Profiling Atherton

However, most unlicensed people are that way due to immigration status, which is almost entirely Hispanic people (since our illegal immigrants are essentially all Mexican or Guatemalan). Suspended license people are often DUI or other things like that, which I'd assume is much more universal. I don't know the breakdown between unlicensed and suspended; generally I think suspended/revoked are punished more harshly than unlicensed, partially because you have to be a fuckup to get your license suspended in the first place, and it's a bit more willful to continue driving at that point. If there were no legal way to get a license, it's a lot more morally defensible to drive anyway (although, insurance...); fortunately CA seems to make it possible to get a license anyway, so failing to do so is an affirmatively lame action.

2) No -- I meant if you wanted to prosecute someone for the unlicensed, but your PC to stop him originally was bad (i.e. you claimed he ran a red light, but it turns out he didn't), the court would let him walk (rather, it'd never go to trial).

If a cop had legitimate PC to stop, and then stopped and found suspended license, the cop would almost certainly cite/arrest/whatever for the suspended license.

Those are two entirely different cases. (It's pretty easy to generate legitimate PC to pull ~anyone over, though, due to how the vehicle code is written and how people actually drive.)

(Another unanswered question is "is there a variation in vehicle maintenance or driving rule compliance in different race/ethnicity drivers?" -- I tend to think there isn't. Even if you wanted to go by rich/poor, I've even seen plenty of expensive cars with maintenance issues, and obnoxious rich people with huge numbers of bikes on bike racks obscuring license plates, unsecured loads, etc. The only real distinction I've seen is that pickup truck drivers, in general, are the cause of almost all object-in-road problems.)

As far as I can tell, there are ~no poor people living in Atherton, Palo Alto, or most of Menlo Park, unless you count startup founders, retirees who live on low retirement incomes in $5mm present-value homes, and the like. There are poor people living in RWC (sort of), who are almost exclusively Hispanic (at least from the neighborhoods I saw; I was looking at houses in North Fair Oaks and RWC at one point.) Even the poor people in RWC didn't seem that poor, more like working class or middle class (which is poor by comparison to Atherton.)

There are poor people in EPA and Belle Haven (Menlo Park east of 101). They would be very unlikely to take ECR through Atherton, though, since 101 is closer. (they used to be almost exclusively black, now it's partially black and partially hispanic and partially pacific islander). And even there, real estate is now becoming absurdly expensive again.

There are weird poor (white, and other) people living in the inaccessible parts of Portola, but they seemed really old, or rarely left their homes, and they probably weren't actually poor, just "people who live in the middle of the woods and are kind of weird."

In the daytime, workers motor towards the money to toil in the plutocrats' homes and gardens. A lot of them are illegal immigrants driving marginal toyota pickups overloaded with tools and co-workers.

Nighttime brings-out the drunkards and the criminals. The police ward off the latter and move the former back into RWC.

These folks are just like you coming to Sand Hill to pitch your startup: they want money & this is where it's at. They're the same in that some will toil & some will grift. They're different in that the deviant poor are more likely to turn to violence and theft, while the psychopathic want-to-be-rich become consultants at Accenture or KPMG.

The rich & the poor look & behave differently. A battered PU stands-out as much as an Athertonian's Fisker just 2 miles down the street the "wrong" way.

They need to be protected from one another. Atherton is way too nice to be real, yet it exists, so it has to be buffered. That requires vigilance. Bay Aryans have delicate sensibilities around inegalitarianism; i.e., you need good police who will go about the business w/o putting it on display.

Same thing in Palo Alto. It has a stark socio-economic border with East Palo alto that requires sophisticated social policing. As a Palo Alto resident (or high-tech gastarbeiter) you feel safe and secure in a shared culture of prosperity. Yet (underreported) property crime and (unreported) deportations tell a different story: safety isn't a given, it's provided by vigilant, sophisticated police & enabled by a populace willingly suspending disbelief.

Catch a glimpse by spending your lunch at the transit center or your evening smoking in any alley off of University. People-watching at the PA Caltrain socio-economic nexus radically changed my "feel" of PA.

It's hard to overstate the difference between (poor parts of) RWC & Atherton, EPA & PA, or Belle Haven/Ravenswood & Menlo Park. If you're local, it's well worth driving (or better biking) from one to another to get the sense: incredibly, unbelievably nice on the one hand; fucking shit awful on the other. My gut says: there's something really wrong with this. But my head can't figure-out what to do about it.