This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So the US government is dancing with shutdown politics again, this time using funding over the Department of Homeland Security to try and enforce new measures over ICE. The Atlantic has an article covering 10 key demands, pushed forward by a joint press statement by the Democratic House and Senate leaders Jeffries and Schumer.
The 10 demands, which may be higher in the culture war discussion for the near term, are-
1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
The Atlantic, as an establishment-Democrat aligned media outlet, adopts the general framing that these are reforms,.
Alternatively, it would be fair to say that some of these are not exactly subtle poison pills in order to prevent DHS from actually conducting immigration enforcement. 'Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations' is a notable one, given the sanctuary state policies in many Democratic-dominated states and cities. Others can write to other aspects as well, I am sure.
Does this mean the entire list of demands is dead on arrival? Not necessarily. The brief article briefly notes an area with alleged traction-
Which leads to a slight transition of topic- the role of police body cameras as a part of standard policing equipment.
Different countries, or cultures if you prefer, have different viewpoints on police cameras that are constantly recording. That is, after all, a form of public surveillance, and once you allow the government to do so, or even require the government to do so, that footage can be used in so many different ways.
I've seen a variety of views towards police body cams. I remember arguments opposing it on civil liberty grounds that were concerned about police state tactics of public monitoring. I know plenty of people who believe they provide a tool to prove cop bad behavior. I have lived in the sort of countries where police body cams would not be used precisely because the government does not want records of such cob misbehavior, which is the sort of thing the previous sort of advocates want to curtail.
What has been low-key interesting to observe over the last few decades is how the arguments for and against body cameras has changed over the years, as the expectations versus payoffs of increased body cameras have become clearer. From my perspective, a lot of the predicted effects failed to materialize, or materialized in ways other than expected.
For example, the civil liberty argument died with the advent of known, and accepted, mass surveillance as a matter of course as leads exposed, but did not reverse, domestic security practices across the west. But more police cameras also did not expose a (non-existent) pandemic of police-of-minority killings, which was one of the basis for the American police reform efforts in the BLM period. It did, apparently, reveal an untapped market for police body cam videos on youtube or tiktok, to a degree that there's now a genre of fake police bodycam channels.
But more than fake videos, what police body cam reforms seem to have done is standardize the release of a lot of videos showing police, if not in the right, at least more sympathetically. Ugly arrest narratives which take the innocent victim narrative apart, perspectives (and sometimes audio) that can sell panic, and so on. It can practically be a chinese robbers fallacy published daily. All the more so because traditional media tends to not be interested in publishing ugly arrest dynamics that work against intended coverage theme, but counter-veiling police footage is relatively easy, authoritative, and- thanks to reformers- available.
If anything, at least in the american culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise.
Not validated their arguments- many of the arguments against police body cams simply fell flat. And not disproven reformist fears of bad actors. But the pro-police coalition seem to have largely been happy enough for bad eggs to be subject to the appropriate processes, which is part of how institutions cultivate/sustain popular legitimacy over time. Meanwhile footage of Actual Incidents (TM) can paint a lot of pictures of a lot of other bad eggs on the other sides that polite company, and media, often downplayed or ignored.
On a narrative/framing/symbolism level, it's practically a format made for, well, copaganda. You have the self-insert protagonist dynamic of being 'your' point of vision, you have a nominally just cause of enforcing presumptively legitimate laws, and you have the antagonist of the episode of varying degrees of sympathy... and the selection bias is generally going to select for the unsympathetic.
It can also, and returning back to the culture war, cut down some attempted narrative efforts before it reaches a critical chain reaction. The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Rather than police body cams provide the evidence police misbehavior, it may not be as partisanally-useful as believed. And if that were true, you'd expect to be progressively more pushback from partisans who are less good-faith reformers and were advancing policy arguments as soldiers.
Which is why I've been a bit interest in... not a vibe shift, but efforts to push for a vibe shift, on who in the culture war is for and against police body cameras. As the opening article noted, establishment republicans are at least open to the prospect. But what's more interesting is the rise of skepticism, or even levels of hostility, from within the Progressive coalition.
ProPublica, an American left journalist group, has an article from late 2023 about how police have undermined the promise of body cameras, with a general thesis that police departments have too much autonomy / influence / differences across jurisdictions in terms of what gets to be shared.
Jacobin, the American socialist magazine with a deliberate party line, last month condemned police body cameras as a giveaway to weapons makers, claimed that the evidence of cameras efficacy was thin... but spent more words upset that DHS/ICE wasn't being forced to spend its current funding on cameras instead of operations, as opposed to more funding for the cameras.
But I think the characterization that best captures that not-quite-vibe shift I'm gesturing to comes from a November 2025 article from last year by Vox, which tries to establish itself as the US left vibe-setter and explainer, in its critique article "How routine police stops are becoming viral social media fodder: Police body cameras were supposed to ensure justice. They’ve turned into YouTube content."
This is, if the subtext was not a clear, a problem to be resolved. The article then weighs considerations on how to keep the police body camera footage they want, that of potential misconduct to be exposed by traditional media, while reducing/removing the rest of the unflattering-for-captured-on-tape cases that get more public interest.
Or, in other words, in the words of their own special-attention quotation-
Which could open questions of whether it is random civilians, or when shaming is or is not appropriate... not least because shaming the misbehaving cops caught on tape is the intent of these police cameras in the first place.
But to bring it around back to the origin, what the ICE tactics may turn to when they are fiscally able, nay required, to video tape the sort of anti-ICE tactics recently employed in Minnesota.
The Congressional Democrat demand includes caveats to "prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities."
Well, there are two ways that an administration could easily work around that.
One would be to use body cameras to track, create, and maintain a database of individuals not participating in First Amendment activities, but obstructing law enforcement activities. This is a legal case that would certainly be litigated through hostile justices, but it could be done.
But the other way would be to simply use body cameras to publicize, publicize, and publicize non-random individuals who insist they are participating in First Amendment activities, and let their words, and videos, speak for themselves.
Demonstrating that a minority of Democrats can do what a majority of Republicans (plus the President) can't do -- shut down a department of the US government. The Republicans, of course, were utter fools when they allowed DHS funding to be separated, because they lost all their leverage.
Most of these demands are entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Learning from the anti-gun people, are they?
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Given the bad faith from Tim Walz, entirely ridiculous.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Police ARE paramilitary, and making them more uniform wouldn't make them less paramilitary. I'm fairly sure other civil enforcement is at least as varied as ICE, so this is BS anyway.
Several of the things they're objecting (e.g. stopping people who they suspect are aliens) to are authorized by statute, so this is exactly a minority getting to change the law.
Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
Okay, this immediately makes me think this would be a problem. Because every single time I've heard "that will never, ever happen, don't be absurd", guess what? It happens.
You honestly think the same people who are handing out whistles, co-ordinating groups, and driving around after ICE vehicles won't find some way to be nuisances on this? Really? The people screaming abuse, recording video, and passing around handy tips as to what is and is not legal (even if that is totally wrong)?
You have a much higher opinion of the reasonableness and law-abiding nature of the activists than I do.
As I mentioned elsewhere, protestors are literally already doing this. They are accosting suspected ICE personnel and demanding their identification. So what exactly are you afraid is going to happen?
Besides, the original claim was that this is 'completely unreasonable'. The only person being unreasonable is Nybbler, acting as if a policy change would occur with literally zero guidance, that protestors could 'hack the system' by DDoSing agents during an arrest, like it's a video game and they can chain-stun them.
Watch my brilliant policy mind at work... "ICE does not have to identify themselves during an active arrest." Or how about this one... "ICE only has to provide a badge number to someone they are detaining or officially interacting with."
The point of this proposal, in case it didn't occur to you, is so that people can hold individual officers to account when they misbehave. This is an obvious good.
No, in fact it did not occur to my tiny, cramped, suspicious, cynical mind. Not when we have things like the church incident where a mob turned up after identifying (as they think and perhaps in fact) an ICE manager as one of the pastors. Not when people are sharing online lists of "This is the home addresses of ICE agents". Not when you get malicious compliance of this sort:
You really can't imagine that, for instance, a group of "citizen observers" wouldn't mob an ICE agent demanding his ID? Pretending they couldn't hear the answer? "What's that, hmmm?" "No, no, who are you, how do we know you're legit? What's your badge number?" "Sorry, what was that?" "Can you repeat that?"
And if said agent tries to arrest them or push past them? "Help, help, I'm being assaulted! Vicious unprovoked attack! State violence!"
Well, how nice to know all the protesters will be well-behaved, law-abiding, and will not be screaming abuse and frothing at the mouth. Oh, wait:
No way this could turn nasty, with a bunch of self-appointed vigilantes deciding to turn up and 'encourage' the presumed ICE nark to leave.
In other words, rather than rebutting what I'm saying, you point to instances of protestors behaving badly and sarcastically imply this means ICE should not be held to a standard for their behavior.
This is what-about-ism at its worst.
I'll cop to sarcasm because that is my besetting sin in commenting, but I've been burned one time too many over "this will NEVER, EVER, happen AT ALL IN ANY WAY so shut up shut up shut up with the objections" and then we get "that thing that never happens just happened again".
So I don't expect a random mob of protestors who think they are the White Rose but are, in fact, misery tourists (see our pal who did some light protesting in the morning with his missus then they toured the museums in the afternoon) to behave like sensible, disciplined groups when they're high on hysteria over "we are fighting the Nazis!!!" and I don't expect well-meaning regulations to be workable when the rubber (bullets) hit the road. Some bunch of activists are going to spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the regulations that will let them engage in "I'm not touching you!" provocation.
And then somebody else is going to get shot. Just like Good and Pretti. For the same stupid reasons on both sides.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure. A standard. Not these unreasonable-on-their-face ones, which have obvious failure modes which you're trying to pooh-pooh away as if the anti-ICE side will be at all reasonable, which it is clear from their behavior they will not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have no idea what this is meant to mean. Is it unreasonable to assume that a Hispanic person who doesn't speak English very well is vastly more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white person with a pronounced American accent?
It's not unreasonable. But there are laws, and at least previously a societal consensus, that you should not have to deal with random police harassment because of your basic demographic characteristics. One of various things that the right has seemingly decided are less important than deportations.
I think those laws are based on crimes where you are far less likely to throw a stone and hit someone who should be arrested. There are only so many carjackers in the world, and most murders are from people close to the victim.
The percentage of people here who are committing a misdemeanor by illegal entry or by overstaying a visa and changing their address without notifying DHS is between 4 and 8%. These misdemeanors become felonies quickly by repeated offenses or stacking against other crimes often necessary to keep a low profile.
So just taking a random sample of the US, 1 in 12 will be here unlawfully.
However, the people here unlawfully are not randomly distributed. They are mostly not Western Europeans, for instance, while a large portion of the United States population still is Western European. They are mostly Mexican, Venezuelan, and Central American. Though the exact number is difficult to nail down, let's be generous and say 2/3s of the people here unlawfully are Hispanic.
Hispanic people make up approximately 20% of the US population. If 5% of the total US population is Hispanics here unlawfully, and Hispanics are 20% of the population total, the odds of any given Hispanic being here unlawfully is 1 in 4.
Now, most Hispanics are here lawfully. Some have family ties to the land well before the land was American. Of the Hispanics here lawfully, most speak very good English, having been raised in the United States or present for decades. Most have little to no accent.
Of the Hispanics here unlawfully, some actually have really good English! Some are DREAMERs. But people who only arrived recently do tend to keep a strong accent for a while.
I will try to give generous estimates. Let's say 50% of Hispanics with strong accents are also here unlawfully.
So if you have someone in the country who is Hispanic and has a strong accent, there is a 1 in 2 chance of them being here unlawfully.
There are ways to make the odds even better. For example, there are certain places someone here unlawfully is likely to be. Using this knowledge, the odds are greater than half that a given Hispanic with an accent is here unlawfully.
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person? Especially if you already have a database of many of the people who have committed that crime, and it's just a matter of checking if that person is on the database.
It's not at all like questioning every black man for a murder, when the majority of black men are not murderers. The only reason to compare them is because the magnitude of the problem is left out in these conversations.
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
32% of US Adults believe that EVERY illegal immigrant should be deported.
51% believe some should be deported. I'm in this group myself. Of the people in this group:
44% of this 51% believe that all illegal immigrants who arrived in the last four years should be deported. This most cleanly describes my views as well - I really didn't care too much about the situation until the Biden Administration began drawing people in by the millions and stopped deporting people with final orders of removal. Before then, I would have said the biggest change that needed to be made is expanding the immigration court system until every case can be processed within a year.
.44*.51 = 22% of US Adults. Plus 32% gets to 54% of Americans who think that at least criminal immigrants and those who arrived since Biden took office should be deported.
So if anything you were selling your position short. Or there might be some other data point you were looking at?
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that, if you have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime, (and a 1:4 or 1:2 likelihood should count as reasonable suspicion) it's perfectly fine and legal (as was recently confirmed by the SCOTUS in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) to take five minutes out of someone's day to ask some basic questions?
This is leaving aside the fact that most Americans answering this survey have no clue that pretty much all Illegal Immigrants, whether they came over the border or overstayed a visa, have committed criminal acts. Conduct related to “unlawful presence,” like eluding inspection, is a criminal misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second offense, and the two often go hand in hand. People who overstay visas are often committing crimes. For example: anyone who is here on a visa is required to notify DHS within 10 days of a change of address; failure to do so is a criminal misdemeanor. Those who stay in the country and work here without a visa are also usually committing crimes like document fraud, identity theft, or tax fraud to obtain employment and/or be paid under the table.
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this comes back to the fact that what the left wants from a police force is fundamentally incoherent:
If a young black man gets shot dead in the ghetto, the odds are overwhelming that the perpetrator was another young black man, and thus the best way to ensure that the perpetrator faces justice for his crime is for the police to aggressively investigate young black men who the victim knew. Is this "racial profiling" (or more accurately, "demographic profiling": the "young" and "man"* parts are almost as important as the "black" part)? I guess so. But I'm not persuaded that the right of young black men not to be questioned by the police automatically supersedes a murder victim and his family's right to justice, and refusing to properly investigate a crime solely because it might "inflame community tensions" is exactly the kind of attitude that led to Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and so on. It's just one of many trade-offs that come with living in a free society. Of course it's not the fault of any young law-abiding black men that they belong to a demographic which commits a disproportionate amount of violent crime (esp. violent crime within their own demographic group) and I don't want them being harassed morning, noon and night, or their civil liberties persistently violated, on that basis alone. At the same time, denying police the right to exercise their own judgement and use statistical heuristics in pursuing lines of investigation because it might result in some hurt feelings seems like a recipe for a) a dramatically reduced murder clearance rate and b) a vastly higher murder rate, once murderers realise it'll be much easier for them to get away with their crimes.
And this isn't just a "he whose ox is gored" situation, where I'm indifferent to this topic because it'll never affect me or anyone I care about. My uncle (Irish, like me) lived in Britain at the height of the Troubles, and was routinely questioned by police officers whenever there was a bomb scare (his bright red hair made him difficult to miss). His sister once cited this example (in a debate about present-day racial profiling) and said it was outrageous, but personally, I didn't really understand the complaint. During the Troubles, most Irishmen were not in the IRA, but most (if not all) IRA members were Irishmen. Whenever a bomb scare was called in on the British mainland, it was usually done by an Irishman. Of course there are familiar examples of miscarriages of justice in the period (the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four), but I'm not persuaded that the investigative method is fundamentally unsound. If the IRA calls in a bomb threat, it's reasonable to assume the perpetrator is Irish. If a man goes to a crowded place and bellows "Allahu akbar!" before attempting to blow himself up, it's reasonable to assume he is Muslim (and consequently that he is a member of an ethnic group disproportionately likely to practise Islam).
*Indeed, everyone accepts that most murders are committed by men, and I'm sure the police, knowing this, will much more aggressively investigate known acquaintances of a victim who are men than those who are women. Is this "sexual profiling"? Is it fair that men will attract disproportionate attention from the police on the basis of their basic demographic traits? As Rob Henderson recently noted, nobody interprets the overrepresentation of young men in prisons as evidence of ageism on the part of the criminal justice system.
When investigating a crime, it is perfectly reasonable to investigate people who have some connection to the crime, and mostly it isn't a huge problem if there is profiling in choosing which of those people to investigate.
It's also perfectly reasonable in most cases for the police to use statistical evidence in looking for and deterring crimes, if doing so in ways that do not impose any real cost on a person (say driving patrols, something that is more valuable in higher-crime neighborhoods).
It is not reasonable to randomly stop people because they are statistically more likely to have committed a hypothetical crime. You can't stop young black men just to see if they might have stolen goods in their pockets and you don't get to stop hispanic people just to see if they might not be legal immigrants.
I wouldn't say I'm a total hard-liner on this, it's more reasonable to investigate people with a more tenuous connection to a crime when problems are more impactful and more intractable. The Troubles is a good example, El Salvador's gang problem is probably another. It is inappropriate to use similar tactics on something that a large percentage of the populace doesn't even think is a big problem, and certainly so in a community where a majority of the people who are supposedly being impacted by the problem would prefer you weren't enforcing it at all!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
Sentence, ideally no. Arrest, yes, though the bar is high. Suspect/investigate, all the time.
More options
Context Copy link
Police do not only arrest people who have already been found guilty in a court of law. There would be no criminal justice system if that were the case.
Here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police, then keep him detained under suspicion until they get a clear picture of the accident.
ICE isn't arresting people for "being 'likely' to commit a crime." They are arresting people for being likely *to have already committed a crime." We know millions of people have committed the misdimeanor of coming into the country unlawfully. The crime has been committed, they are investigating and making a suspect list.
More options
Context Copy link
We don’t arrest people but we do question them for being “likely” to commit a crime. See the original quote:
Nothing here about arresting people based on ethnicity
More options
Context Copy link
People who care about actually stopping the thing in question. It's a huge point of data that we're supposed to ignore, what, just because it gives you warm and fuzzy anti-racist feelings and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Hispanic people are more likely to be illegal immigrants, therefore what? We round up anyone who speaks Spanish and run them through processing? But then we'd be missing other groups like the Somalis, so to be safe let's round up anyone browner than Marco Rubio. You know, just to be safe.
The thing you're missing is a concept called 'probable cause'. You can't round people up because they're statistically more likely to be in an offender class. At least you can't in America - authoritarian dictatorships actually do this all the time.
More options
Context Copy link
Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Racism works. It’s efficient.
How was it efficient for 2 decades 70 year old ladies had to take their shoes off at airports when we could have just racial profiled every Muslim male for additional screening? Then everyone could leave for the airport 30 minutes later because airport security did not exists for them. And here’s the thing about racial profiling it’s better for Muslim men too. Since they are about 1% of US airport passengers they would have a security guard screen that thoroughly for 10 minutes which still saves them 20 minutes of their day.
Suicidal empathy like you described worked as an argument 5 years ago. Today people just want a society that functions well.
Racial profiling is good because it improves net happiness in society.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
More options
Context Copy link
It should be pointed out that Israeli airport security includes racial profiling so the 70 year old ladies are not as scrutinized, yet their policies have largely escaped outrage.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We actually do arrest people for having 'likely' committed a crime. That's what "probable cause" is. And as @LotsRegret points out, we sometimes do detain people on an even lesser standard even if we think they haven't committed a crime yet (the original "articulable suspicion" case, Terry v. Ohio was about a robber casing a target, IIRC)
More options
Context Copy link
It isn't required to arrest someone, you can detain them pending investigation as long as you have reasonable articulatable suspicion, then you can arrest them with probable cause.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The "atrocities" this is supposed to stop are cases where US citizens who did not provide ID and were believed to be an illegal alien that ICE was looking for were arrested and detained until they were identified. This would allow any actual alien to avoid detention by refusing to identify themselves.
Because they're not required to tell their badge number and last name to anyone who asks.
Sure it would. Protestors would go up to ICE agents and ask their badge number, over and over again, just so they could film it when the ICE agent quit answering because he had something else to do.
The least charitable implementation is what to expect.
I can see how, again, you could imagine a poorly worded rule that would have this consequence. But any reasonable implementation would provide the necessary protections so that before someone is locked up in a detention center, ICE would be required to do due diligence on the person. Obviously anyone, US citizen or not, who refuses to give their name would not be protected by this. How could you imagine it otherwise? But there are cases where a US citizen told ICE who they were but were still arrested and taken to a detention center, and had to call a lawyer to get out. That's obviously unacceptable!
Again, any reasonable implementation - in fact scratch that, literally any implementation - would provide guidance on when and where ICE agents need to identify themselves. Seriously, how do you imagine this stuff works? Not to mention, your horror situation doesn't even rely on the new rule, protestors literally already do this!
It’s not obviously unacceptable. I’ll fine with spending a day a month in ICE lock-up while they verify my identity. I’ll gladly do my time to help ICE out.
I would gladly wear a masks if I thought it would prevent COVID or get a vaccine if I thought they worked. Or lock myself at home to stop the spread (I actually locked myself at home a week before any lockdowns began).
It’s unacceptable if you think the mission is wrong or would fail. It’s not unacceptable if you think it passes costs-benefit analysis.
Sorry, that's insane. I'm not going to dignify it by treating it as an argument.
Your response is wildly disproportionate to the suggestion, which (to be clear) is that ICE should make checking someone's citizenship part of standard operating procedures for immigration enforcement arrests so that US citizens aren't arrested and detained when they shouldn't be. It's already the law that they cannot detain US citizens for immigration, once they know that person is a citizen they are required by law to be released - this is literally just saying 'hey, you have to check if they're a citizen'. It's a procedural remedy to a mistake ICE has been repeatedly caught making. Your cost-benefit analysis is so off the rails it's laughable.
It isn't. Currently they sometimes arrest people believing they are not citizens, then they verify their citizenship, and they let them go. The "remedy" would be they somehow have to prove they are not citizens before arresting them. Which is like saying you have to convict someone before arresting them, which is entirely backwards.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think you really appreciate the extent to which many people really, really hate illegal immigration. 'I will endure a high and probably unnecessary cost on a regular basis just to prevent even the possibility of making it slightly harder for ICE to do their job over the next few years, until the illegal immigrants are all gone' is a valid position, even if your cost-benefit analyses don't work out that way.
Broadly, people are well-aware that the Left is the party of pro-bono lawyers and suspiciously-well-instructed activism. It's not that weird that people on the right have started refusing point-blank any restraints that are likely to turn out to be a tripwire or a trojan horse. Personally I'm not sure whether I think giving ICE absolute carte blanche would help or hinder them in the long run, but I can believe the former. It works fine in Japan.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, now protestors can ask ICE agents for their ID, but if the ICE agents don't give it, they've done nothing wrong. If they were required to give it, protestors could and would do exactly as I said, and the agents or ICE itself would be in trouble if they didn't answer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Profiling obviously works, when we abolish it cops can't stop teenagers in the hood while we all pretend it's fine that the TSA gives extra pat-downs to grandma. You profile everyone relentlessly every day of your life, it's drawing patterns from observations, it's how cognition works. Throw infinite quantities of money down a blackhole because AI keeps profiling and the principled anti-racists say it shouldn't be allowed to do that. I think this attitude is anti-civilization, if we have to jump through hoops to act on information everyone obviously knows is reasonable, what are we even doing here? We know where the illegal immigrants are coming from, we know what they probably look like. Sorry for anyone mistakenly detained for five minutes while ICE works through the exceptions, it's a minor inconvenience we promise, until the lawyers get involved. Along similar lines, we can't kill criminals anymore, because activists made the death penalty so expensive, so now they say we should just get rid of it entirely. No thanks, let's profile all the illegal immigrants so we can deport them faster and have a country again, I can put up with a little racism in the process.
If you were a Spanish-speaking Hispanic citizen you would feel differently. If you were routinely stopped by ICE until you could prove your citizenship, solely on the grounds of what you look like, you'd be rightly furious.
ICE should not be rounding up people who look like they could maybe be illegal and demanding papers from them. That's insane! And blatantly illegal! You cannot detain someone on the grounds of 'looking Hispanic in public'.
There's a huge difference between you treating someone differently based on assumptions you make from their appearance, and law enforcement openly targeting people for the same. It's a totally different standard.
Tell us honestly, if you were out shopping for groceries, for instance, and a police officer stopped you and said something like, "We are looking for a group of car jackers, some of whom match your description. Give me your license so I can make sure you're not one of them."
Would you freak out, try to ignore the police, tell them they have no right to do this? Complain about racial profiling because someone who appears like you will also likely share your race, so race is likely one of the criteria they used to single you out?
Or would you maybe get a little tense, a little nervous that there will be a paperwork mistake, but give them your license, get cleared, and then move on with your day?
If this happened once a year, do you think people would be sympathetic if you complained or would it just seem like a funny story?
If it happened every day, I would see where there is room for complaint.
I have yet to see a story like, "I get stopped every day for my ID." I don't think I've seen someone complain about it happening to them more than twice.
I think the real complaint is, "Some of these people have removal orders they've been ignoring and are going to show up on the database as such when asked for ID."
With a side helping of, "Leftists have terrified minorities into thinking that ICE is going to lock everyone up on the basis of skin color, they're not even checking if you are a citizen or have an unexpired visa. This makes what should be a routine, quick, painless check into something horrifically scary. We will ignore that it's our fearmongering that made it so."
Just to be clear, your argument is 'profiling doesn't happen that often, so stop complaining about it'?
It's wild to me how many people are biting the bullet on 'yes let's just racially profile people' despite the fact that it's illegal to do so.
No, that would not be my argument.
I've been talking to a lot of people across a lot of comment chains, so forgive me if you've heard this before:
ICE’s policy is that no one can be lawfully taken into custody, or even questioned, on the basis of skin color. Ethnicity is never on it's own a sufficient basis for probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. However, several factors when taken together can create reasonable suspicion:
the types of job they worked (people unlawfully present disproportionately work in certain kinds of jobs)
presence at particular locations (people unlawfully present are disproportionately found at certain places, like car washes and construction sites)
language and accent (people unlawfully present disproportionately speak languages other than English, or speak English with a heavy accent)
apparent race or ethnicity.
The Supreme Court agreed with ICE on this assessment that in combination (though not in isolation) these factors can create reasonable basis for a Terry Stop. That using these factors in combination does not count as simple "racial profiling" and does not violate anyone's constitutional rights.
Refusing to cooperate with a Terry Stop, refusing to roll down your window, show ID, get out of the vehicle when asked, etc, are all things that will get you arrested, whether it is ICE or your local beat cop who's trying to talk with you.
For example, here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police. This is actually really normal! Refusing to identify yourself to law enforcement, even in absence of suspicion of committing a crime, will get you detained.
Being questioned in a lawful and constitutional Terry stop can be annoying if it happens once in a while. If it happened every day, that would be a cause for concern that maybe Terry stops are a bad precedent. That is the point I was making here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just to be clear, this is not happening. Race is just one factor of four that ICE uses to have reasonable articulable suspicion for their Terry stops.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think any one random guy is gonna be stopped all that often, and if he is, oh well he can just have his ID ready. Not exactly a large cost to society. Seriously whatever moral feeling you're having here isn't universal or assumed, you still have to give actual reasons why bad things are bad.
If one random guy is stopped all the time he SHOULD have redress... but is this actually happening? Not so far as I can tell. The US citizens detained seem to be either protestors who were arrested for something other than immigration, people who were mistakenly thought to be targeted illegal aliens, and people who happened to be around where ICE was raiding looking for other illegal aliens. None of those seem likely to be repeated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link