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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32899 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.

And an important virtue of enforcing the rules against “minor” offenses like jumping the turnstile, peeing on the street, or carrying an open container of alcohol is that it’s easy to visually verify who is and isn’t following the rules. If someone isn’t following the rules, police officers can stop them and search them, and if they’re carrying an illegal gun, they can arrest them. Without this kind of low-level stop, the only way to get illegal guns off the street is by stopping people at random — which realistically means racial profiling. That is bad. People have a very legitimate interest in not being stopped and frisked merely for belonging to a particular demographic group. Where progressives have gone too far is in extending this consideration to people who are in fact committing crimes, when those are exactly the people you want to stop.

The bolded part is such a bizarre claim in this context. The only way that random stops can lead to racial profiling is if the law enforcement apparatus is somehow biased. Assuming that's true, how exactly would that bias disappear when pursuing low-level stops? It's impossible for cops to be everywhere and to enforce every possible offense in existence, so naturally they have to make some discretionary decisions. They need to decide what neighborhoods to patrol, what time to do so, what to be on the look out for, and what offenses to prioritize. That's a ton of opportunity for bias to seep in (again, assuming bias exists). In contrast, it's at least theoretically possible to construct a truly random stop system, and you can do so simply by significantly reducing the amount of police discretion by turning them functionally into unthinking robocops. At the beginning of every shift a computer uses RNG wizardry to pick a random part of the city and then tasks cops to stop people based on random arbitrary characteristics (e.g. stop the third person wearing blue, stop the 36th person walking in a northeast direction, etc.).

The majority of shootings are committed with illegal handguns, and we need constitutionally and morally permissible ways of discouraging people from carrying them. Rigorously enforcing boring rules is one of the best ways to do that, because the people shooting each other out there are mostly not mastermind assassins.

Gun possession on its own does not hurt anyone. The argument in favor of enforcing simple possession is as an upstream attack to preemptively address the potential for harm. The problem with this "precog" approach is exactly how indiscriminate the enforcement is. Even if it was enforced by unbiased automatons, a stop-and-frisk system cannot differentiate between the "good guy with a gun" and "bad guy with a gun". It ensnares everyone, regardless of their potential for violence. These kinds of "precog" justifications highlight how much of a waste of time gun control is in general, and how unjust it is. Which is why it's so wild to see folks like Yglesias essentially agree with me, but instead of using it as an opportunity to rethink the wisdom of gun control policy, he just bites the bullet and accepts that indiscriminate enforcement as a necessary evil.

The bolded part is such a bizarre claim in this context. The only way that random stops can lead to racial profiling is if the law enforcement apparatus is somehow biased. Assuming that's true, how exactly would that bias disappear when pursuing low-level stops? It's impossible for cops to be everywhere and to enforce every possible offense in existence, so naturally they have to make some discretionary decisions.

True, but the relationship isn't a pure binary: the more discretion police are given, the more room bias has to operate. "Random" really means that police are given complete discretion since nobody is ensuring mathematical randomness as you propose. Curtailing this discretion will reduce (but not eliminate) racial profiling. Sure, biased police might turn a blind eye to white scofflaws, but they will (in theory) be restrained from harassing law-abiding minorities. The latter injustice is generally more vexing to our sense of equality than the former.

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