Imagine, for the sake of argument, both white people and black people have a 50% chance of possessing weed (not that weed should even be criminalized, but you get the idea).
Now also let’s take a group of 100 people, assuming 80 are white and 20 are black. Given the above weed possession rate, we can say there are 40 weed-carrying white people and 10 weed-carrying black people.
Now imagine cops last year searched 20% of the total population, 90% of those searched being black and 10% being white. Thus, last year, 18 black people were searched and only 2 white people. Of these searched people, 9 black people were caught in possession of weed vs 1 white person.
Thus, the newspapers can now publish “9 black criminals for every 1 white criminal!”, and so the police decide to continue mostly searching black people this year.
Same underlying crime rates, but searching one demographic more skews the resulting arrest record and seemingly justifies further discriminatory enforcement.
As an example:
Imagine, for the sake of argument, both white people and black people have a 50% chance of possessing weed (not that weed should even be criminalized, but you get the idea).
Now also let’s take a group of 100 people, assuming 80 are white and 20 are black. Given the above weed possession rate, we can say there are 40 weed-carrying white people and 10 weed-carrying black people.
Now imagine cops last year searched 20% of the total population, 90% of those searched being black and 10% being white. Thus, last year, 18 black people were searched and only 2 white people. Of these searched people, 9 black people were caught in possession of weed vs 1 white person.
Thus, the newspapers can now publish “9 black criminals for every 1 white criminal!”, and so the police decide to continue mostly searching black people this year.
Same underlying crime rates, but searching one demographic more skews the resulting arrest record and seemingly justifies further discriminatory enforcement.
Don’t even need to imagine it when every study shows that is an accurate description.
Sure, but a lot of people need it very clearly spelled out for them.
Thank you and the poster above you for explaining that so well.
What a wonderful, easy to understand example. Thank you for this