Almalieque wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
Interesting that I didn't mention clothing style at all, but that's where you went anyway. I was talking specifically about behavior. Body and verbal language.
Are you saying that attire and appearance have nothing to do with the police stereotyping you as a gangster?
I'm saying that
I am not talking about clothing. You're free to expound upon the possible relationship between various styles of attire and the exhibition of suspicious behavior which might draw a cop's attention, but that would be entirely your discussion. Again though, it's interesting how there seems to be a need among the PC crowd to talk about everything *except* behavior. Remember all the people wearing hoodies and holding skittles and cans of tea? That's making it about the clothes, or objects you were carrying, or anything at all, except the actual behavior that was what brought Martin to Zimmerman's attention.
Surely, you don't think a hoodie is "gansta" attire, right? So you kinda have your answer right there, don't you? It's about what you are doing, not what you are wearing. What clothes the person engaged in suspicious behavior may happen to be wearing may tell us something about his clothing choices, but it doesn't work in the other direction. Again, it's interesting that this is what you choose to focus on.
Quote:
Stop and Frisk statistics say otherwise.
No, they don't. We've had this conversation a number of times now. Stop and Frisk stats are perfectly consistent with the police profiling
behavior, and not skin color. That this happens to result in disproportionate stop rates by skin color does not mean that the police are targeting people based on skin color. When you look past the surface level stats, you can see that there are behavior differences that affect the stats. Black drug dealers are more likely to be standing on a corner selling their wares than white drug dealers. Other black males, not themselves engaged in any criminal behavior, or carrying any contraband, are more likely to be standing on the same street corner hanging out with the drug dealer. So guess what happens? When the cop stops the group, there's one guy holding drugs and 8 guys not. When the cop stops the white drug dealer, it's just the one guy, and maybe one accomplice with him. The result? A lot more black guys stopped, and a lot more black guys stopped who didn't themselves do anything wrong (other than choosing to hang with the guy dealing dope). Get it? There's your stats right there.
We can wring our PC hands all we want over this, but the hard reality is that, for whatever reason, a higher percentage of black males are accepting of criminal behavior around them, and almost seem to idolize it and mimic it. This makes it very very hard for the cops to single out just the one black male in the crowd who's actually breaking the law. Add in the higher poverty stats (which almost certainly influences that behavior in the first place), and you have higher *actual* rates of criminal behavior, and more importantly, such behavior is more commonly and openly seen in the areas these young black men are growing up in, which in turn affects their own acceptance level. I linked to a source that mentioned this as a key difference between white and black poverty. White poor are far less likely to live in areas with a very high overall rate of poverty than black poor are. The makeup of the neighborhood itself affects the leaned behavior of those who grow up there. That's what needs to change, and the only way it's going to change is if we can figure out how to change the poverty stats. That's literally the start and end point to this issue.
Edited, Aug 9th 2016 2:18pm by gbaji