> Another possible explanation is that Blacks are more likely to be criminals, and these stops represent police getting bad guys off the street. [..] City-wide, 68% of no-arrest stops city-wide were of Blacks, the same proportion as arrest stops, which means that Blacks were no more likely to be criminals than others who were stopped.
If, despite being stopped more often, the stop is equally likely to result in an arrest (I'm assuming that's what "no more likely to be criminals than others who were stopped" means, since if they were less likely, the author would surely mention it), doesn't that support this explanation? Of course there are problems with this, since an arrest itself is up to the cop's possibly biased judgement. Which brings me back to
> There is more policing in those beats, they argue, because that’s where the crime’s happening. There’s a logical problem with this argument, because more crime will always be found where more policing is done. But leaving that aside
How quickly he moves on! But there is a solution: look at crimes not affected by over-policing, such as homicide, or look at victimization surveys [1], that don't involve the police. Finding the results is left as an exercise for the reader.
> the stop is equally likely to result in an arrest
A study of California police data found that "when the police search black, Latino and Native American people, they are less likely to find drugs, weapons or other contraband compared to when they search white people."
So do you believe this article should be disregarded, because it uses data that differs from California's and Chicago's?
Or would you instead prefer to only use the parts of this article that support your position, and replace those that don't with data from California and Chicago that does?
"So Blacks are being arrested at the same rate as others in the city, even when they’re not doing anything wrong. So while Blacks represent a hugely disproportionate percentage of police stops, they represent an even greater percentage of specious police stops not related to criminality."
Thank you for catching that. Now if only he'd state how much greater, but apparently he ran out of numbers by this point in the article. But he does give us some clues. Earlier in the article he states:
> City-wide, 24% of residents are Black, while 68% of police bike/ped stops are of Blacks.
So Blacks are 2.8x more likely to be stopped. And:
> they represent an even greater percentage of specious police stops
A quick reading might make one think their stops are more than 2.8x more likely to be specious. But a careful reading would only say that more than 68% of all specious stops are of Blacks. How much more? That's cleverly left to the reader's imagination. But throughout the article he heavily implies the unfairness in stops is 180%:
> An unbiased sample would be clustered around the dotted line: a beat whose population is about 40% Black would have about 40% of its police stops be of Blacks.
So "even greater percentage of specious stops" gives the impression that taking specious stops into account worsens the picture. Of these 3 articles, only the Washington Post bothers to give the ratio of specious stops*, which turns out to be... 21% (averaging all states given in that graph, without correcting for population size).
That's still bias, and I'll freely admit it suggests racism. But it's much less than the 180% racism the article tries to imply. It's 8.6x less - nearly an order of magnitude. That's enough for me to say the article is misleading, and given how strategically it ran out of numbers when it came to comparing specious stops, I'm willing to say it is deliberately misleading.
*If you think the situation in Oakland is much different than the states the Post covered, you're free to work out the numbers from the raw data at https://www.oaklandca.gov/resources/stop-data
If, despite being stopped more often, the stop is equally likely to result in an arrest (I'm assuming that's what "no more likely to be criminals than others who were stopped" means, since if they were less likely, the author would surely mention it), doesn't that support this explanation? Of course there are problems with this, since an arrest itself is up to the cop's possibly biased judgement. Which brings me back to
> There is more policing in those beats, they argue, because that’s where the crime’s happening. There’s a logical problem with this argument, because more crime will always be found where more policing is done. But leaving that aside
How quickly he moves on! But there is a solution: look at crimes not affected by over-policing, such as homicide, or look at victimization surveys [1], that don't involve the police. Finding the results is left as an exercise for the reader.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_S...