"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
Aggregating everything and taking an average doesn't prove 'everything is racist', it just proves some portion of people are. It's not traffic stops, 'the police', or 'the system' that is racist, it's individual cops making the decision to pull over one person and not another. If this were an example of systemic racism, there would be a systemic fix, but there isn't. The only way to fix this would be to wipe out or even out the biases of the individual officers. Police departments in the bay area are very ethnically diverse: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/do-bay-area-police-dep...
The claim they were contesting was that the poster couldn't find "a single example of systematic racism". Countering that doesn't require that every single person isn't racist, just that racism exists and has a measurable impact.
> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."
If you define any amount of discrimination as a failure to provide an appropriate professional service, then, mathematically, any amount of racism will become 'systemic' or 'institutional' so long as there is an uneven population distribution:
Let's say there are 3 groups. One group is 60% of the population, another is 30%, and the last is 10%. If all three groups have the exact same predisposition to favoring members over outsiders, the 60% group will experience prejudice from 40% of the population. The 10% population will experience it from 90% of the population. The 10% group will experience >10X the incidence of prejudice unless group favoritism is <= 0, which is literally impossible.
If that's what you mean when you say systemic/institutional, it feels like a completely useless thought to me. I, and I think many other people, hear 'systemic', and think 'coming from processes, rules, or procedures defined as part of a system', not from the people operating it. To make a better analogy, when I hear systemic car problem, I think the engine, transmission, or some other component of the car, not the driver.
We're overrepresented in poverty and crime, so it's reasonable that police officers would be biased against black people.
I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.
A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.
This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
> This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.
An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.
> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.
Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...
"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."
> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.
> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.