Today we will all pause for a moment in our lives to celebrate Independence Day. Aside from the separation from the British Empire, Independence Day embodies the celebration of our most cherished values – freedom, liberty, and equality. And yet even in 2010, some 234 years after the Declaration of Independence that declared, “we hold these truths to be self-evidence that all MEN are created equal…,” the notion of equality is still a work in progress at best.
Even in our own pristine community we are not immune to the social problems that has tormented this nation and questioned its values from day one. This is a nation not only of values that ask us, implore us to do better, to seek greatness, but at the same time it is a nation of contradictions. The shining beacon of liberty at the same time only granted that liberty to free white property owning males. African Americans were slaves and only counted as two-thirds of a person.
Last week she told the story of driving a carpool of kids home and her 13 year old daughter and 9 year old son were play fighting in the car, slapping each other with a rolled up Aggie newspaper.
And then as she tells it, there was a knock on the door…
“A Davis police officer asked me to step outside, away from the other children. Was there any reason someone would report a minor being physically abused in my car?
‘They followed you from Mace and Alhambra, and got your license plate number,’ the officer explained.
They got that close and didn’t see who we really were?
After the reprimand of my children by both the very courteous officer and me, and the arrival of a second car and officer, I closed the door and repeated my ‘I told you so’s’ to my kids.”
The question that popped into the minds of others was whether the visit had to do with her race rather than what happened in the vehicle.
“As I told the story from my perspective of a beleaguered mom to several people, they asked me if I thought this concern of child abuse was about my black race.”
She continued, “I remember my friend Bernita Toney, who spent two years trying to clear her name in Yolo Superior Court after someone falsely accused her of leaving her two children unattended in the car. Bernita went through 19 court visits, culminating in a ‘not guilty’ jury decision that took fewer than three hours. “
She concluded after reliving some other Davis events…
“This is not a blanket statement about all police officers, and certainly not about all Davis residents, the vast majority of whom are wonderful folk. And I appreciate as a pediatrician that law enforcement officers are obligated to respond to all concerns for public safety.
But please: before you go sticking your nose that far into someone else’s business, consider the power you have over people’s lives when you assume an aggressively supervisory role and put us at the mercy of social institutions about which we have deep issues of trust and intergenerational injury.
Ask yourself: would you feel the same danger if a carpool mom or kid on a bike or an undergrad was white?
Oh, and I do love my country- although with my eyes wide open, a bit more hypervigilant again – and for now – of how my children’s behavior and mine plays to my neighbors.
That is why I write. I (still) feel a little bit of terror living while black in Davis.”
I am sure a lot of people can come up with a large range of explanations for the police visit that have nothing to do with race. I think each individual incident taken in isolation can be explained away as an innocent contact. However, this month will mark the fourth anniversary of the start of this site. That means for five years I have been working in this community and hearing complaints from people of color about disparate treatment. And by disparate treatment I do not mean just by the police, what Dr. Murray Garcia experience was not police profiling, it was by the citizenry (if it was anything at all).
Here is what I have learned. First, when you are white, you do not see race on an everyday basis, so when you see a contact between police and person, you do not see race as the critical factor. However, when you are a minority, a minority that has to deal with racial difference on a daily basis, your lens through which you see the world is very different. And enough things in your life are about race that after a while everything potentially is about race. People lose the benefit of the doubt. We will never know if what happened to Jann Murray Garcia was primarily about race, but the fact of the matter that because we wonder, we know there is still a problem.
Second thing I can tell people is that to this day, I have never met a current or former African American who does not tell a story about being racially profiled in Davis. I have had millions of discussions with the Police Chief about this, and we always end up in the same place, he does not believe it happens. I have been on ride alongs and certainly at night there is no way to tell the race of the inhabitant of the car. And yet it is too pervasive a believe to simply explain away.
I drive all over town sometimes very late at night and sometimes very early in the morning. In the last five years, I have been pulled over by Davis PD once. I had a brake light out, the officer was very nice, knew I had no idea, and told me to get it fixed. But there was also a six month period where I had not updated by tags – I simply forgot to put the new tag on. And drove everywhere and never once got pulled over. I know African-Americans who get pulled over all the time. I cannot explain that.
I was reading a report on racial profiling from the ACLU and Professor Deborah Ramirez from the Northeastern University School of Law. Their studies found that racial profiling is “a sloppy, lazy substitute” for actual policing. They found three key findings.
- Racial profiling is an abusive practice that targets innocent citizens solely because of the way that they look.
- Racial profiling is not an effective law enforcement strategy. Research shows that racial profiling diverts officers’ attention from using actual, objective signs of suspicious behavior to effectively assess situations.
- Racial profiling erodes trust between law enforcement and its community. As a result, people are less likely to report a crime or work with the police to give information that could apprehend an actual criminal.
There is a perception that racial profiling might be a good tool for law enforcement to use. For instance, why not stop every Muslim in the airport or why not in Davis pull over every person of color. First of all, you end up pulling over a lot of innocent people. That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The first time, one gets pulled over, okay it happens big deal, but after a few times it will get old, people will lose their patience. People will feel victimized. People will lose their trust with law enforcement. People will feel victimized. That is really where the third bullet point comes into play.
The second point I think is interesting because if you are simply looking for groups of people and traits in them, you will tend to miss actual and objective signs of suspicious behavior. You are using a blanket policy to catch a minority even in the minority that you are targeting. It does not seem like an effective policy.
A House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties had a hearing called “Racial Profiling and the Use of Suspect Classifications in Law Enforcement.” They suggested three ways to help end racial profiling:
- independent data collection tracking law enforcement officers’ stops and searches to accurately measure the extent of racial profiling
- funds for better law enforcement training that teaches officers how to look for suspicious behavior , and
- a way for people to redress their grievances if they are a victim of racial profiling, which will hold officers accountable for their actions.
The question of data has actually been a heated one for five years. Back in the day, the Human Relations Commission had asked for it, at one point they had collected it and Chief Pierce informed the commission that they did not know what to do with it and threw it out.
I had a recent discussion with Chief Landy Black about this following some of the comments that Daniel Watts made regarding racial profiling. It is not data that the police department collects. They have aggregate data on race, gender, and age of those they cite and arrest but not “stop and detain.”
Chief Black does not believe they could adequately, comprehensively and accurately collect the data. The list itself would be problematic in terms of determining what constitutes a contact and how it gets marked down. Also the population is difficult to determine because so many minorities that get stopped in Davis are from out of town. Using resident population would underestimate the effective minority community in town at any given point.
There is also the question of what happens if we find that a higher proportion of Hispanics and African Americans are stopped, what then? Does that mean that there is racial profiling or were there legitimate reasons for the stop?
I agree with Chief Black here, there are difficulties in analyzing this set of data. There may be misperceptions here. On the other hand, right now I think there is a still a problem that is not being addressed in this city. After what happened in 2006 with the Human Relations Commission, a lot of people are afraid to come forward and make noise.
I think things are better under Chief Black than they were under his predecessors, but I still hear on a regular basis stories about racial profiling in Davis. One of my interns told me that he and his friends were racially profiled all of the time and pulled over so much they stopped going out at night.
I want to know how that is even possible given the few times I have ever been pulled over, even when I should have been pulled over.
Until we deal with these issues, I am afraid that people like Jann Murray Garcia will still have to wonder if the reason that someone called the police had less to do with what happened and more to do with what she and her family looked like. We will never know, I suppose the motivations of the caller. But I think we have a lot of work to do to build in the trust so that one day people like Dr. Murray Garcia will not have to wonder about such things, they will simply know.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Does anyone know of a California community with racial/ethnic diversity that notably doesn’t have issues of racial profiling?
DMG: “One of my interns told me that he and his friends were racially profiled all of the time and pulled over so much they stopped going out at night.”
This is key – if you are out late at night, you are much more likely to get stopped no matter who you are. But then more crime takes place at night, so the police are more hyper-vigilant then, especially in the wee hours of the morning.
As has been noted, even Dr. Murray Garcia doesn’t know if race had anything to do with whether someone called in a complaint about potential child abuse.
IMHO, these types of vague grumblings about racism are not particularly helpful. They tend to paint a picture of racism in every event – so that every incident involving a minority is tainted with the potential for racism. In consequence, the concept of “racism” is getting “old” and worn out – it is beginning to lose significant meaning anymore. It has become a broken record, and hence results in denial that such a phenomenon exists.
It makes far more sense to zero in on incidents where the “racism” is more clear cut. I read the column by Dr. Murray Garcia, and was not particularly impressed. Nowhere could she show actual racism, in regard to the person who called the police about Dr. Murray Garcia having hit her child over the head with a rolled up newspaper. Nor does Dr. Murray Garcia take any responsibility for her own public behavior that was perhaps a bit inappropriate? Granted, all parents have “been there, done that” when it comes to disciplining their kids. But when should a member of the public step in? And I would cringe to think Dr. Murray Garcia hit her child WHILE DRIVING, so I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that was not the case.
I had a quandry one time, whether to call Child Protective Services. A 12 year old child was left by herself all weekend, while her mother and the mother’s boyfriend went gambling. In another case, a mother would take off for an afternoon, not tell her 8 year old daughter where she was going, leaving the 8 year old by herself or with her 8 year old brother. In both cases, I made my house available to the abandoned children, but I could just as easily have reported these parents for child neglect.
Our country may not be perfect, but I would prefer living here than anywhere else in the world. If you think the police are bad here, think about what police are like in other countries. Often other countries don’t have basic civil rights. Can we do better? Absolutely, and we should always strive for improvement. But I would also argue perfection is probably an unrealistic standard to insist upon.
A few thoughts in response:
1. I fear that people’s view of our country as being better than other countries, which is certainly true, often becomes a rationalization for inaction. “To form a more perfect union” to me means an ongoing act, we never achieve perfection nor do we stop trying to.
2. Along similar lines you say, “these types of vague grumblings about racism are not particularly helpful” – the problem is that if we ignore them, they fester and then explode. I think we should explore the vague rumblings since they are rather frequent and figure out better ways to deal with them before things become a crisis.
3. According to the story it was Jann Murray Garcia’s daughter who hit her sibling, not Jann herself.
4. I don’t think that racial profiling is necessarily a matter of racism, I think it’s more a matter of poor technique and laziness.
Racism and racial profiling is as much a part of the American inheritance as the Flag which will fly high today all over the country. And racial profiling is not just a problem of policing. Civilians participate enthusiastically.
And denial is one key reason it persists so tenaciously. It is so painful to admit that in the “land of the free” some citizens live under a shroud of suspicion that they are not really Americans, even though their ancestors preceded most European-Americans by hundreds of years, and even though they laid the foundation of wealth by their unpaid labor.
This contradicts the American Horatio Alger notion of self made men. A lot of men made their fortunes based on the unpaid or under paid labor of others.If you watched the World Cup yesterday, you would have seen all the teams, in the name of FIFA, unfurl a large banner and proclaim “SAY NO TO RACISM”. We could at least do as much. Denial only serves to prolong the agony, because we know, in the deep recesses of our hearts and minds, that racism thrives.
Jann Murray is a broken record. she is becoming the boy who cried wolf, and that is a shame because there really are African Americans who REALLY DO suffer from racism, and their cries for help will get lost amidst self-important columnists like Murray. She still cannot point to anything that showed her that the incident had anything to do with race at all.
A uniquely African American phenomenon is that of entitlement. In slavery, African Americans were not entitled to own their bodies. In “freedom” they are not presumed entitled to their experiences. Others believe they are better equipped to interpret those experiences for them, as is done often by parents on behalf of children. It makes one pause to examine the notion of emancipation. When do people gain the right to their own experiences or are others jealous of those experiences?
jg: ” We could at least do as much. Denial only serves to prolong the agony, because we know, in the deep recesses of our hearts and minds, that racism thrives.”
I know you fervently believe racism thrives, but what statistics do you have to back that assertion up? The term “racism” is so overused now, it has literally lost its meaning.
DMG: “”To form a more perfect union” to me means an ongoing act, we never achieve perfection nor do we stop trying to.”
This kind of thinking seems to be taken right out of the current political playbook. One side achieves a success, so the other side insists it isn’t good enough and “raises the bar”, insisting perfection has not been reached. But the law of diminishing returns comes into play, where we spend an inordinant amount of resources for minimal gains.
Katehi handed over $230,000 to a minority group that had graffiti spray painted on their clubhouse door. $230,000 at a time when student tuition was raised 32% in one year, entire programs are being eliminated, staff are being laid off. That $230,000 would have been better spent on a good security system that could have caught the little brats who sprayed the graffiti, which would have better protected ALL students.
Do you really think the $230,000 handed to the minority group is going to change the minds of the ones who perpetrated the petty crime? Instead, because of all the “racism” handwringing, all have been collectively punished and the perpetrators will never get caught – instead the perps will garner the negative attention they were looking for.
DMG: “Along similar lines you say, “these types of vague grumblings about racism are not particularly helpful” – the problem is that if we ignore them, they fester and then explode.”
Or is it the vague grumblings that cause the problem to fester and explode?
DMG: ” I don’t think that racial profiling is necessarily a matter of racism, I think it’s more a matter of poor technique and laziness.”
But even Murray Garcia even admits she has no idea if the complaint was a result of “racism”. The police chief doesn’t keep those statistics.
DMG: “There is also the question of what happens if we find that a higher proportion of Hispanics and African Americans are stopped, what then? Does that mean that there is racial profiling or were there legitimate reasons for the stop?”
So even you admit there is really no way of definitively determining if racial profiling is going on. Let’s face it, “racism” has become too vague a term, overused for all sorts of possible behavior. I agree with Kane607 – crying wolf too many times dilutes the effectiveness of having a reasonable discussion about very real injustices against minorities that do take place.
[quote]Racial profiling is an abusive practice that targets innocent citizens solely because of the way that they look.[/quote] For those who think the Davis PD or likely any other PD uses racial profiling in traffic stops (or most anything else), you would be enlightened to do a police ride-along, especially at night. Cops, because of their training, spot a lot more infractions and suspicious circumstances that most of us, myself included, miss. However, in less than perfect light, even a well-trained cop cannot tell the skin color (or often even the gender) of someone who rolled through a stop sign 50 yards or more away or who is driving 25 miles per hour over the speed limit.
The idea that a police officer is letting whites and Asians transgress the law while pulling over browns and blacks for the same offenses is downright laughable.
What is true is that in most cities there natually is a larger police presence in neighborhoods which have a lot of street crime. And insofar as those are the black and brown neighborhoods, people living there are more likely to be seen by cops for things like rolling through a stop sign or turning without signalling than someone is in a lower crime neighborhood.
I don’t agree that focusing on this question of racial profiling is one which will make our country or our community better. In fact, I think it makes us worse off. It diverts our attention from the real problems which plague our society. It comes from people who are emotionally stuck in the past and don’t want to address what hurts us today.
We have a terrible problem of broken families, of a great percentage of children being born to mothers who are not ready to raise a child*, who don’t know how to carry on a stable marital relationship, who have no skills to earn a living and provide for their families, of fathers who are irresponsible and absent and don’t even care enough to love their children, let alone feed, house and clothe them.
*Teen pregnancy rates declined rapidly in the 1990s and then have rebounded in the last 6 years.
By race, these family problems are much worse among blacks and Latinos. However, it’s stupid to think of those as black or Latino problems. They are American problems.
Whites and (very few) Asian girls who are getting pregnant as teenagers and the boys who are sleeping with them and then leaving immediately have the exact same broken family profile as the blacks and browns. And for those Latinos and African-Americans who have intact families, all of these related problems of dropping out of school, drug abuse, lack of work, time in jail or prison, issues of violence, and so on barely affect them.
The people who concentrate so much effort on the problematic interaction of police and some minorities need to take a step back. They need to ask themselves things like, “Why is it that dark brown skinned Indian-Americans (often Muslim or Hindu) don’t suffer from all of these terrible social conditions and so-called racial profiling problems?” The answer, of course, is because those Indian-Americans don’t come from broken homes (very often) and they thus don’t get involved in all of the issues with gangs and street crime and so on0.
If we could convince young women (of all races) to wait until they were at least age 25 and married and able to support themselves financially to bear children, virtually all of these supposed institutional race problems would fade away. It’s not just luck that certain ethnic groups in America (including people from India and many other non-white countries) are successful and have very low crime rates. It’s their family structures which makes them a success.
Something like 72% of black children are born to unwed mothers. It’s also a high percentage for Hispanics. And not surprisingly, those groups have the highest crime and incarceration rates. (Blacks males are 6.5 times as likely to be in prison as white males; and 2.6 times as likely to be in prison as Hispanic males.) It’s not a guarantee to have no problems with the law or drugs or whatever if you come from an intact family. However, it is patently obvious that your chances in life are far better if you start out with parents who are married, who finished school, who are not teenagers and who are employed.
Elaine: “So even you admit there is really no way of definitively determining if racial profiling is going on.” I have always pointed out the difficulty of proving racial profiling, it’s solitary act, that is undocumented by police, that is hard to prove or quantify. Nevertheless, I think the large number of people who believe they have been is sufficient that we need to change current practices OR better educate the community about current practices.
“But even Murray Garcia even admits she has no idea if the complaint was a result of “racism”.” This gets to the point I made at the beginning, when you live in a world where race is never an issue it’s easy to rule out such explanations. A lot of African Americans particularly in Davis do not have that luxury.
Rich: I have been on over a dozen police ridealongs, all of them at night in various jurisdictions. “I have been on ride alongs and certainly at night there is no way to tell the race of the inhabitant of the car. And yet it is too pervasive a believe to simply explain away.” What we have instead are pretext stops, stops based on very small infractions that would never warrant a ticket but are enough to pull over an individual the police may sense does not belong. In Davis that is more likely to be a black or Hispanic. Or perhaps blacks and Hispanics are just more sensitive to the issue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Mr. Toad, thanks for that link.
[i]”In Davis that is more likely to be a black or Hispanic.”[/i]
Probably. But most often, as you know, the cop has no idea of the race of the person in the car he sees driving with an expired tag until he first sees the infraction.
[i]”Or perhaps blacks and Hispanics are just more sensitive to the issue.”[/i]
I actually doubt that. In fact, I would think that they might be more inure to it than whites or Asians. No one of any race wants to be pulled over for what he thinks are b.s. violations. But it is the case in many cities that it does happen more to blacks and browns, largely because cops are concentrated in high crime neighborhoods.
And that raises the most important question, which I droned on about in my previous post: What is it that is going on inside of families which results in these “pretexts” being so much more common for blacks and browns? The societal problem is not that we have racist cops. The U.S. has far less racism than most countries; and we are probably the least racist multi-ethnic country in the world today. The societal problem is unfit parents crapping out children.
Rich Rifkin wrote: “The societal problem is unfit parents crapping out children.”
Which came first? The racism or the unfit parents? The chicken or the egg?
Mr. Toad: Thanks for the link, although in the end, I found the piece tried to do too much and ended up meandering all over the place.
Rich: My point is, if it truly is innocent, then there needs to be a way in which to work with the black and Hispanic Community to overcome the perception.
I’m a researcher at UCD and often drive to/from campus late night/early morning.
I have been pulled over many, many times by Davis PD (a couple times for broken taillights, a couple times for inadequate lighting of license plate, many times for trailor hitch knob partially blocking view of license plate.)
I normally drive an old blue pickup truck with canopy; maybe that type of car is profiled (I don’t like it, but it doesn’t offend me!).
P.S. I am blond haired and blue-eyed. Just one persons experience.
[i]”Which came first? The racism or the unfit parents? The chicken or the egg?”[/i]
That is a more interesting question than you might have intended, because, while I don’t think one has driven the other at all, we evolved (societally, not biologically) from a society in which most children were born to unfit, though usually married parents (prior to the US Civil War) to one in which (by WW2) bastardization was uncommon and the average black family of 1945 was far more cohesive, intact and functional than the average white family of 2010 is today.
Since the mid-1960s (following huge increases in welfare programs, as described by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and following women’s liberation), the two-parent family has declined to very low levels, divorce rates have skyrocketed and female headed households with no adult males raising children has become the norm in the black family and very common in white and Hispanic homes. (I don’t know how far you have to go back to find fully half of all children born to unwed mothers and a similarly high percentage of children who don’t grow up with their fathers.)
If racism were the reason for the broken black family, then today’s black family should be in better shape than it was in 1945. But it is just the opposite.
My belief is that the intermingling of cultural factors and economics have riven the American family: women have far more independent earning power; and welfare programs have allowed uneducated women (of all races) to make terrible family-planning decisions, sometimes even encouraging them, because a woman with a few kids gets a lot more in benefits than one who stays childless.
At the same time, our economy has become far more technologically and educationally driven, which has harmed those males in those cultures which generally don’t value education. They are worth much less today than they used to be. That’s not just true of poor blacks or Hispanics, but also whites from various sections of our country where farming, coal-mining, factory labor and other jobs which take little formal education have defined the culture.
In places like Davis, where most black parents are well-educated and value education, their male children are far more likely to go on to have stable family relationships than are whites from the rural South and midwest. So cultural norms of what is “white” or “black” or whatever are just generalizations. Underneath, the important question is to the individual, regardless of his skin color. It’s quite irrelevant that the norm in the U.S. was racist for a long time.
The relevant question is what types of family-planning decisions are individuals making to raise their own children. Those who make bad choices — to have kids very young, while unmarried, before finishing their education and before they have some financial security — are likely to raise children who have problems in school, problems with violence, problems with unstable relationships, problems with finding good jobs, maybe more problems with substance abuse and often problems with the law. The relevant answer is to change the incentive structure for people who are unfit to raise kids from making babies. Pay young girls from broken homes to stay in school and to put off having a child. Stop rewarding them for bad behavior, as our welfare system still does in a perverse manner.
[quote]In places like Davis, where most black parents are well-educated and value education, their male children are far more likely to go on to have stable family relationships than are whites from the rural South and midwest. So cultural norms of what is “white” or “black” or whatever are just generalizations. Underneath, the important question is to the individual, regardless of his skin color. It’s quite irrelevant that the norm in the U.S. was racist for a long time. [/quote]
But even in Davis, blacks perform considerably, consistently, and statistically significantly worse than their white counter parts. And this difference holds even when factors such as income and parent’s education are held constant. So even among blacks and whites who should be equal in status and location, blacks perform worse.
“The relevant answer is to change the incentive structure for people who are unfit to raise kids from making babies. Pay young girls from broken homes to stay in school and to put off having a child. Stop rewarding them for bad behavior, as our welfare system still does in a perverse manner.”
There you go again with your social darwinism thinking you know what is best for others. Once again you forget that nature selects not man in whatever image he has in his head. But actually lack of access to healthcare is a big reason why there are higher teen pregnancy rates in the US than in other developed countries.
Rifkin: …the average black family of 1945 was far more cohesive, intact and functional than the average white family of 2010 is today.
Interesting, powerful statement. Do you have any reference(s) to support this? Census data?
I appreciate that you’ve developed a sincere concern about how race influences a variety of issues since you’ve been reporting local events.
[quote]”I have been on over a dozen police ridealongs, all of them at night in various jurisdictions….What we have instead are pretext stops, stops based on very small infractions that would never warrant a ticket but are enough to pull over an individual the police may sense does not belong.”
[/quote]
Are you saying that you observed this behavior on your ride-alongs? If so, you must have drawn the most dumb officers each place!
It’s a shame when you’re stopped for a bad tail light, David, that your first thought gets to be that your tail light is out–while a person of color’s first thought could be that the same stop would be because of race. It’s a shame that a pediatrician who gets a police visit has to consider that racial profiling might be involved instead of concern about protecting children against possible abuse. (Should police decide [u]not[/u] to act once they’ve determined a person of color is involved–thereby profiling to help protect themselves against charges of profiling?)
Given our 200+ years of experience (and recent efforts to teach minority history), it shouldn’t be surprising that today’s minorities are sensitive about how these matters affect them. However, that doesn’t mean that Davis stops are made because of race, that Yolo County arrests and prosecutions are made because of race or that guilty verdicts or pleas or sentences are because of race.
Anecdotes that may or may not reflect racism don’t help explain the bigger issues you and Rich have noted here. As you say, “there needs to be a way in which to work with the black and Hispanic Community to overcome the perception”–assuming everyone in authority (and in the neighborhood) to act on racist leanings doesn’t advance the cause.
P.S.–Congratulations on your four years of Vanguard service to the community. Are you at all worried that your admitted traffic transgressions won’t encourage Chief Black to assure that you get more equitable police treatment in the future?
[quote]Rifkin: …the average black family of 1945 was far more cohesive, intact and functional than the average white family of 2010 is today.
Interesting, powerful statement. Do you have any reference(s) to support this? Census data? [/quote]
I would argue that that’s very much not true.
Finally.
I’ve heard, and been part of, what is essentially an endless circle of futile discussion on this provocative topic for the past 4 decades. This discussion is probably the most thoughtful and useful group critique I’ve ever witnessed. But a solution is never going to be totally achievable, despite what we may seek or desire. You will not want the hear the reason why, but you are going to anyway.
Every human who has ever walked this earth has formed and harbored personal biases towards other persons and groups. The most insidious are those we do not even recognize within ourselves. But they are there all the same, and they most definitely color our judgments. What I’ve seen most often is those who render sweeping judgments of others are, ironically, themselves the most tainted. And you don’t have to look very far in Davis to find innumerable examples.
It’s a shared human condition to stereotype other people and groups of people. We may mitigate it through education and life experience, but it is never totally erased. Thwarting one personal bias gives usually rise to another prejudice. Blame arising from our biases must be placed somewhere.
Everybody seems to have a strong opinion on the topic of racial, religious, and cultural stereotyping, but nobody can speak objectively devoid of their own biases. We are all compromised and tainted by personal stereotyping, the same as the person or group that we condemn or support.
Rifkin: …the average black family of 1945 was far more cohesive, intact and functional than the average white family of 2010 is today.
Interesting, powerful statement. Do you have any reference(s) to support this? Census data?
DG: I would argue that that’s very much not true.
When I remember anecdotes and attitudes of my grandparents’ generation growing up in the Jim Crow era, I have a lot of trouble reconciling it with Rifkin’s statement. But I’m willing to consider solid info that contradicts my impressions, if it’s out there.
I used to read a lot of literature from African-American writers that portrayed life in the 1930s and 40s, the portrayal was often of an absent father, beset by alcohol addiction and abusiveness. In short, while you can probably show that divorce rates are higher now as they are across all strata of society, it would be difficult to argue that the family was more cohesive and functional.
Coleman: Every human who has ever walked this earth has formed and harbored personal biases towards other persons and groups.
I agree that human impulses lead us to biases and prejudices toward others. But it’s a cop out to give up on better behavior because of it. Better to recognize that those impulses are there, and figure out how to be a better person in spite of them.
It’s also understandable that a person can be so angry at someone else that he might want to get violent toward that person, but law and civil society doesn’t condone that behavior. Some individuals learn how to deal appropriately with those angry impulses; others don’t and end up in our criminal justice system.
[b]”the average black family of 1945 was far more cohesive, intact and functional than the average white family of 2010 is today.”[/b]
[i]”Do you have any reference(s) to support this? Census data?”[/i]
The best source to read about this is a scholarly book by Tucker and Mitchell-Kern called “The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Implications.”
The actual numbers to support that statement are that in 1940 (just before WW2) 19% ([url]http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams060805.asp[/url]) of black children were born out of wedlock. Today, 28 percent ([url]http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/08/out.of.wedlock.births/index.html[/url]) of white children are born to single mothers.
The Tucker/Mitchell-Kern book, which I don’t have a copy of, details more statistics about the rearing of black children, insofar as the destinies of those who grow up with their mother and father and those raised solely by their mothers, regardless of marital status when the child was born.
But that’s only part of the story. Out-of-wedlock doesn’t get at cohesiveness, doesn’t get at abuse, doesn’t get at absenteeism. Society allowed for greater numbers of out-of-wedlock births and divorce, but the actual structure of the family was frayed long before those numbers caught up to reality.
[i]”There you go again with your social darwinism thinking you know what is best for others.”[/i]
I have no idea who you are, so I don’t know if you are someone I’ve engaged in a discussion with about this topic. Yet the exasperation in your writing suggests you think we have.
I am no “social darwinist.” I really have no idea what you think that means, anyhow.
As to my own judgment on personal behavior, of course. I’m not claiming any great insights. I am simply repeating the obvious: the chances for a child in life are much greater if his mother and father are married to each other, if they have completed school, if they have stable employment and so on. For you to get your panties all wound up over that statement of the obvious is most strange.
[i]”Once again you forget that nature selects not man in whatever image he has in his head.”[/i]
That actually means nothing. I hope you understand that your statement here is pure gobbledygook ([url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobbledygook[/url]). However, I realize that there are a lot of people with PhD’s who write nothing but meaningless jargon. So you have company.
[i]”But actually lack of access to healthcare is a big reason why there are higher teen pregnancy rates in the US than in other developed countries.”[/i]
That very well may be true. However, it’s a complete non-sequitir. I have posited no argument against better access to healthcare. I would like our country to do whatever it takes to discourage people who are unfit to raise children from having children until they are fully ready.
Once again, trying to make an issue of something that just isn’t there. The officers were just doing their job and the person who reported it thought they possibly saw abuse. It doesn’t hurt to be safe rather than sorry. Just another case of writers trying to drum up a problem in order to have something to write about.
If it’s something that’s not there, then why have I heard these complaints consistently for over four years, and people who have lived in this community twenty to thirty years say it’s been a problem going at least that far back? As I said before, even if the officers are doing their job, as you suggest, there needs to be a better effort to communicate. On the other hand, I believe it’s easy to say, it’s better to be safe than sorry when it’s not you being hassled.
rich rifkin: “If we could convince young women (of all races) to wait until they were at least age 25 and married and able to support themselves financially to bear children, virtually all of these supposed institutional race problems would fade away.”
If we could convince young MEN and women (of all races) to wait… As I have said before, “it takes two to tango”. But I agree with your premise that the oversexualization of society and moving away from abstinance/responsible sex has resulted in broken families and more crime. And I blame Hollywood, magazines, etc. for that oversexualization.
[i]If we could convince young MEN and women (of all races) to wait…”[/i]
I don’t absolve men at all, Elaine. Unlike the girls who are trying to raise their children, the boys have abandoned all responsibility (in so many cases) and are therefore more to blame for the bad outcome of their kids. However, what I wrote is about bearing children. Males are not, last I checked, getting pregnant. Outside of rape and rare instances of properly used but failed contraception, the choice to bear children is one too many young, unprepared girls (of all hues) are making.
DMG: ” I have always pointed out the difficulty of proving racial profiling, it’s solitary act, that is undocumented by police, that is hard to prove or quantify. Nevertheless, I think the large number of people who believe they have been is sufficient that we need to change current practices OR better educate the community about current practices.”
What current practices, when you don’t even know if racial profiling is going on? The concept of racial profile I believe started with actual cases that began in Florida. There was a highway, in Florida, that was an actual drug corridor. Mixed race couples seemed to be the carriers of drugs, so the police began profiling mixed race couples. In that case, the racial profiling was pervasive, and the police even admitted doing it. Racial profiling, in that case, was real and unfair.
Fast forward to the Murray Garcia “incident”. She had no idea if the police report of possible child abuse was racially motivated; the police treated the entire episode in a very professional manner; but somehow Murray Garcia wonders if the whole thing was racially motivated. This is just plain wrong – because it will make the next person who thinks about reporting child abuse hesitate bc they might get accused of being racist should the children involved happen to be of a minority ethnicity.
This reminds me of the recent stupid case of the African American professor who was caught “breaking into” his own home, bc he lost his keys. He was incensed bc the cops called to the scene of the “breaking and entering” asked for his identification, as if somehow the police should have known he was a college professor of upstanding moral character innocently trying to break into his own home bc he forgot his keys. What a farce that was. The uptight professor pulled the race card on the police. Yet I’ll bet this same guy would have been incensed if his home had been burgled, and the police stood by and did nothing because the perps were black and the police chose to do nothing rather than be accused of racism. The professor would have claimed “racism” I’m sure. You can’t have it both ways…
Elaine:
“What current practices, when you don’t even know if racial profiling is going on?”
Right now what we know is that a large percentage (or at least sizable) of minorities believe they are getting singled out for disparate treatment by the police. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument, they are wrong and the police are acting completely appropriately. Isn’t the perception still a problem and doesn’t that at the very least indicate that there needs to be greater communication and community awareness?
Now we’ll flash forward, Jann has an incident, maybe had it been a white person in the car instead of a black one, the passerby would not have followed her and reported it to the police. Maybe they would have. So now it’s doubt in her mind, again, how should we appropriately handle it – allow it to fester and so every time something happens to a black person we simply ignore it, or do we try to find what happened and see if there really is a problem.
Again, I believe that minorities are more sensitive to issues like race because they have to deal with racial differences all of the time. That does not mean that they are imagining these problems, they are too pervasive.
Maybe it happens to white people too and white people simply don’t think twice about it because race isn’t on their screen. Or maybe people really are getting treated differently. Either we have a problem that is based on race or one based on perception, either way, we have a problem.
“This reminds me of the recent stupid case of the African American professor who was caught “breaking into” his own home, bc he lost his keys. “
And what we found out based on the report that just came out is that both sides were to blame in this incident, neither handled it properly.
DG [quote]What we have instead are pretext stops, stops based on very small infractions that would never warrant a ticket but are enough to pull over an individual the police may sense does not belong. In Davis that is more likely to be a black or Hispanic.[/quote]
Even though an officer may not give a ticket for a citations clearly doesn’t not mean they cannot conduct a traffic stop. Your assuming that the officer may be conducting a stop because the officer feels the car car or people MAY not belong.
There are a lot of assumptions and unknowns in that statement. What factual basis do you have to say that these stops in Davis are more likely to result in blacks or Hispanics being stopped?
“What factual basis do you have to say that these stops in Davis are more likely to result in blacks or Hispanics being stopped? “
I only have anecdotal evidence, I’d like to have statistical evidence to go along with it, but at this time the Police Chief is not comfortable collecting it.
[i]”Right now what we know is that a large percentage (or at least sizable) of minorities believe they are getting singled out for disparate treatment by the police.”[/i]
Singled out by the cops? We know that?
Until just now, I had not read the story by J. Murray-Garcia*. What is absent from this story (and I presume she would have no way of knowing) is what was the race or ethnic background of the person who called the cops? The implication is that this was a racist act, to single out a non-white family, perhaps by someone of another race. But it’s entirely possible that the caller also was black.
If the behavior of Dr. M-G’s kids was as innocent as she described — and not knowing them but knowing how kids behave I completely believe her that it was just innocent horseplay — then it would seem the bad behavior was on the part of the caller, not the Davis PD.
Dr. M-G’s perspective also seems internally contradictory. She is at once upset that the police inquired as to whether her children were harmed. (“… before you go sticking your nose that far into someone else’s business!”) At the very same time she says she is grateful that “law enforcement officers are obligated to respond to all concerns for public safety.” In that someone reported this “incident,” the police had no choice but to check it out. Based on what she says happened, the DPD did its job perfectly and justifiably.
What is really disturbing, though, is that Dr. M-G’s conclusion is that this inquiry by the police has caused her to “… feel a little bit of terror living while black in Davis.” That makes no sense. It is the opposite of sensible.
If we had a police force where, because the purported victims of “child abuse” were black and the cops dismissed the report for that reason, then it would make sense to “feel a bit of terror.”
But this is a case where she should feel nothing but grateful for the Davis police, who made sure her black children were not harmed. Assuming this was just horseplay, she rightfully should be upset with the person who took down her license plate and called the cops. That person is probably an a**hole.
And as anyone who has any experience in this world knows, a**holes come in all colors and there are a lot more a**holes than there are racists. That holds true for cops as well.
——-
*Her story is hurt terribly in my opinion by putting in all that nonsense about Halema Buzayan being the victim of religious prejudice by the Davis PD, as if she knows what motivated the Vietnamese-American police officer in the way he did his job. The good doctor further asserts that the teenager was not driving the car in the Safeway parking lot. However, based on the eyewitness accounts she was. I obviously don’t know who is right; and neither does Dr. M-G. For that reason, when the facts are in dispute, she makes herself look like a fool in implying that her case and the Buzayan case are examples of the horrors of minority life in Davis–never mind that she ignores the race of the cop in that case and race of the mayor whom she upbraids for praising that officer.
“I am no “social darwinist.” I really have no idea what you think that means, anyhow. “Once again you forget that nature selects not man in whatever image he has in his head.”
“That actually means nothing. I hope you understand that your statement here is pure gobbledygook. However, I realize that there are a lot of people with PhD’s who write nothing but meaningless jargon. So you have company. “
Don’t criticize what you don’t understand. Instead of dismissing these remarks maybe you need to try to understand them.
First of all the notion that embracing your eugenic approach as a solution to our social conditioning is offensive. While you condemn young people for having children out of wedlock and before reaching a level of education that few achieve you fail to recognize that there are many other factors in the complexity of human character and development. I have seen children from foster homes who are the nicest people you would ever meet and children from two parent homes that are among the nastiest. Your problem is that you want to simplify things based on some book or study when the world is more complex.
Finally, the early 20’s are some of the best years for a woman to have children. You see its all in your head. What is wrong with a young woman with limited education deciding she wants to have lots of children? How does that translate into overzealous policing? What you are exposing are your personal biases nothing relevant to the actual discussion about why police stop who they stop.
[i]”What factual basis do you have to say that these stops in Davis are more likely to result in blacks or Hispanics being stopped?”[/i]
While that is an interesting question, it is also important to ask a follow-up: are any of those being pulled over stopped [i]because[/i] of their race or ethnicity? Or are individuals being stopped instead because offenders are not equally distributed as a percentage of all ethnic or racial groups?
In other words, is the reason why there are very few Japanese-Americans as a percentage of the J-A population in prison for homicide because the cops are letting them get away with murder? Or is it the case that there are very few because they are much less likely to kill a fellow human being?
Black-Americans are 6.4 times as likely as whites to be homicide victims and 7.3 times as likely to commit a murder, according to Census ([url]http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/law_enforcement_courts_prisons/crimes_and_crime_rates.html[/url]) and FBI statistics ([url]http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm[/url]). Yet if cops were expected to arrest people equally on the basis of their groups’ percentage of the total U.S. population, a lot more white and Asian Americans need to be arrested for murders they are not committing.
If you still are talking about Davis, from where did this assumption come?
[quote]”Right now what we know is that a large percentage (or at least sizable) of minorities believe they are getting singled out for disparate treatment by the police.”[/quote]
One way to help with minority perceptions (and those of the rest of us) would be have good data. Whether it’s police stop information or minority perception surveys, the community discussions you want need accurate information for enlightenment. I worry that spending a lot of time and energy arguing about the meaning of anecdotes ends up adding to the divide.