
The Fining of Black America - ryan_j_naughton
http://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/
======
noonespecial
_The Finance Director wanted the police to generate more revenues from fines_

If you've already criminalized so much of daily life that there's an
essentially unlimited amount of "criminals" to go out and fine whenever you
need a little extra cash, you've ceased to be "law enforcement" at all and
have simply implemented a brutally regressive tax scheme, Sheriff of
Nottingham style.

~~~
runako
The thing that gets missed is that a ton of laws on the books are written with
the expectation that they will not be applied evenly. Some examples:

\- Nobody really expects the cops to sweep the dorms at NYU for marijuana,
even though this would probably turn up a ton of arrests. Smoking a joint
while looking like a minority and being in a minority part of town carries a
much higher probability of being arrested.

\- Crossing the street against the light at or around the front of MIT doesn't
get you cited for jaywalking, ever.

\- All of New York City has (had?) a prohibition on open containers of
alcohol. This prohibition is generally unenforced in non-minority areas.

\- Open carry laws in Georgia are not meant for dark-skinned Muslim men.

~~~
jghn
Jaywalking isn't really a crime in MA* so no, you wouldn't get cited at MIT

* technically it is, but the fine was set to $1 many years ago in order to effectively make it legal

~~~
runako
Good catch. But it's still roundly unenforced, which was the point. One that
still is illegal in Cambridge is underage drinking, and here again the police
forces in Cambridge and Boston turn a blind eye instead of making mass arrests
every weekend.

The point is that behavior is only effectively legal when it's actually legal
and not only made so by convention, because relying on convention leads to
selective prosecution.

~~~
spennant
The concept of "Campus Police" allows for Universities to insulate themselves
from local laws. Crimes from underage drinking up to rape are generally dealt
with internally, in what seems like understanding between the institution an
their host cities.

~~~
runako
We're in violent agreement.

We've decided to create special jurisdictions where certain laws are ignored
for certain people. Campus Police are basically this practice codified into
law and organization. Your student ID is a pass that gives you immunity from
prosecution from certain violations.

~~~
ethbro
Irony: campuses (at least a vast majority of the ones I've been to in urban
areas) tend to border higher-crime parts of town and would thus otherwise
likely be subject to the same police jurisdiction.

------
outis
> It seems unlikely that the connection between fines and large African
> American populations—a connection that cannot be explained by poverty—is the
> result of African Americans across the United States committing more finable
> offenses.

I'm not sure why that seems unlikely. African Americans commit a
disproportionately large amount of violent crimes. It seems reasonable to
expect that they also commit a larger amount of misdemeanors and minor
infractions. It would be far more surprising if they had a higher propensity
to break the law, but _only_ when the violation is serious and the penalty
heavy.

~~~
cassieramen
They give some data to back up that statement.

> Although African Americans and Whites report smoking marijuana at the same
> rates, African Americans are 3.7 times more likely get arrested for
> marijuana possession.

> An analysis of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that 6.6% of
> White people between the ages of 12 and 25 have sold drugs compared to 5.0%
> of Blacks. Yet Black people are 3.6 times more likely get arrested for
> selling drugs.

~~~
flukus
How many of those are arrested in high crime areas? What is the arrest rate
like in comparison to poor white areas?

The discrepancy may be explainable simply by the police presence in the area.

~~~
tamana
A Chipotle exec just got busted for cocaine possession. Guess what the charge
was, and guess what the proposed punishment is. Guess his skin color (or
culture, if you prefer).

~~~
vivekd
There are so many factors that arise in something like that. For example, the
Chipotle executive has access to better lawyers whereas a young black man may
only have duty counsel. The Chipotle executive can better speak for himself,
knows not to answer police questions, can get character references, is likely
under first offense. I'm not saying it's okay, but certainly there are so many
factors at play here it would be impossible to distill it to just one and name
it as the most prominent single factor.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Cue Dave Chapelle singing "I plead the fifth! I plead the fifth!"

------
grkvlt
[http://pix-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/1190/image02.png](http://pix-
media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/1190/image02.png)

This graph really doesn't seem to support their hypothesis _AT ALL_ \- the
correlation looks really weak, and they give no strength statistics for it at
all. Of the municipalities with the lowest revenue from fines, all of those
with the highest percentages (from 80% up to around 100%) of African Americans
are represented. On the other hand, in the scattering of municipalities with
high revenue from fines (say, over 20%) the percentage of African Americans is
anything from less than 5% to 80% with no clear pattern. I'm not convinced...

~~~
Ntrails
Agreed, although [http://pix-
media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/1190/image04.png](http://pix-
media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/1190/image04.png) is more indicative of a pattern.

I think it would be interesting to look at the ethnic distribution of the
police force vs that of local population, in case it offers a stronger signal?
One needs the data to do it though and I can't see a link to a clean download.

~~~
sinxoveretothex
Based on what's shown in the other graph, there are a few cities that are
extreme outliers (such as Stone Mountain and Clarkston). Doing an average on
such data won't show a trend so much as it will reflect on how much these
outliers sway the average.

It's like proving that everybody got rich in a town overnight since the
average income shot up while Bill Gates came for a visit.

------
bpchaps
This matches my experiences in Chicago. A FOIA request got me all of Chicago's
parking ticket data from Jan 2009 to March 2016 and I did some quick awk
commands to find the most ticketed spots. I found some pretty interesting ones
and even went to one of the spots to figure out why so many tickets happen in
these spots - it's mostly just from signage issues and bad parking meters that
let you pay after parking hours. In particular, a three car-length spot
received 2.2 million dollars and a LOT of tows.

I called and emailed the alderman office that would handle that spot and got
_zero_ results. Tried contacting media outlets, etc, but nobody wants to help
out in fixing the spot. Hell, I even posted on reddit and got downvoted for
"trying to help dumb people".

It's incredibly frustrating that it's seemingly impossible to get anything
done in any large city as an individual who just wants to help out.

~~~
dpweb
This is interesting. Maybe blog on this and some media may pick it up? Getting
it into the local Chicago media would get some attention from officials.

~~~
bpchaps
I'm going to take a long break from this project, I think.

Working with the data has been fun and all and has probably been the biggest
learning experience of anything I've ever done... but doing it all on my own
has been pretty stressful, especially after trying really, really hard to get
some attention through conventional ways. It's really disheartening to have
next to zero traction from the city and the local "open gov hack" groups. Many
journalists and tech folks who want to help out have their own goals, but I've
been finding more and more that their goals are (at the risk of the obvious)
largely attention seeking, so "unsexy" stories don't get much attention.

It's a very strange dynamic where so many folk are interested in visualization
of data over actually solving problems. I really don't get it. Taking a break
from this sort of work will be nice.

~~~
dredmorbius
Sex the story up, and get some graphics.

Having a random Internet guy make a Sankey diagram to show G+ user numbers
helped the hell in promoting that story.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq)

If you're on Reddit, drop a request at /r/MKaTS

------
captain_crabs
For all the people in this thread who don't feel like they have solid ground
to stand on one way or another (more specifically, other me's, middle class
white dudes who are bothered by this but don't even know how to start
approaching the situation), this book is single-handedly the best resource
I've ever come across - "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

[https://www.amazon.com/Between-World-Me-Ta-Nehisi-
Coates/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Between-World-Me-Ta-Nehisi-
Coates/dp/0812993543)

Give it a read/listen. It's incredible how many things will click into place,
how drastically different you'll perceive the world before and after.

~~~
JPKab
I think the "middle class white dudes" issue is this: Unless you (like me) had
parents who had some bad things happen to them financially, if you're parents
knew what they were doing and had some form of means, you were probably
successfully isolated from poverty growing up.

This means that you're understanding of poverty will lack nuance. If you're
one kind of person, you'll think its just bad parenting and bad culture. If
you're another kind of person, you'll think it's external causes from racism,
bad schools, etc.

The fact of the matter is that most people I've encountered who actually grew
up in and around poverty understand that Coates portrayal is heavily biased
towards the "external" causes, as opposed to the other forms of literature
heavily biased towards the "it's their fault they are poor."

Why is this? Because there isn't really a market for the nuanced truth: It's a
mix of both. I grew up in an extremely poor county with about 50% white/black,
and most of both were poor. I went to the same schools, and watched some of my
friends go down one path, while most went down the other, very bad path.

The problem is people like you, whose parents did what I'm doing with my kids
(keeping them away from these failing schools and bad neighborhoods), have no
clue what's going on and are limited in your information to the two extremes
of WHY this is happening.

Why did two of the extremely smart, black male friends of mine growing up go
down such extremely different paths? They both were poor, both highly
intelligent, but one decided he wanted to fit in with the overly masculine
cultural norms in black youth culture, while the other went down the path of
escaping the trap of poverty by getting financial aid and going to a great
public university. Their paths diverged in 8th grade.

What book out there explains this, and if it exists, is there a market for it?
Probably not.

------
joe_the_user
OK,

Reading the article and looking at their chart[1], something stood out to me.
The 38 municipalities they list appear to be extreme outliers with another 100
municipalities looking like relative outliers. It appears that if you remove
those cities, trends would look quite different. For example, it actually
appears that the median reliance on fine of high-percentage African American
cities is lower than average.

Basically, it looks like most of the action is in a few place. Thus, it seems
like Federal Government should be investigating those 38 or 100 city
governments, just as they investigated Ferguson's government.

[1] [http://pix-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/1190/image02.png](http://pix-
media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/1190/image02.png)

------
simbalion
If law-enforcement is for-profit and a necessary piece of the budgeted income,
doesn't that demand that laws be broken? If the city is going to in the red
unless it meets ticket quotas, then aren't people who break the law providing
a service to the government?

For-profit prisons create similar problems. It becomes in the best interest of
those profiting from these systems to encourage systemic crime. The problem
was exposed years ago in the media, why hasn't it been dealt with?

I think this is evidence that the people running those local governments are
insane. Would a rational minded person ever support such a system? It doesn't
take a genius to look at the long term consequences and think "Maybe this plan
needs adjustment."

~~~
brbsix
Law enforcement in the U.S. is almost exclusively served by public agencies,
so I'm not really sure what you mean when you bring up for-profit. They
certainly aren't for-profit in any traditional sense (i.e. engaging in
voluntary trade of goods/services in an open market). They're only "for-
profit" in the same sense as mafia, in the same sense as government, in that
they use violence (or the threat of it) in order to sustain themselves.

For an interesting perspective on private prisons, you should see what Gary
Johnson has to say on the matter based on his experience as Governor of New
Mexico:
[http://govgaryjohnson.tumblr.com/post/139039414105/private-p...](http://govgaryjohnson.tumblr.com/post/139039414105/private-
prisons)

If you want to see some serious influence (for the worse), take a look at the
prison guard and law enforcement unions. At least the private organizations
are accountable, liable. They aren't bestowed with any magical priviledges or
powers. Deals can be renegotiated, people can be fired, competitors can be
pursued.

Who knows what we could achieve under private (wholly volunatary) policing.
Organizations could actually compete on budget, effectiveness, community-fit,
supplemental charity services. Don't like the service? Hire someone else.

------
cassieramen
Great analysis! I'd be interested to see an analysis of the demographics of
the police departments in cities with a high percentage of revenue coming from
fines. It might also be interesting to look at the historical demographics of
that city. I wonder if a city "in transition" (either becoming more or less
diverse) is more fine happy as the dominant population loses or gains power.

~~~
adrr
That would be interesting. Also voter turned out as another dimension to go
along the same line of thinking. I am going to take a guess that a local
government that preys on its citizens has low voter turn out either by apathy
or disenfranchisement or maybe a combo of both. Wonder if exit polls track
race which would be another helpful bit of information.

------
obs_guard
> Lies, damned lies, and statistics

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the lack of statistical significance, std
deviation, p-values, etc. Opinions are great and charts are fun but I don't
really know that the conclusion is justified outside of Ferguson and other
specific municipalities.

------
mc32
What if police were funded at the state level and all revenues from fines went
to the central gov't? Ration of officers per 1,000 people would be distributed
where they are statistically needed more --that way you avoid wealthy areas
with cops who sit around pulling over out of towners because they have little
else to do and locales that need a police force to deal with the crime can
have more officers to police the locale.

Bonus, one pension one authority to negotiate contracts, etc.

~~~
fiatmoney
That is a recipe for centralized power unaccountable to the population they
are theoretically protecting.

~~~
mc32
Well, from what I gather here, decentralized power isn't faring vary fairly
for at least some of the pop.

The current decentralization is resulting in abuse an lack of accountability.
I'm sure we could devise community oversight over the state police force. At
least the police could have less variance and without the pressure to raise
funds from citing locals, provide a fairer police force.

------
vivekd
Wouldn't the solution to this problem be simple. So you have black individuals
being disproportionately charged under the law - so why not include an extra
set of inquries in court for black individuals to ensure that they are not
being unfairly discriminated against. We can just have the judge ask

1\. During sentencing, does the sentence we are imposing on this man/woman
markedly deviate from the sentence imposed on similar offenders in similar
circumstances who come from different racial backgrounds.

2\. Initially - would a reasonable person, giving rise to the circumstances
have cause to believe that the defendant would not have been subject to
scrutiny were he of a different race (and allow defense counsel to bring in
statistical evidence to try and prove this.)

All we are trying to do here is to prevent differential treatment under the
law, which seems like a very easy problem to fix.

~~~
bmelton
I suspect that will work as effectively as it currently does when a judge gets
involved in a police shooting to the back of an unarmed civilian... which is
to say, kangaroo court oversight, at best. The courts are far too often
lenient when they needn't be because the officers and the judiciary are
ostensibly on "the same side", ergo a broad degree of latitude is afforded the
police that would otherwise be reserved for the ruling class for infractions
that would almost certainly land either of us in prison.

------
known
Let Black Police/Judge deal with Black Suspects;

[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)

------
jsprogrammer
Where can I watch the flag feed?

~~~
jsprogrammer
OK, we are told to watch what gets flagged, but no one can say how to do it?
In fact, the question gets censored?

The API readme does not contain the word 'flag'.

~~~
kelukelugames
Go figure. :)

I wonder how many devs work on HN. There are a number of features on my
wishlist.

~~~
krapp
kogir and dang are the only two I'm aware of, there may be more but I doubt
there are many more. I think their general policy regarding feature requests
is to ignore them and hope they go away.

~~~
dang
You never seem to pass up an opportunity to slag us, usually with statements
that are factually wrong.

Nick (kogir) left to work on a startup over a year ago. As for features, come
back in a few days and review what you said here.

~~~
krapp
> You never seem to pass up an opportunity to slag us, usually with statements
> that are factually wrong.

It was a joke, I know you've put a lot of work into improving the site. And
I'm usually the one pointing out that thread folding is coming every time it
gets mentioned, as it does often, month after month, so it's not as if I don't
defend you as well.

>As for features, come back in a few days and review what you said here.

I look forward to it. I seriously do.

~~~
dang
Ok, I'm sorry for snapping at you! I do try to avoid that around here.

~~~
krapp
It's fine. I have ranted and made fun of this site once or twice.

------
flareback
What I didn't see in the article is the percentage of fines that come from
each race. If Ferguson MO is 65% black then it would make sense that roughly
65% of the fines come from blacks, but if 80% comes from the black population
then that would show a racial bias.

~~~
Houshalter
Not necessarily. It could be that, say, poor people are more likely to get
fined. If more black people are poor, then it could look like discrimination
against blacks, when it's just discrimination against the poor.

~~~
tamana
A distinction without a difference. White people in USA spent 200 years
intentonally creating a correlatio n between skin color and poverty, and then
spent 50 years crying "correlarion is not causation"

~~~
kelukelugames
Let's post some citations.

1) MLK jr. on turning working class whites against freed blacks.

[http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...](http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_address_at_the_conclusion_of_selma_march/)

2) Eleanor Rooselvet gets involved when Southern states give New Deal money
disproportionally to whites.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Civil_rights...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt#Civil_rights_activism)

------
jomamaxx
As a Candian in Cali, I too, was fined rather large amounts for minor (though
admittedly consistent) traffic violations.

I suggest this is mostly a problem with how law enforcement works across the
board in America.

Also - going to see a 'judge' for a minor traffic ticket? That's crazy.

In Canada, you get a ticket, you pay it, done.

And there aren't crazy traps everywhere etc..

That African Americans happen to occupy the lower tier of the economic stratum
(not saying this is right), means they are much more likely to be thrown by
any disbursement of these fines: 'not showing to court' for tiny offenses can
be worse than the offence itself.

Perhaps it's exasperated by racism, but it's more of a general problem.

~~~
twblalock
You don't generally need to see a judge unless you want to challenge the
ticket. Most tickets in California can be paid online or by mail. It differs
by county.

~~~
astronautjones
in Atlanta, you have to go either way - the judge decides your penalty. it's
ridiculous and a complete waste of time

~~~
bmelton
But then they get to tack on "court costs" as increased fines.

