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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Matthew Yglesias has a post about fare evasion. I especially love this part:

In theory, if you’re out on bail but you skipped your court date, you ought to be extra-cautious in your day-to-day behavior. In practice, a lot of people who commit crimes don’t make that decision. The police walking around the street aren’t clairvoyant; they don’t know which passersby have outstanding warrants. But if they catch someone jumping the turnstile, that’s a perfectly valid reason to run them through the system. Police can catch bail skippers or people who are already wanted for some other reason — they can also catch people carrying illegal guns.

I know he's moved away from Vox/Slate towards the center, but just this year, places like Philly and Oregon no longer allow the police to pull people over for broken lights because it is racist, and here is Mr Yglesias, literally advocating for more terry stops. I actually think it's a good thing: if both neolibs and neocons are trying to re-center and narrow down the Overton window, this thread might get slow and boring.

To those below, particularly @greyenlightenment and @Walterodim who argue that this sort of behavior is fine if it means getting various scofflaws off the streets, I'd argue that the problem with that isn't so much that it's bad for criminals but bad for people like you and me who get caught up in these dragnets. I couldn't tell you the number of times I've been pulled over for a light I didn't know was out or some other bullshit that resulted in a totally unnecessary amount of stress and inconvenience. And there's no rhyme or reason to how the interaction goes; in some cases I get a friendly oral reminder and I go on my way, in other cases I get grilled about whether I've been drinking or whether I have guns or drugs in my car and usually end up taking a field sobriety test (that I easily pass) because the cop didn't feel like taking me at my word or felt pressure to make sure because I admitted to having one beer. Two incidents stand out, though.

My final year of law school, the afternoon before Thanksgiving, I met up with friends from high school at one of their homes to shoot guns in his yard. Afterwards, we all went to a local restaurant to get wings. As I was driving one of my friends home (at about 7pm), I got lit up by two state troopers. I was told that the reason I was pulled over was because the light above my plate was a bit dim. I was then grilled for what seemed like forever about whether I had been drinking. During the course of the conversation I admitted to having drunk a single beer several hours earlier, and that no, I was not drinking while driving because the beer was in my trunk. The cop then insisted on my opening the trunk to let him see the case of beer. When I told him that this wasn't necessary, he insisted that he had to because he needed to verify that I had only had one beer. I told him (well, both of them) that this was ridiculous because other people had drunk beer from the case and in any event I had bought it several days earlier and had probably consumed half of it before I even brought it to my friend's. At this point I was asked to leave the car, was illegally frisked (police can't reach into pockets, or even roll fabric between their fingers), and was given every field sobriety test in the book.

After I passed all of them, the police told me that they detected the faint odor of marijuana when they pulled me over a half hour earlier. At this point I knew they were totally full of shit at let them know it, at which point they told me that if I didn't open the trunk in the next five minutes they'd have to call the barracks to bring a drug dog in. At this point it pretty much ended—I told them that if they were calling for a drug dog then the closest dog was a half-hour drive away and it would probably take them 15 minutes to put the call in and get the car loaded so that if they had 45 minutes then I did as well. Then the other cop, who had been talking to my friend, who was still in the passenger seat, told me that he wanted to move the process along so I caved (not my proudest moment) and opened the trunk for them. They looked at the inside for about two seconds before telling me to close it and letting me go. They never mentioned the license plate light once after I had been pulled over, and I didn't get ticketed for anything. My guess is that the trunk was riding low and they thought something looked hinky and after they pulled us over they thought we looked like drug traffickers (I had long-ish hair at the time and I overheard one of the cops say "couple of stoners" when they were walking toward the car). Either way, it was a stressful encounter that no one who isn't breaking the law should have to endure, especially under such bullshit pretenses.

The second incident happened a few years ago. I was driving along a heavily-traveled suburban thoroughfare at about 1am on a weeknight when I got pulled over. I didn't have the slightest idea why (I wasn't speeding), but was told that a strap hanging off my bike rack was blocking one of my license plate numbers. The cop basically spent the entire stop profusely apologizing and explaining that this kind of thing would only happen late at night when there aren't many speeders because the officers are required to make so many contacts in order to justify their jobs. I obviously didn't bother telling him that if this was the best they could come up with then maybe their jobs weren't really needed. Anyway, nothing happened, though I did get a written warning, and I avoid that road late at night. The funny thing is that I actually had been drinking earlier that night, but the cop didn't even ask.

The overall point I'm trying to make is that it's easy to say that cops should have wide discretion to use minor offenses as pretext to stick their nose in is based on the assumption that other people are the ones who will be dealing with the fallout. When you're the one who's constantly getting pulled over because the cop doesn't like the looks of your car and thinks you must be up to no good, then you have a much different attitude. For minor vehicle code violations, there's no reason they can't just run your plate and send a warning in the mail. If they see the guy again and the problem hasn't been rectified, then cite him for it. The vast majority of the time, the cops aren't going to find anything more interesting than a guy who didn't know his brake light was out. And when they do find something interesting, it's not America's Most Armed and Dangerous; you'll get a few DUIs, and the warrants are mostly going to be for things like unpaid fines and missed court dates for minor offenses. These people probably aren't on the run and could be easily found if the police just went to their listed address, but the cases are so minor that they aren't going to make a special trip so instead they tell patrol cops to find reasons to pull people over when it's slow and hope that every once in a while something pops. This doesn't seem like the best way to go about doing things.

Yes. You are half right. We need more BS policing of people statistically likely to be real criminals, and less BS policing of suburbanites who might have an oz of weed in their pocket or might blow a .08. If we let an AI be in charge of policing, said AI would be called incredibly racist, because it would continually fail to break up white kids underage drinking parties in the burbs, while it would also successfully prevent hundreds of city murders of black kids.

An ounce if weed is quite a bit of weed. Not really important but I found this funny.

Thanks. To be fair, you are talking to the guy who has several posts over the past month posting evidence that the median federal inmate in a marijuana related offense had over 100 lbs in their possession at the time.

That really is a shit ton of weed. You may already know this but the standard unit of cannabis exchanged tends to be an eighth of an ounce or eighth for short. An ounce is about the absolute most a consumer might buy in a single transaction and cost at least a couple hundred bucks.

We need more BS policing of people statistically likely to be real criminals, and less BS policing of suburbanites who might have an oz of weed in their pocket or might blow a .08.

Without an AI police overlord running things, what specific instructions would you give police departments now?

To wealthy suburban police: Reduce your force by 50% and allocate almost all of that policing your borders with poorer towns, or quarantining a poor area in your town.

For big cities, follow comstat twice as hard, focus on quarantining bad areas. Double your force, preferably all new officers should be walking, horse, or bike units.

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