Friday 13 November 2015

Greensboro moving in the right direction on police bias

A broken tail light should not land you behind bars:

The police chief in Greensboro, N.C., has ordered his officers to stop pulling over motorists for minor infractions involving vehicle flaws like broken taillights, an action he called a first step toward eliminating “alarming” racial disparities in traffic stops.

The chief also promised to better supervise young officers, a response to data showing that four times as many blacks as whites were charged with the sole offense of resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer after traffic stops and other police encounters. “That, too, is alarming,” he said.

Bolding mine. As a society that is supposed to encourage blind justice, we have failed miserably. We've allowed our law enforcement community to freely exercise discrimination, we've allowed our court system to reject black jurors at an alarming rate, and we've done very little to limit the flow of our school-to-prison pipeline. These biased interactions between cops and random minority drivers are just one aspect of the problem, but fixing it can be a game-changer. Especially for the age range 18-25, where the young person's future is a blank slate. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that has become so self-centered a problem doesn't exist until it affects us individually and directly. Some random facebook comments from said group:


http://ift.tt/1HNz3TT

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