Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets

https://theconversation.com/police-stop-more-black-drivers-while-speed-cameras-issue-unbiased-tickets-new-study-from-chicago-238170

by ceejayoz • 2 years ago

14 15 2 years ago

theconversation.com

yesco4• 2 years ago

Traffic Stops =/= Speeding Tickets

These are two very different metrics and I'd be interested to see what a proper comparison actually looks like here. As it's currently presented, this feels kind of dishonest.

Rather than comparing the citations from speed cameras with the totality of all traffic stops made by police, a more honest comparison would be the racial distributions for speeding tickets given by police vs speed cameras.

ceejayoz3• 2 years ago

It's the next in a pretty big set of evidence.

That one's particularly interesting because it had a rock-solid natural control; they looked at incidents one week before daylight savings through one week after. They saw an instant one-hour shift in police traffic stop patterns that quite simply cannot be explained away as "well black people drive worse".

Rather than comparing the citations from speed cameras with the totality of all traffic stops made by police...

That's not what they did; they only counted speed citations in the study.

yesco4• 2 years ago

I can't speak for the tangentially related Stanford study since I haven't read through it yet, but I want to make the obvious clear here and will re-state that my main issue is the dishonest comparison of two unequal metrics.

That's not what they did; they only counted speed citations in the study.

Okay so I found the paper and read through it to see if it said something contrary to what the article written by the researchers themselves said and you seem to be incorrect. The study is very clearly just traffic stops in total, not speeding tickets. In fact it's not even that, but a complex model estimating the traffic stop distribution.

Based on the study text, I'm guessing the data they need for this is simply unavailable so this is the best they could do, which I find both surprising and unfortunate. I personally think it would be worth collecting this kind of data precisely so that more robust arguments can be made.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402547121

While an unbiased enforcement system is naturally a good thing, I can't help but wonder what strategies the middlemen who build these systems use to get public support. Consider this, what if these systems are built in a predatory manner, positioned at locations where a speed limit change is non-obvious, or at intersections where the timing of yellow lights is reduced below the usual? If a portion of everyone on the road is getting ticketed, then of course it would appear "unbiased". While I can't speak to the nature of these cameras, a misleading studying directly advocating for more of these systems should always raise alarms unless they have good data backing them.

So in summary, not only have you misrepresented my complaint with your strawman: "well black people drive worse" argument, you yourself were dishonest about the contents of the study you clearly did not read.

I don't think I will be replying to any other posts in this thread since this overall discussion has been unproductive and frankly a waste of my time.

olliej3• 2 years ago

From the article, that your automatic “well it can’t be racism it must be that black people are naturally bad in other ways” response implies you did not read:

“Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.”

The rate that speeding tickets are issued when police are involved rather than automation is very clearly racially biased.

yesco4• 2 years ago

Your automatic “well it can’t be racism it must be that black people are naturally bad in other ways” response

Excuse me? This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of my reply.

“Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. *With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.*”

This is precisely the text that lead to my reply, why would they compare speeding tickets from speeding cameras with traffic stops by police and not speeding tickets from police? I'm not denying there is something here, just that this is a dishonest comparison.

In fact if you had read to the end of the article you would have seen they even indirectly allude to this:

Over half of police stops in Chicago for 2023 were license plate, registration or equipment related. Automating enforcement of such nonmoving violations would eliminate a major reason for police-driver interaction, reducing the potential for bias and escalation.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

... “well it can’t be racism it must be that black people are naturally bad in other ways”

First it's not what GP said at all... But seen that you obviously want to go down that route here's a harsh reality check which you're not going to like.

Here are official numbers from the FBI from 2018, only concerning white and black victims and white and black murderers:

    3114 murders of either black or white (but mostly black) victims by black perpetrators
    2911 murders of either black or white (but mostly white) victims by white perpetrators

These are official numbers from the FBI [1].

But then in 2018 black people only made about 13% of the US population while non-latino whites made about 61% of the population.

Invoke socio-economic status / class warfare or whatever you want to explain why black people are 5x more likely to commit murder but the official numbers are there and hard to dispute.

FWIW my family is white, black and yellow so you can safely send your "racist" card to /dev/null.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

microbug• 2 years ago

lol at conflating "speeding" with "traffic stops".

ceejayoz3• 2 years ago

The full study linked in the article (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402547121) indicates they counted only "speed citations" in both groups.

olliej3• 2 years ago

[edited to match comment guidelines] “I couldn't be bothered reading that source to see what was being compared, and instead I'm going to brush off yet another study showing racial bias in US law enforcement as it not comparing like-for-like, despite the study literally doing exactly what I've decided that they did not”

If you actually could be bothered reading the article - they are comparing stop+ticket for speeding vs camera driven tickets for speeding. They explicitly ensured that they were doing a like-for-like comparison to avoid responses like this.

Speeding tickets issued by machines: speeding tickets are issued to black people at the same rate they’re issued to white people

Speeding tickets issued by police officers: tickets are issued at overwhelmingly higher rate for black people than white.

There are two options:

* black people drive worse than white people, but only when police are present and cameras are not

* police are racially biased when enforcing traffic laws

Given the overwhelming evidence of racial bias in other parts of policing I don’t see any - non-racist - reason to believe that the former is more likely than the latter.

klyrs2• 2 years ago

It pains me to say: you can make this point without overtly calling the parent racist; and the guidelines say you should. I do wish that we could have such honest conversations online, but it time shows that doing so is not a sustainable practice. Replying now before you get flagged to death; there is time to edit.

Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets

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