I had a discussion about BLM today (I'm not from US) with some of my friends and I feel like I haven't been able to convince them that those protests have a point. Basically it's not a mainstream issue in my country and I feel like it only pops up on local news and websites when there are acts of vandalism, or if someone on BLM's side says some stupid shit (like Lebron's tweet recently).

Basically I know that there are studies that showed that black people are searched at disproportionate rates or that black drivers are a lot more likely to be stopped when driving the car if a cop can identify their race. So if anyone has any resources that aggregate such things it would be great.

  • acealeam [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    This isn't quite what you're asking for, but one I love to bring up is that Nixon's aides later admitted that the war on drugs was just an excuse to harass black people, and the left. Of course, the war on drugs is very much still impacting today.

    “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

    “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
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    4 years ago

    Machine Bias - There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.

    Wikipedia - Racial Bias in Criminal News in the US

    Racial Bias in Crime Reporting - Research shows the media disproportionately depict African-Americans as criminals, and whites as victims. Brooke speaks with Nazgol Ghandnoosh, research analyst at The Sentencing Project, about her study, "Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies," which details how media distortions feed our own implicit biases. (And you can take Harvard's Implicit Association Test yourself here.)

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.

    A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014