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This Is Why Cops Are Disliked

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A Black driver is more likely to face being searched, handcuffed, or arrested when a police officer's first words are commands rather than a

When a police officer stops a Black driver, the first 45 words said by that officer hold important clues about how their encounter is likely to go.

Car stops that result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest are nearly three times more likely to begin with the police officer issuing a command, such as "Keep your hands on the wheel" or "Turn the car off."

"The car stop is by far the most common way people come into contact with the police," says Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford University. "With the spread of body-worn cameras, we now have access to how these interactions unfold in real time."

All of the stops in this study occurred in a racially diverse, medium-sized U.S. city over the course of one month; the researchers won't identify the city for privacy reasons.

"The vast majority of the stops that we're looking at are stops for routine traffic violations, not for other things that are more serious," says Eberhardt.

The scientists controlled for factors such as the officer's gender and race, as well as the neighborhood crime rate. About 200 officers were involved in these stops.

"It's not really a function of a few officers driving this pattern," says Rho.

The words or actions of the person behind the wheel of the car didn't seem to contribute to escalation.

"The drivers are just answering the officers' questions and explaining what's going on," says Eberhardt. "They're cooperative."

To understand how Black men perceive the initial language used by police officers during a car stop, the researchers asked 188 Black men to listen to recordings of the opening moments of car stops.

It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, those Black men were highly attuned to the implications of a police officer starting an interaction with a command.

"There are stark racial differences in who is stopped and who's not," says Meares, who points out that in the one-month period covered by this study, the city's police officers did 588 stops of Black drivers and only 262 stops of white drivers.

Over 15 % of Black drivers experienced an escalated outcome such as a search, handcuffing, or arrest, while less than 1% of white drivers experienced one of those outcomes.

"They're not drawing any conclusions from that, but these are things we should just be paying attention to," says Meares. "It strains credulity that there are that many more traffic violations."

Rho says in planning this study, they had initially set out to look at patterns related to traffic stop escalation for white drivers too, but realized that it happened so infrequently for white drivers that there just weren't sufficient numbers to even include them in the analysis.

#npr #npr news #driving while black #racism #systemic racism #police accountability #police crimes #police violence #police culture

Sprinter Ricardo Dos Santos says he was "worried" when armed police pulled him over early on Sunday.

#Ricardo Dos Santos #Driving While Black #UK #The Metropolitan Police #News

If you want to better understand why there is a divide between minority communities and law enforcement, consider how police have been forced by cash-craving municipal governments to abandon traditional policing and, instead, become mere revenue collectors.

By handing out citations that carry heavy fines and fees, or by taking and keeping property through civil forfeiture, policing has become increasingly about profit rather than public safety. To rebuild trust among the communities they patrol, officers and prosecutors must stop treating citizens like ATMs.

The first way government uses law enforcement to fill government coffers is the one most people are familiar with: citations. Most Americans have received a parking or traffic ticket at one time in their life. But you may have noticed there are certain days in a month when ticketing by police seems a lot more common.

Why? Well, for some American cities, revenue from tickets makes up a substantial part of municipal budgets. And when police begin to realize that their job is dependent on handing out enough tickets in a given month, they are going to make sure they find offenses, especially among those least able to fight back.

Inevitably, this “taxation by citation” increases the number of confrontations between police and citizens, leading to more public frustration and less trust between the police and the people they are meant to protect and serve.

Excerpt from Forbes.com Policing Should Not Be About Generating Profit

Black Paraphernalia Disclaimer - images from Google images

#black paraphernalia #driving while black #policing the poor #stop the madness #while black

Currently reading Drivin While Black by Gretchen Sorin.

Here's a passage from the introduction:

It reads "The intricate pattern of interstate highways was designed to make car travel safer and more efficient, to support national defense, to boost the economy, and later to provide a method for citizens to evacuate the cities in the event of a nuclear war. As early as 1916, the federal government passed legislation to finance the building of roads. Throughout the twentieth century, the US Army argued for the building of a system of highways in the event that troops and supplies needed to be deployed quickly. President Dwight D Eisenhower made passage of the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act (also known as the National Interstate and Highway Defense Act) a signature piece of his administration. It soon led to a vast network of highways coursing through every state and connecting major cities and rural areas. Existing roads, the president argued, represented an 'appalling problem of waste, danger and death.' In his annual State of the Union address in January 1955, Eisenhower told the nation: 'A modern highway system is essential to meet the needs of a growing population, our expanding economy and our national security.'"

Blurb:

How the automobile fundamentally changed African American life―the basis of a major PBS documentary by Ric Burns.

It’s hardly a secret that mobility has always been limited, if not impossible, for African Americans. Before the Civil War, masters confined their slaves to their property, while free black people found themselves regularly stopped, questioned, and even kidnapped. Restrictions on movement before Emancipation carried over, in different forms, into Reconstruction and beyond; for most of the 20th century, many white Americans felt blithely comfortable denying their black countrymen the right to travel freely on trains and buses. Yet it became more difficult to shackle someone who was cruising along a highway at 45 miles per hour.

In Driving While Black, the acclaimed historian Gretchen Sorin reveals how the car―the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility―has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. She recounts the creation of a parallel, unseen world of black motorists, who relied on travel guides, black only businesses, and informal communications networks to keep them safe. From coast to coast, mom and pop guest houses and tourist homes, beauty parlors, and even large hotels―including New York’s Hotel Theresa, the Hampton House in Miami, or the Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles―as well as night clubs and restaurants like New Orleans’ Dooky Chase and Atlanta’s Paschal’s, fed travelers and provided places to stay the night. At the heart of Sorin’s story is Victor and Alma Green’s famous Green Book, a travel guide begun in 1936, which helped grant black Americans that most basic American rite, the family vacation.

As Sorin demonstrates, black travel guides and black-only businesses encouraged a new way of resisting oppression. Black Americans could be confident of finding welcoming establishments as they traveled for vacation or for business. Civil Rights workers learned where to stay and where to eat in the South between marches and protests. As Driving While Black reminds us, the Civil Rights Movement was just that―a movement of black people and their allies in defiance of local law and custom. At the same time, she shows that the car, despite the freedoms it offered, brought black people up against new challenges, from segregated ambulance services to unwarranted traffic stops, and the racist violence that too often followed.

Interwoven with Sorin’s own family history and enhanced by dozens of little known images, Driving While Black charts how the automobile fundamentally reshaped African American life, and opens up an entirely new view onto one of the most important issues of our time.

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