JFC Votes to Track Race of People Stopped By Police
Ah yes… the open and honest government we’ve come to expect from Wisconsin’s legislative leadership.
Starting in 2011, law enforcement officials across the state would be required to compile data on the race of people stopped by police, under a budget proposal that the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee recommended late Tuesday.
The 16-member committee, which like the Legislature is controlled by Democrats, was supposed to start meeting at 1 p.m. Tuesday, but leaders spent the day in private meetings and didn’t bang the gavel to begin until after 8:30 p.m.
I thought law enforcement was supposed to ignore race? I suspect that the same thing will happen in Wisconsin that happened at airport security checkpoints. Cops will start pulling over white folks on flimsy excuses and let people of other races sail by in order to avoid accusations of racial profiling.
So is the JFC some kind of super legislature and if you are not on it you don’t really count?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 0704 hrs
The full legislature will have to take up the budget too, but the same party controls those bodies that control the JFC. As such, all we can expect are a few token changes.
Posted by Owen on May 27, 2009 at 0720 hrs
Really Owen, you’re gonna trot out the old reverse discrimination line??? Yeesh, that one gets a little old.
Posted by Mike on May 27, 2009 at 0729 hrs
Jeez, Owen, Justice is blind, not the police. Cops are supposed to be racist. Don’t you watch Dateline?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 0750 hrs
Yeah - let’s not ignore race. Let’s get started with quotas! If we see a woman being raped by a latino and we’ve already met our latino quotient for the week, she’s just out of luck. I suppose we could just tell her to lay back and enjoy it.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 0857 hrs
Sheesh, do you really have such little faith in law enforcement officers to think they’ll ignore their professional obligations to avoid personal accusations of profiling?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 0901 hrs
Cops pulling people over based on flimsy excuses because of their race? No way. Never happen. Total nonsense. No need to examine the situation any more closely. No reason to even consider the possibility.
Wait, you’re talking about pulling over white people? I’m sure it’s happening then and it’s the most vile, disgusting racism in the history of the United States!!!!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1047 hrs
What I meant from comment #1 is way does this go through JFC?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1245 hrs
Because the budget, in addition to outlining Wisconsin’s spending for the next two years, is the best way to get items from your goodie basket passed.
Ultimately, legislators have to vote up or down on the budget in its entirety, which means individual politicians end up voting for some things they don’t like (and wouldn’t support as stand-alone legislation) in order to vote yes on the things they do like. That makes the budget a great Trojan horse for policy items that could be controversial or difficult to pass.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on May 27, 2009 at 1256 hrs
I’d think they already have such data. I am reminded of the old saying “If you walk around with a hammer, pretty soon everything starts looking like a nail”. Let’s hope that Eugene Kane isn’t in charge of interpreting the results.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1316 hrs
I could certainly see tracking race information as helping to inoculate police departments against the charge of racial profiling. “Nothing to see here, just doin’ our job.” Right? Whenever I’ve seen numbers that account for race, I’ve been unimpressed.
Posted by Mike on May 27, 2009 at 1351 hrs
It’s not the police that I’m concerned about. It’s the politicians /community organizers who will misuse the information.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1352 hrs
Purely from a data collection/empirical research standpoint this study is flawed at the gate. They are drawing conclusions and then going out to get the data. IF they want a clean study they will look at the data they already have on file. Go to the police departments and do a study on a given time period…say the last three years or so and compile that data.
That is the baseline. Then see what it says and make the necessary changes and sample the data again in three years.
The data collected under this Dem proposal will be anything but true and clean in terms of gathering data and proving or disproving their theory.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1413 hrs
AND!!!
If the data produced by a given city shows no bias - no problem WHO on JFC is going to believe it??
Those same proponents will be saying there was a cover up. You can imagine the players and the rhetoric.
Better we get an outside firm or university to do the research. ORRRR since its in the budget and using state money…..lets get the Leg Audit Bureau to do it.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1421 hrs
Why not get ACORN to head this up? Someone’s got to oversee the police or the data could be skewed. Yea, that’s the ticket.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1658 hrs
So to continue posts from #1, #8, & #9….
So I was wrong from post 1. It’s not that it’s a super legislature. They are ALL in it together. [i]No one in Madison has a problem with this process. Everyone outside of Madison has a problem with this process. Why can’t we elect some people to do something about this?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1830 hrs
I my opinion and personal observations, It is impossible to see who is driving the car ahead of you as you overtake it. You cannot even tell if it is male or female until you pass it.
My questions is what drives this proposal before the legislature? Is this another way to create racial animosity?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 1916 hrs
@Hello: Because at the end of the day, nobody cares about legislative process enough to let it influence their vote. If Joe Sixpack likes my positions on economic and health care issues, but hates how I handle the logistics of the budget process, he’s going to vote for me anyway.
@Ralph Heun: It’s not to create racial animosity. Some people (not me, necessarily) legitimately believe that collecting this data might reduce animosity towards law enforcement by certain constituent groups that believe the law is not applied consistently.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on May 27, 2009 at 2000 hrs
My point in 13…
Was that the data is already in the files. Look at the last 3, 5, or more years of data to see if we have a problem NOW. Why set out to collect new data to prove or disprove a theory.
It would be cheaper to just use the data that already exists and it would be less subjective to boot.Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 27, 2009 at 2032 hrs
Say Wha??
I think most of the people got your point and it is true enough that nobody questioned it. Getting the facts after the conclusion has been reached is liberal SOP.I was trawling for trolls this morning and I caught a Jason. Disgusting little bugger, but he brought a good price at the back door of a Chinese restaurant.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 28, 2009 at 0830 hrs
You should keep my name out of your mouth if you’re not addressing me or something specific that I said. Get a reputation for side-talking and people are going to start treating you like a bitch.
And you really don’t see the humor of Owen suggesting that this is completely unnecessary, because cops are ethical professionals who don’t use pretextual reasons to pull people over based on race, then saying that if this passes, cops will probably start pulling white people over for pretextual reasons? Even when the problem is racism against non-whites, some people find a way to spin it so whites are the ones being treated unfairly. Perpetual victims.
For the record, the issue here is data on stops, not arrests. We have plenty of data on arrest demographics, but that’s getting at the issue too late. If you pull over 9 blacks for every 1 white, then yeah, you’re going to see a hugely disproportionate arrest and conviction rate for blacks, but that doesn’t mean blacks commit more crimes and it doesn’t justify continuing to treat them with more scrutiny.
Annecdotally, anyone who thinks this isn’t a problem needs to get in the car with their black friends more often. I’m white, and I’ve been pulled over when driving alone once in the last 10 years - doing 75 on the highway because I was running late for a meeting. I’ve been pulled over three times in just the last several years when I’ve been driving with non-whites in the car - one failure to signal a lane change, one broken tail light cover, and once just because we looked “suspicious.”
Racial profiling happens. Ask a cop. I’ve been told by more than a few of them that they call it “targeted enforcement” in training sessions. And I think this is the most important issue related to race in America right now. Disproportionate stops of a particular race lead to disproportionate arrests and convictions, which cops and citizens, consciously or unconsciously form impression from and then treat those races accordingly, so the cycle continues.
And maybe doing this will show that non-whites are all just a bunch of whiners, and the experiences of people like me are just one big coincidence after another. Either way, don’t you want to know? Are you afraid what you might find out?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 28, 2009 at 1308 hrs
Are you afraid what you might find out?
Terrified. I might feel all my superior white notions are just walls of my own insecurities and that I have been unfairly magnifying my own personal anecdotes to the unfair status of stereotype.
Such as, the two times that robbery attempts were made against my person, they were done by blacks and a cuban.
Or that the racial chip is very regional. When I have lived in Miami, Tempe, and had long visits to Nashville, black people there seem truly racially blind and it is impossible to treat them in any way different than you would a white person because, why would you?I would find it funny if the State Government mandated the police to stop a proportionate number of white people regardless of ‘suspicious’ behaviour, because if you believe that there are not a disproportionate number of minorities in gangs or that gang members are not hugely disproportionately lawless in a number of ways… well maybe I should look at some your data statistics and you should look some of mine.
Talk to those same cops and ask how many times they or their immediate associates were shot at on or off the job? They will likely be able to tell you exactly how many times. Then ask how many of those shots were by minorities. But don’t take any of the rest of the words of those cops as truth, just take the damning words ‘targeted enforcement’ and use it how you wish.
For the record, if you are the only Jason on this blog, most of your comments are not troll-like, but comment 7 on this post was, live with it. Be proud of it. I know that when I occasionally leave a comment on a liberal blog, it does not come off as sunshine and puppies.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 28, 2009 at 1442 hrs
@Ralph Heun: It’s not to create racial animosity. Some people (not me, necessarily) legitimately believe that collecting this data might reduce animosity towards law enforcement by certain constituent groups that believe the law is not applied consistently.
You got to be kidding yourself. It is the grievance seeking race exploiters who will manipulate any data to prove their invalid point.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 28, 2009 at 2016 hrs
I don’t buy the “driving while black” thing.
People who commit crimes and don’t have the license and registration in order are going to get pulled over more.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on May 28, 2009 at 2237 hrs
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