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.
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.
So cops can make the murder rate in a city *go up* just by brutalizing innocent Black civilians more. 🙃
Because then Black people call the cops less.
So murderers are more likely to get away with it.
So instead of being caught after one murder, they rack up *huge* body counts.
Out of every 1000 white folk or Black folk, N are multiple murderers. But in white neighbourhoods, the killer is often caught before their second murder. In Black neighborhoods, the killer is often never caught.😢
This phenomenon has been known since the 70s.
So when in 2021, we are still making SCORPION units to "address the rising murder rate," it makes no sense at all.
Brutalizing Tyre Nichols makes the murder rate *go up* not go down. It makes it *easier* to get away with murder, not harder.
Think of any US city with a high murder rate.
Notice that it has a low murder clearance rate (they're not catching any murderers).
Notice that police brutality in that city is even higher than average.
Now understand why civil rights leaders say that Chicago's plan to make murders go down by giving police officers an arrest quota, is doomed to fail.
Cops are just going to arrest the poorest, Blackest, people in the city for petty crimes, starting them down a poverty spiral that will ruin their lives.
This *reduces* trust in a way that can't be made up by "positive interactions."
"You arrested my mom, but later you smiled at me." Doesn't exactly win hearts and minds.
After Chicago’s deadliest year in a quarter-century, Lori Lightfoot and Supt. David Brown pressed police brass in a closed-door meeting to increase flagging arrest numbers and get officers to engage more with city residents.
When people say, "Fewer cops reduces crime" they're not being hyperbolic. US policing is so violent and racist, that the only thing that has been consistently shown to reduce the level of police violence against Black people is... not having police there at all.
Reduce the number of police interactions, and reduce the number of negative police interactions experienced by Black people. Solve problems without guns.
If you were a cop in Chicago, 5 years away from your pension, and the mayor's office told you to hit your arrest quota or be fired, would you do the right thing and not contribute to systemic racism? Or would you just say,, "This is kinda messed up!" And over-arrest innocent Black folk?
Trick question. Because it doesn't matter what you as an individual would do. You're only one person. Most Chicago cops are just making the arrests that the system incentivizes them to. Yes, even the Black cops.
In this whole thread, I haven't even talked about how many openly racist police officers there are. I haven't even addressed qualified immunity, civil asset forfeiture, corruption, genocidally violent tactics, racist sentencing laws, or any of that.
I just talked about one way a "non-racist" person who becomes a police officer is incentivized to contribute to violent racism that destroys Black lives at a horrific scale.
@mekkaokereke Thank you for this great thread!
This is what I wished to see every time an election comes up.
Do you have this on some stable URL — a website I can reference?
Just coming back to this; if you read Mekka's description of who fights a ticket, there are probably some "tells" you could put on your car to change an officer's "will this ticket stick" calculation.
Stanford Law decals and the right kind of car, for example. Appearing educated and having spare time is probably the key.
Oh snaps! Sorry I missed this question when it was first asked.
1) There are entire cities I avoid
2) I don't drive my own car the month *before* the tags expire
3) Extra caution: I don't drive white people's cars. Not joking. If you ask me to drive your car home from a bar, the answer is no. Some white folk are on some busted taillight, weed dust sprinkled in the carpet, expired reg, no front plate, nonsense. You can drive that mess without being pulled over. I can't.
It's easier for a cop to lose their job for not writing enough tickets, than for shooting an unarmed Black person🙂🙃
People that don't know what they're talking about, see me as "anti-cop." But even cops* don't view me as anti-cop, and abolitionists sure as hell don't view me as anti-cop. Cops are like, "Yeah, he's right about a lot of it.🤷🏻♂️"
Eg, I think Justin Hammers should still have a job as a cop. Is that anti-cop?
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112668265983428465
(*Most cops. There's always some).
@[email protected] Meet cop Justin Hanners: * Straight white man * Southern boy * Born and raised in Alabama * Military combat veteran * Harley riding biker * Police officer who believes strongly in rule of law * Not afraid to draw his weapon and take on "bad guys with guns" Sounds like many US cops. Except... He didn't get with the program. He didn't like harassing innocent Black folk via quotas. 3 guesses what happened to him... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGeZiWOeGIc *Policing* is more racist than *cops*.
@mekkaokereke Part of the peace treaty ending the 30 year civil war in Guatemala was to revamp the corrupt police. Guatemala has a national police force, not local police departments.
I was living in Guatemala when this was implemented. They fired everyone. 35,000 police, top to bottom, fired.
Spain is considered the world's experts on policing. (They invented the idea of civilian police long ago.) And they implemented the process.
The whole country had no police. And me, I'm thinking "We're all gonna die. Criminals will run rampant." But guess what happened? Nothing happened. The crime rate went down. And this was when I learned that the vast majority of people are good and honest, and all they want is to live their lives in peace.
Why did crime go down? I believe it was a combination of police corruption being part of the crime problem and the people themselves. Because there were no police, the people were extra vigilant and the criminals knew it. Criminals realized: "Now is not a good time to do crimes. The police are not here to arrest me and keep me safe. I'll probably be lynched in an extremely unpleasant manner." (True.)
This was good because the process of building a new police force took longer than expected, months. Only those who had graduated high school (for real with good behavior, no equivalency test) were considered. Any officer with authority, sergeants and above had to have earned a college degree. All had to pass the stringent training set up by the experts from Spain.
It all turned out great. Wages were boosted way up so that cops didn't need bribes in order to support a family. They were provided with all new equipment. The whole manner of the new police force changed to what you find in Europe. But during the transition process, nothing significant happened. And I realized that we in the U.S.A. are brainwashed into believing that cops protect us from crime. They don't.
@MisuseCase @mekkaokereke
For anyone whose response to “police behave like shitty state-backed protection rackets” is “huh?” or “show me!,” hoo boy do I have a story for you:
I live in the neighborhood, I know what these cops are like, and still…the number of times my jaw dropped reading that article….
(For those who don’t live in the neighborhood: El Nuevo Rodeo was a short block away from the 3rd precinct, epicenter of the George Floyd uprising.)
@mekkaokereke Me waiting for each installment in this thread …
(no trouble with waiting, actually, just wanted to let you know I appreciate the content!)
@jag0325 @mekkaokereke
That's why I don't believe in cops for home protection. Or guns. Neither of those will prevent a home invasion.
I believe in dogs. It doesn't even have to be a big dog! Though that helps, it just has to bark.
True.
It’s a revenue raiser.
And many departments give officers quotas to meet, monthly.
Ticket revenue is also a way to keep property taxes lower in white suburbs.
Fines shift the tax burden from those who benefit from police presence to those who don't.
Tickets & fines are yet another form of tax evasion for the wealthy.
https://fortune.com/2023/09/25/speeding-traffic-tickets-broke-cities-towns-policing-for-profit/
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.
@mekkaokereke this brings back memories of when even I (unambiguously a White Guy) drove, carefully, a beater that clearly said “poor” and got pulled over all the time. A decade later, driving a nice car and not nearly as lawfully, it was rare I got any attention.
It is such a clear and dangerous flaw in society to incentivize officers—while armed!—to issue citations. 😞
@mekkaokereke Thank you! This is so important to understand! Once the ball gets rolling, we can end up (and have ended up) with systemic racism even if somehow everybody individually is “not racist.” (As if!) The effects of historic racism are still being felt today in nearly every area of life, even before adding in the fresh new racial horrors that never end.
I used to say “wake up, wypipo,” but I guess that label has been co-opted, so… open your eyes, wypipo! A cop doesn’t have to be a neo-nazi to be part of a system that has never quite moved past its history as “slave patrols.” On top of that, many cops are actively neo-nazis too, so not only do we not make progress, we move backwards.
And all the while, people with their eyes still closed claim we’ve moved past racism because we elected a Black president.
🙄
⬆️ 🧵 🧵 🧵 ⬆️
@mekkaokereke -- If memory serves, this ground-breaking 2003 reporting demonstrated that black drivers in Boston *definitely* should have concerns, whether pulled over by black or white cops: https://archive.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/tickets/010603.shtml
Thank you, Bill Dedman and Francie Latour of the Boston Globe!
(BTW, if anyone wants to talk about data-driven reporting, count me in; but there are so many others with tons more street cred than myself -- like these nice folks at IRE: https://www.ire.org/)
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