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Profiling Atherton

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Re: Profiling Atherton

#21

Post by jdale27 »

ngoel36 wrote: post #16

My [non-Hispanic] girlfriend lives in Atherton. Hispanics run that city. At first I thought it was great for my taco habit, but after our second or third burrito date I quickly realized the locals were not as thrilled to have us. We were glared at often, and my rusty Spanish was good enough to pick up murmurs of "puta madre" and other various obscenities as we walked by. Needless to say, she's moving up to the City s…

Hispanics run that city. At first I thought it was great for my taco habit, but after our second or third burrito date I quickly realized the locals were not as thrilled to have us. We were glared at often, and my rusty Spanish was good enough to pick up murmurs of "puta madre" and other various obscenities as we walked by.

That wasn't Atherton, that was Redwood City. I know, on the peninsula it kind of all blurs together...

Re: Profiling Atherton

#22

Post by rdl »

yid wrote: post #17
rdl wrote: post #10

It seems pretty natural that if the serious penalties are for being unlicensed drivers (14602.6 VC, the $1800 thing), and most of the unlicensed people have Hispanic names/are Hispanic (which I think is generally true, in California), most of the people who get serious penalties for being unlicensed drivers will be Hispanic. There's no particular racism there on the part of the Atherton police in that. You have to ha…

Woodside certainly isn't a consolation prize. It's beautiful, and features the stunning Skyline Blvd drive and Alice's Restaurant!

I also like Portola Valley, but while I like driving on winding roads sometimes, I think it would get a bit lame to do every time I wanted to come home late, etc. And the cellphone reception/internet access/etc. thing, although I suppose a lot of places have decent LOS for a point to point free space link.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#23

Post by abrons »

NoPiece wrote: post #18

The author is cherry picking his data. He has a pool of 12,500 tickets, and is looking at a very narrow type of infraction that affected 182 drivers of 12,500. In that small pool, why do hispanic names show up disproportionately? Maybe they are more likely than your typical Atherton resident to not have a license due to immigration status.

12500 refers to the section of the vehicle code under which 182 tickets were issued: http://dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d06/vc12500.htm

Re: Profiling Atherton

#24

Post by gre »

ngoel36 wrote: post #16

My [non-Hispanic] girlfriend lives in Atherton. Hispanics run that city. At first I thought it was great for my taco habit, but after our second or third burrito date I quickly realized the locals were not as thrilled to have us. We were glared at often, and my rusty Spanish was good enough to pick up murmurs of "puta madre" and other various obscenities as we walked by. Needless to say, she's moving up to the City s…

Atherton is all of the mansions with huge yards, gates, tons of trees, and no commercial zoning. Driving north, you hit little mexico or whatever, then Redwood City.

Learn to baylife.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#25

Post by dandelany »

NoPiece wrote: post #18

The author is cherry picking his data. He has a pool of 12,500 tickets, and is looking at a very narrow type of infraction that affected 182 drivers of 12,500. In that small pool, why do hispanic names show up disproportionately? Maybe they are more likely than your typical Atherton resident to not have a license due to immigration status.

This. He is ignoring the rest of the data and looking only at "vehicle code violations" - and then irresponsibly reporting it to seem like Hispanics driving without licenses is a disproportionally large drain on police resources when in fact, as you say, this is only a narrow violation comprising a small minority of total tickets issued.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#26

Post by avichal »

MysticFear wrote: post #13
avichal wrote: post #6

I ended up with renting a mansion in Atherton right off of Fair Oaks for dirt cheap for about a year. If you look at the tickets, a lot of them are on the streets around Fair Oaks since that's also a short path to/from Redwood City and the highway. I would bet a lot of money that the profiling is done based on the type of car you drive and intended to keep people from Redwood City out of Atherton. I drive an older Ci…

wowow wait... screw the police and story. How do you find these dirt cheap mansions for rent?!

The guy who owned the mansion was a former entrepreneur who didn't want to live in the Bay Area but owned this giant house, and several other very expensive properties. To pay the property taxes on all of these places, he bought/sold very expensive items, and this stuff would get shipped to his house. But he didn't want to leave it outside for long and needed someone trustworthy to bring it in doors. That person was me.

So I would once a week drag a giant box filled with something expensive into the garage, and some guy would come by later and load it into a truck and carry it off. The guy who owned the house could then live in Tahoe or Hawaii or Florida in his other mansions, with the peace of mind of knowing he could pay his tax bills with 0 effort on his part.

In return, I got to live in a 6 bedroom house with a pool, basketball court, 2 gardens...for the cost of the utilities. In case you're curious, I found this guy on Craigslist when he was trying to rent the mansion at the bottom of the real estate bust and he just liked me, so we set up this special arrangement.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#27

Post by NoPiece »

abrons wrote: post #23
NoPiece wrote: post #18

The author is cherry picking his data. He has a pool of 12,500 tickets, and is looking at a very narrow type of infraction that affected 182 drivers of 12,500. In that small pool, why do hispanic names show up disproportionately? Maybe they are more likely than your typical Atherton resident to not have a license due to immigration status.

12500 refers to the section of the vehicle code under which 182 tickets were issued: http://dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d06/vc12500.htm

You are right! I read, "Why were so many (over a hundred) of the 12500 tickets," incorrectly. Looks like there were actually 1509 records in the author's JSON object.

Nonetheless, it is an infraction type that will disproportionately target illegal immigrants since they can't get driver's licenses. If the author wanted to show racism, he'd need to pick something like speeding and show that hispanic names show up more than their presence in the area.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#28

Post by auctiontheory »

rdl wrote: post #10

It seems pretty natural that if the serious penalties are for being unlicensed drivers (14602.6 VC, the $1800 thing), and most of the unlicensed people have Hispanic names/are Hispanic (which I think is generally true, in California), most of the people who get serious penalties for being unlicensed drivers will be Hispanic. There's no particular racism there on the part of the Atherton police in that. You have to ha…

I think the point of the story is that drivers with dark skin are (it appears) much more likely to be pulled over in the first place.

if the initial infraction isn't worth citing, no big deal

Well, no. The whole objection to profiling, whether Hispanic drivers in Atherton or black kids in NYC, is that the cops have no good reason to be stopping them in the first place.

This report provides no data on how many red-light running/speeding/drunk white drivers were not pulled over, or were let go and told to "be more careful next time."

While I'm sure that being very wealthy is amazing, I've never heard "amazing" used to describe Atherton.

Source: I live two blocks away.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#29

Post by nostrademons »

hkmurakami wrote: post #12
avichal wrote: post #6

I ended up with renting a mansion in Atherton right off of Fair Oaks for dirt cheap for about a year. If you look at the tickets, a lot of them are on the streets around Fair Oaks since that's also a short path to/from Redwood City and the highway. I would bet a lot of money that the profiling is done based on the type of car you drive and intended to keep people from Redwood City out of Atherton. I drive an older Ci…

if you * really * don't wan't neighbors they should move to woodside or portola valley where lot sizes are even bigger. :p

It's kinda interesting to me to see what Californians consider a big lot. I grew up in the Northeast suburbs of Boston, and my parents owned an acre lot. I went to school in central Massachusetts, and many of my friends lived on 5-10 acre properties.

When I moved out to California, it was really depressing to see the rows and rows of townhomes on postage-stamp lots. A family friend would show me around Cupertino, where typical houses are on about 1/4 acre, and he'd say that the land alone is worth $1M as a teardown. Looking through some real estate listings, I found that if I wanted an acre lot, basically the only option in Silicon Valley is Atherton (or Portola/Woodside/Saratoga). And it'll cost around $5M.

My parents spent $60K on their home - granted, it was a while ago, but it's still not worth close to $1M. My friends' houses in Central Mass were maybe $150-200K. There are downsides to living where everybody is rich.

Re: Profiling Atherton

#30

Post by Zaheer »

What's interesting if you look at a map of Atherton on Google Maps is that exactly will the city lines are drawn, it is much more green (trees, vegetation, etc). I remember reading something about how the greener the area, the wealthier it tends to be.
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