

The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate - misiti3780
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-police-in-america-are-becoming-illegitimate-20141205

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kartman
i was in court to clear a minor ticket yesterday in SF and noticed the
demographic of folks in there.

the demographic of the traffic court was mostly minorities and poor folks,
completely out of whack with SF general population and what you expect traffic
case tickets to reflect. Imagine the criminal cases.

this skew is even after accounting for pre filtering that happens before
someone walks into the courtroom (who is ticketed by police, who pays early,
who appears etc). Felt I was seeing the results of a system not working right.

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mindslight
Would the system be working well if only there were the correct ratios of
demographic groups being oppressed by it?

Minorities have become the face of this issue because they are more likely to
get caught up in the system in the first place. But the issue affects us all -
perfectly non-racist cops would still run roughshod over plenty of people.
What we need to repair is eventually-consistent justice so the murderers end
up in jail (criminal) and wrongfully-harmed people are compensated for their
losses directly from operating budgets (civil).

The injustice system has been allowed to degrade to its present state because
most innocent people simply _will not_ be harmed by it. It's only by getting
the majority to see that injustice _could have_ happened to them will you ever
make them feel affected. Framing the issue around racism is ultimately self
defeating - it turns the issue into one of those longstanding happens-to-
other-people problems that people from the dominant group care about just
enough to fit in/get laid/assuage conscience.

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johnfitzeecs
Anyone else notice that Hacker News has been systematically keeping articles
about Police, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner from reaching the front page? This
reminds of a post some months ago showing that any post with "NSA" in the
headline got a 50% handicap to its points ranking. I wounder what the handicap
is for this article.

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anigbrowl
Good point. This is clearly of interest to many people, with 22 points right
now. I generally dislike Matt Taibbi but this piece is thoughtful and even-
handed rather than inflammatory.

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gumby
As an aside: I don't understand how selling "loosies" can be a tax violation.
Presumably the excise tax was paid when the packet of cigarettes was purchased
in the first place!

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mikeyouse
The cigarettes are typically purchased in a low-tax state, transported to a
high-tax one, and sold there.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/cigarette-
smuggling...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/cigarette-smuggling-
increase-prompts-crackdown-by-states.html)

