06-01-2018, 04:02 PM
(06-01-2018, 03:47 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Precisely correct. There is also the factor that upper and middle class drug users have money on hand to purchase said drugs. Many lower income drug users resort to criminal activity to obtain money for their drug use. Not to mention that street level drug sales are the purview of criminal street gangs and all the peripheral criminal activity, and law enforcement scrutiny, inherent in that. So, as we've stated, there is a very logical and fact based reason for this apparent discrepancy that has nothing to do with ethnicity.
Even when it comes to street sales cops concentrate on minorities selling crack instead of white people selling other drugs
Katherine Beckett, Kris Nyrop & Lori Pfingst, Race, Drugs, and Policing: Understanding Disparities in Drug Delivery Arrests, 44 CRIMINOLOGY 1, 105 (2006); see KATHERINE BECKETT, DEFENDER ASS’N’S RACIAL DISPARITY PROJECT, RACE AND DRUG LAW ENFORCEMENT IN SEATTLE (2004), available at http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/ kbeckett/Enforcement.pdf.
Although the majority of those who shared, sold, or transferred serious drugs in Seattle are white (indeed seventy percent of the general Seattle population is white), almost two-thirds (64.2%) of drug arrestees are black. The racially disproportionate drug arrests result from the police department’s emphasis on the outdoor drug market in the racially diverse downtown area of the city, its lack of attention to other outdoor markets that are predominantly white, and its emphasis on crack. Three-quarters of the drug arrests were crack-related even though only an estimated one-third of the city’s drug transactions involved crack.
The researchers could not find a “racially neutral” explanation for the police prioritization of the downtown drug markets and crack. The focus on crack offenders, for example, did not appear to be a function of the frequency of crack transactions compared to other drugs, public safety or public health concerns, crime rates, or citizen complaints
Whites constitute the majority of those who deliver methamphetamine, ecstasy, powder cocaine, and heroin in Seattle; blacks are the majority of those who deliver crack. Powder cocaine was involved in an estimated 22.7% of outdoor transactions, but accounted for only 3.8% of drug arrests; methamphetamine was involved in 10.7% of outdoor transactions yet only 1.1% of drug arrests; and heroin was involved in 33% of transactions but in only 16.4% of arrests
