I agree that nobody will ever be able to say what SoHo Karen was thinking. If somebody wants to hold that standard up, then nobody should ever be convicted of a crime without hard physical evidence. That's not even a standard used in courts, much less public opinion. I agree that we are jumping to a conclusion. It's a matter of judgment.
Speaking of which, racism isn't a crime. Why get all sensitive about people forming a well founded opinion that SoHo Karen's baseless accusations were founded in racism? Racism isn't a crime. What is a crime is she assaulted two men and then fled the scene, showing up in California not too long thereafter. There is plenty of evidence and testimony to convict her should it come to a court case. Also civil damages. Those can be worse than the criminal punishment. So, yeah, I'd say SoHo Karen is in for a rough decade.
That said, racism is a motive. That's what we are talking about here, the motive. Racism isn't a crime but it does affect a person's bias and judgement. In the background is the fact that Black people are more often stopped, and searched than others in the US. We have good reason to think that racism played a role in this. For example
We are collecting, releasing, and analyzing data on millions of traffic stops across the United States.
openpolicing.stanford.edu
We’re launching the Stanford Open Policing Project to facilitate discussion of police practices.
slate.com
Two years ago, we assembled an interdisciplinary team of statisticians, computer scientists, and journalists at Stanford University to study possible bias in policing. The first major obstacle we faced was that police data is often inaccessible, making rigorous analysis difficult. Traffic stops—what we hoped to analyze—are the primary means through which police interact with the public, yet there was no national database of stop records.
We filed public record requests with all 50 states to obtain details of each stop carried out by state patrol officers over the last 10 years. So far, we’ve collected over 100 million records from 31 states.
We’re also releasing the preliminary results of our own analysis, using data from the 20 states with the most detailed information. (Full disclosure: This work has not yet undergone peer review, but we have released both the data and code to reproduce our analysis.) In our analysis, we focused on vehicle searches, in part because they have a clear goal—recovering contraband—which makes it easier to measure potential biases.
When we applied the threshold test to the data we found evidence of bias against both black and Hispanic motorists. The inferred thresholds for searching minorities were consistently lower than the thresholds for searching whites in jurisdictions across the country. If officers held black and Hispanic drivers to the same standard as whites, tens of thousands of searches of minorities might be avoided each year.
The patterns we find are suggestive of racial bias in policing. But as with all tests of discrimination, there is a limit to what one can conclude from such statistical analysis alone. For example, lower search thresholds for these groups could be the result of nondiscriminatory factors if officers had valid reasons to suspect more serious criminal activity when searching black and Hispanic drivers compared to whites. Such possibilities would have to be assessed independently of our analysis—our study is just one step in understanding complex police interactions.
So, yeah, the publishers of that data quite rightly say that statistics are a signal for more study and not proof. One must ask, "what caused this study to be done in the first place?" The consistent narrative from the Black community is nearly universal that they see themselves singled out as suspects for no good reason more often than they see others. Data from the Stanford Open Policing Project isn't proof but it does back up that claim.
We aren't going to satisfy
@DaFreak . He's off on some tangent claiming 'murrica is going to ruin because "anti-racism". I'd say it's about time that we get unreasonable against racism. After all, racists have had a free hand since the beginning of this country and before then. We've only begun to address this issue. Too bad some weak minded landlord who hates his tenants got into a dither over this.
