“The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black”
“Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.
Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance. The routine nature of the stops belies their importance…
many criminal justice experts contend that the racial consequences of that strategy far outweigh its benefits — if, indeed, there are any. “This is what people have been complaining about across the nation,” said Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “It means whites are ‘getting away’ with very low-level offenses, while people who are poor or people of color are suffering consequences.” “It amounts to harassment,” she said. “And police cannot demonstrate that it is creating better public safety.” To the contrary, she added, it makes minority citizens less likely to help the police prevent and solve crimes…
“Chief Medlock is godsent to Fayetteville,” said Mark Rowden, the pastor of Savannah Missionary Baptist Church. “There was a lot of distrust between African-Americans and the police. That has turned around.” Not everyone is cheering. This month, Chief Medlock, who is white, found a racist flyer in his front yard that he regarded as a personal threat. On the back was an application for the Ku Klux Klan.”
This is one of my real gender privileges, being a woman. I’ve never had to deal with this, but every male member of my family has STORIES that begin when they were teenagers and first started to drive.
And before this was a mainstream thing, in news and media a lot, I barely heard these stories because there wasn’t really a time when they would naturally come up. And I get the sense that a lot of my family members felt a little alone and “wrong” in these experiences.
