probability of getting a ticket that sticks is higher with Black drivers. If you (illegally) search the vehicle and find weed, you might get 2 tickets! The daily double!
But you can't search the car or the person, without escalating. You are *incentivized to escalate*.
This makes Black people not trust police officers. Because police officers seem like they are always trying to find some reason to mess with you, violate your civil rights, and "hem you up." And you visibly see that they don't seem to do this with white folk.
Again, I'm not even talking about the racist cops here, of which there are many! I'm just talking about the ones who just go with the flow of what the system wants them to do.
Black cops do this too. Black cops pull over Black drivers.
Studs Terkel had an interviewee in *Working* who said this same thing. Which would make this practice 50 years old and more. :( I think the cop he talked to was Black and eventually quit the force because he hated this so much.
@vfrmedia @xenophora @mekkaokereke Yeah I think speed and stop light cameras are a great idea, and I've definitely been deterred from speeding or running a yellow light a little too tight by them
Unfortunately here people are against them because Muh Freedoms and Muh Privacy even though the only thing it's viewing is the road and the vehicles passing through (which are entirely public and often times in range of the cameras of local businesses anyway) and while there's definitely a risk of systemic abuse with that footage, it's not those people it would be used against.
mekka okereke 
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Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
the 1998 Sega Saturn RPG, Baroque 🔞