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.

As part of trying to understand why I get pulled over so much I've straight up asked cops and police chiefs why they pulled me over so much. And they say this.

For the most part, cops hate this system! It doesn't exist because cops like the arrest and ticket metrics. It exists because voters elect people that put ticket and arrest quotas on cops.

And because city budgets live on the revenue from tickets and court fees.

And this explains why cops can't solve crimes in Black neighborhoods...

Because police don't solve crimes the way that TV shows pretend they do. Most serious crimes, especially murders, are solved by:

1) someone calls the cops (caller)
2) someone tells the cops exactly what happened (witness)
3) cops gather enough evidence to show that the witness' story is credible
4) DA builds a case

Without callers or witnesses, it's almost impossible to even know who committed a murder, let alone get a conviction in court. And Black folk don't call or play witness.