Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Walking While Black

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 177 posts

Re: Walking While Black

#131

Post by DoreenMichele »

cannam wrote: post #99
DoreenMichele wrote: post #25

I can't find it, but I first read a piece about Walking While Black when I was still homeless. It was a different piece, written by a successful American man, a lawyer iirc, whose car broke down not too far from home. So he walked home into his upper middle class neighborhood to his own home and was harassed by the police about it. I got some very small taste of such treatment while homeless. Walking while homeless i…

http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/...

Thank you very very much.

Re: Walking While Black

#132

Post by spraak »

wbronitsky wrote: post #110
Jaruzel wrote: post #47

North America's attitude towards people of colour, absolutely disgusts me. I simply do not understand why that a country that was founded on on the principles of freedom continues to act this way. The fourth amendment clearly states that all citizens should be treated equally if suspected of a crime, yet this simply does not happen. Yeah, the UK (my homeland) has it's problems, but in the main, racial in-equality is…

> a country that was founded on on the principles of freedom The USA, my country, was not founded on the principles of freedom. It was founded on the principles of white supremacy. Its quite easy to come to this conclusion if we simply look at the US Constitution, which has a clause stating that the Black slaves brought to this country for a single purpose, that of chattel slavery, were to be counted as 3/5ths of a p…

I'm confused about the down votes here. What isn't true about this?

Re: Walking While Black

#133

Post by DoreenMichele »

michaelgrafl wrote: post #76
skissane wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is taking walks maybe an uncommon thing in the USA? I once got sent to Plano, Texas, for a week. It was a training course for work. After the course, I went for walks in the afternoon / early evening. And it surprised me at just how deserted the streets felt. There were plenty of cars around, but so very few pedestrians. I didn't really feel unsafe, just more out of place.

A friend of mine who worked on a plant site in Alabama for a couple of months told me he would get weird stares from the locals when he was going for runs in the morning/evening. I never knew whether to believe him, but everything in this thread seems to underpin his story.

In American articles, pro environment types sometimes mock how Americans will drive to the gym, drive home to get ready for work, then drive to work creating extreme time stress. The punchline is usually to the effect of "Why not just bike to work? It would be cheaper, take less time and be better for the environment."

One justification for going to the gym is the poor outdoor air quality in some places. It seems list on a lot of people that driving everywhere is a cause of poor air quality.

In the years I have lived without a car, my example of walking everywhere has tended to popularize walking wherever I lived. (Yes, even when I was homeless.) After seeing an uptick in walking, you could see visible evidence of improved air quality, such as healthier plant life in the area.

Crime also went down. In the apartment complex where I gave up my car, the cops stopped staking out the entrance on weekend evenings. In another city, helicopter manhunts and similar police activity trended down.

Re: Walking While Black

#134

Post by sangnoir »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #112
belorn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one of those very minor study that had a person trying to dismantle a bike lock in a park. Male with dark skin, male with white skin, female with dark skin and female with white skin. The man with the dark skin had people tackle him down while calling the police. The other people on the team that was observing had to rush in to disarm the situation. The white man had people stare and point, but nothing dra…

What does the raw data about these types of crime say though? I lived near a university and had multiple bikes stolen. If the data points to a demographic in that area, for example where 0% of bikes are stolen by women, why would people in that area react if a woman is working with her bike? Raw data may disagree with you, but it's impartial and unbiased. (unless you want to argue the collection and recording of data…

If it's the same clip I watched, one of the (white) male passers-by asks what the (young, white) lady is doing and she says outright that she's stealing the bike. He proceeds to offer his help!

Re: Walking While Black

#135

Post by naasking »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #73
superkuh wrote: post #31

This was a wonderfully written piece and a lot of it rings true to me even as a white as you can be person in a smallish state university town in the midwest. But maybe being 6'2" with a big unkempt hobo beard is almost as scary as being black. I too love walking the streets at night. And I too have to not be myself and behave in very conscious ways to avoid being hassled and detained by the police. Police just assum…

>Police just assume that if you're out at night you are a criminal. No they don't. What they are doing is noticing things that are out of the ordinary. You do the same thing. If everyone is wearing a suit, and one person is wearing shorts, watch all the heads turn. A black man walking through an all white neighborhood late at night will draw attention from any person in that neighborhood. The same is true if a white…

"Out of the ordinary" does not and should not immediately mean "suspicious". I think that's a difference that should not be forgotten.

Re: Walking While Black

#136

Post by naasking »

braythwayt wrote: post #118
diddid wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The partners are always the first SUSPECT and the police do their due diligence to RULE THEM OUT. Even on the 1/10 where the weren't the murderer, the police still intrude on them to try to find the truth. Being a SUSPECT != SENT TO JAIL. The rapper in the story was a SUSPECT, they weren't SENT TO JAIL which makes your analogy not an analogy at all, because well, they aren't anologous. If anything I feel your argueme…

Ah, you are correct that there is a missing element to the analogy, and this is it: The woman lies dead in the murder case. When the rapper was pulled over, there was no case of a Ferrari stolen by a dark-skinned man. The police were not acting on a tip that the rapper was smuggling narcotics in his car. They stopped him for driving while black. If we want to add the missing link, we then say that the police, knowing…

> The very notion of all men being permanent suspects of a crime would rightly be considered abhorrent

Maybe so, but it's default policy. For instance, in any domestic disturbance or abuse case, the man gets removed from the situation.

Re: Walking While Black

#137

Post by naasking »

yosito wrote: post #126
tailrecursion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for adding perspective to this issue with police and drawing it out of exclusively-race territory. I would suggest that perhaps, part of what's happening is that the police are optimizing for a particular metric. We can hope that it's crime reduction, or some number or numbers very close to that. When you optimize for one metric, other metrics fall. The police, like most anyone, make errors based on superfi…

> When you optimize for one metric, other metrics fall. This is very true. People often assume that things like machine learning or AI won't have racial biases, but then we find out time and time again that our algorithms are in fact biased. It's not that the bias is intentional (even human bias is rarely intentional), it's that by focusing on metrics, the metric of racial equality often suffers. I'm not sure why you…

Interesting way to frame it. If I could restate in slightly more colloquial terms, the police's goal is typically something like "to protect and serve", where "serve" is serving the public by upholding public ideals or principles.

Racial profiling might satisfy the "protect" clause, but it fails the "serve" clause, because it fails the portion of the public that is profiled.

Re: Walking While Black

#138

Post by gamblor956 »

spraak wrote: post #132
wbronitsky wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a country that was founded on on the principles of freedom The USA, my country, was not founded on the principles of freedom. It was founded on the principles of white supremacy. Its quite easy to come to this conclusion if we simply look at the US Constitution, which has a clause stating that the Black slaves brought to this country for a single purpose, that of chattel slavery, were to be counted as 3/5ths of a p…

I'm confused about the down votes here. What isn't true about this?

Because the Constitution doesn't mention race. It merely states that a non-free individual was counted as 3/5 of a free individual for purposes of the population census, which was used to determine proportionate representation in Congress. Native Americans were excluded from the census entirely if they weren't tax paying residents of a state.

Re: Walking While Black

#139

Post by sathackr »

usrusr wrote: post #75
toomanybeersies wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to walk home from my friends' house to mine when I was at university in New Zealand, often drunk or high. The police would usually stop and talk to me if they drove past. I always thought of it as a good thing. I lived in a high burglary area (being a student area), so there were a lot of shady characters walking around at night, especially in the back streets. They never actually detained me or even got out o…

> The police never viewed me through the lens of suspicion, they never talked to me in an accusatory tone. I felt more like they were checking that I was OK, rather than checking that I was a criminal. As a European I wonder if this is "because Freedom", that the state-sceptical tradition laid out by the US constitution has created an expectation that police should never interact with anybody who isn't a criminal. Th…

As a white American, I carefully watch what I say around police and generally do not trust them.

Most police are incentivized to "solve" crimes, not solve crimes. They are exposed to the worst our society has to offer and this takes a toll on them. We as a society also feel that every crime can be solved and that an inability to solve the crime is incompetence.

Sometimes the evidence doesn't quite match the person the police strongly feel committed the crime, so words get twisted, evidence gets adjusted to make things fit a little better.

That conversation you had the other day telling an officer about your vacation in Florida can be turned around and then used as evidence against you in your trial for a murder that took place in the vicinity of the hotel you stayed at.

It doesn't matter that you told the officer you were with your family the entire time, he may not remember that or remember it a bit differently than you. Now it's your word against his in court. Who is a jury going to believe?

Of course, they would have to have other evidence to convict, some of it possibly slightly adjusted also. Even if you are cleared of the charge, that's not something anyone wants to go through. The humiliation, the cost, the damage to your relationships as people start to doubt you.

The less info the police have about me and the less interaction I have with then, the lower the chance my name might pop into their heads when they're looking for a "person of interest."

I'm not saying police want to send innocent people to jail. I'm saying their internal biases and desire to hold someone responsible for a crime causes them to twist the facts to ensure that the person they suspect gets convicted.

If you have the time, you should watch this[1] video. It may provide some insight into the American criminal justice system.

[1] https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE "Don't talk to the police"

Re: Walking While Black

#140

Post by toasterlovin »

verylittlemeat wrote: post #117
ddrdrck_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know who is London's city mayor, isn't it ? Well I grant you he's not black. Racism is certainly an issue in Europe, but at least our cops do not gunshot black people for any reason.

The US had a black president for 8 years so I guess America solved racism. /s

I think the point was not that America has solved racism, but that it is a common refrain of some Europeans to point to America's race problems as somehow indicative of the backwardness of Americans, while they smugly pat themselves on the back for being the progressive ideal of tolerance. But European countries have never had the kind of racial divisions that the US has. Until roughly 50 years ago, there was basically no significant non-white population in Europe. The US has had a significant black population for 400 years. And we now have a huge brown population as well. And now that Europe has acquired a significant non-white population, lo and behold, you see a lot of the same racial issues that the US faces.
Post reply on HN