The Fight Against Fascists (I Can't Believe This Exists)

[CJD]

(06-08-2021, 05:23 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I have routinely stated (and this is not accusatory btw) that intent matters. An unintentionally racist policy only become a racist policy if that fact becomes known but the policy stays in play unchanged. 



I agree with you on the war on drugs, especially the sentencing discrepancies between possession of powder versus rock cocaine.  I do not think stop and frisk is inherently racist.  When one looks at the demographics of who commits street level crime and then focus on stopping street level crime you're going to get disproportionate results in regard to ethnicity.  That doesn't mean that an individual officer can't implement the policy in a racist way, and I have no doubt that this happened (but not on the scale that many would claim), but that does not make the policy racist.



I see how you could come to that conclusion.  But by the same logic many Democratic voters are pro criminal as the people they voted for are enacting policies resulting in a large rise in crime.  They may not be pro criminal but their vote still resulted in an increase in crime and a decrease in consequences for criminals.


I don't disagree.  However, again by the same logic, Biden is responsible for the crises at our southern border. 

I agree that intention matters. While results also matter, if the intent is not malicious or ill-willed, the negative results can teach you not to repeat that mistake again, whatever it was.

Regarding Stop and Frisk, there was a study that found black and Hispanic people were stopped disproportionately, even after controlling for precinct variability and race-specific estimates of crime participation. Granted, this looks at statistical data on the precinct in which the stop occurred, so it doesn't account for the perception of crime participation but the statistical reality of it (I.E. a cop may be in a precinct that has a low rate of black crime, but still stop black people because of his perception that black people in his precinct are dangerous, for some reason). As the study says:

Quote:To briefly summarize our findings, blacks and Hispanics represented 51% and 33% of the stops while representing only 26% and 24% of the New York City population. Compared with the number of arrests of each group in the previous year (used as a proxy for the rate of criminal behavior), blacks were stopped 23% more often than whites and Hispanics were stopped 39% more often than whites. Controlling for precinct actually increased these discrepancies, with minorities between 1.5 and 2.5 times as often as whites (compared with the groups’ previous arrest rates in the precincts where they were stopped) for the most common categories of stops (violent crimes and drug crimes), with smaller differences for property and drug crimes. The differences in stop rates among ethnic groups are real, substantial, and not explained by previous arrest rates or precincts

 
This isn't proof that the cops were acting with racist intentions because you can never truly know what a person is thinking, but I do think it is indicative of the general perceptions of the police force in the way in which the policy was carried out.


As far as Democrats causing a rise in crime, I'm not sure what you're referring to. I'd have to know more before I could speak on that. And, regarding the southern border, I think Biden is perceived to be "Softer" on immigrants than Trump was (which was, frankly, inevitable once Trump left office, because no president before him ever opined about shooting illegal border crossers, to my knowledge), which likely caused at least a portion of this surge, as the migrants indicated when interviewed. I also think COVID caused a backlog of migrants who potentially would have come regardless of who was president. 

With that said, honestly, even if Biden's policies were the sole reason for the increase in migrant crossers, I still think it's the right thing to do to treat these people better than they were treated by Trump. In many cases, I personally hoped we would have gone further in some regards. If that means more come, then I wouldn't call that an unintended or unforeseen consequence. I see it more as a predictable result that people voting for Biden (and Biden himself) hopefully foresaw and accepted.