Posted on 03/27/2002 8:05:08 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:40:00 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- A study that suggests black motorists were more likely to speed than whites is another attempt to vindicate state troopers who practice racial profiling, the head of the state's NAACP chapter said Wednesday.
The Rev. William Rutherford said he had not read the study but didn't believe its findings.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Clearly a mental giant with a firm grasp of statistics.
Facts can never withstand the onslaught of pervasive paranoia.
Must be running for a political office or something. What a dolt.
"We're only 12 percent of the population. If you arrested every white person that was speeding and every black person that was speeding, common sense will tell you that you're going to arrest more whites than blacks," Rutherford said.
Apparently in school he missed the day they covered percentages. But this does explain his first statement. The sad part is I wonder how many people cannot see the glaring flaw with this "logic"
Rutheford is right to be skeptical, even if his reasoning might not be entirely sound.
Booker T. Washington, 1911
Not in this case. The Turnpike runs the entire length of the state, and does not really represent any particular area or neighborhood. Everyone drives on it, and as such, it probably represents a better statistical cross-section than you would get on local roads or on smaller, more locally used highways.
One simple way is the placement of the cameras. I you place the cameras near one ramps close to black neighborhoods you will naturally get a large proportion of black speeders.
Methinks the good Reverend is smoking the crack pipe. He obviously is too baked to understand that IF 12% OF THE POPULATION COMMITS A DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF CRIME, THE PERCENTAGE OF THOSE ARRESTED WILL NOT BE 12%! Conversely, if the 12% of the population in question consisted entirely of pacifists, I would expect their arrest statistics to be near 0%.
Idiot. (Speaking of which, I wonder if the "Rev." Ralph Neas will come to the rescue and condemn him for getting involved in politics, just like he condemns us conservatives for doing the same... I won't be holding my breath, though...)
:/ ttt
Hint: There are no "neighborhoods" on the New Jersey Turnpike, which is the only place where this study was performed.
:) ttt
...with curb-feelers and a little bitty custom made oval rear windshield and gold wire rims.
As a long term NJ resident that travels between exit 14 and 10 and 7a and 2 on a regular basis your estimate of 3/4th is being very kind. I would guess around 90%. The other 10% is unknown only because the jackasses are driving so fast I can't see anything.
Not only can you sometimes tell buy the appearnce of the vehicle, but other things give it away as well. For example, here in Tallahassee, we have two major universities, Florida State and Florida A&M. For those who dont know, Flordia A&M is a historical black college. Any car with a FLa. A&M license plate or sticker is obviously driven by a black motorist. When someone speeds past you or cuts you off, you don't even have to look at the driver or passenger!
In this case, the road was the New Jersey Turnpike, which has only 20 exits from end to end. The cameras were set up over the entire length. There are no representative exits on the Turnpike. Some of the whitest areas of New Jersey access the turnpike in Newark and Elizabethport, some of the blackest cities. So how would a camera near the Elizabethport exits (13 and 13A) effect the sample?
The cameras were placed in various locations to minimize the distortion and accurately reflect the patterns of behavior on the road. It found that some of the greatest disparities between the races were found in Southern New Jersey, in farm country.
I know that the results don't support the prejudice that New Jersey State Troopers are a bunch of seething racists. But eventually people will have to give up their preconcieved notions when faced with objective evidence. Maybe, just maybe, the NJ Troopers are just doing there jobs in the best way they can.
BTW, the US Justice Department is just covering their a$$es on this one, since they are the ones who trained the state troopers all over the country to racially profile drug couriers in Operation Pipeline.
Good point. There should have been a "control" sample, in which a camera was used to determine the race of every driver during the same period of time.
Having said that, I suspect blacks and hispanics will tend to speed more often than "whites" or whatever. A cultural thing, since there is a greater percentage of urban poverty in those two groups, and these areas tend not to develop a respect for the rules as other areas.
Empirical observation has proven to me that blacks are more likely than any other race to drive in the high speed lane at excessive speeds, crawl on my bumper at 65MPH, and do Mario Andretti lane changes during rush hour in urban traffic (only to crawl on someone else's bumper).
Sorry, this report merely confirms what the eye can see. And it applies to the NJ Turnpike as well as every other major corridor in the Northeast.
"The new turnpike study, commissioned by the New Jersey attorney general, solves one of the most vexing problems in racial profiling analysis: establishing a violator benchmark. To show that the police are stopping “too many” members of a group, you need to know, at a minimum, the rate of lawbreaking among that group—the so-called violator benchmark. Only if the rate of stops or arrests greatly exceeds the rate of criminal behavior should our suspicions be raised (see “The Myth of Racial Profiling,” Spring 2001). But most of the studies that the ACLU and defense attorneys have proffered to show biased behavior by the police only used crude population measures as the benchmark for comparing police activity—arguing, say, that if 24 percent of speeding stops on a particular stretch of highway were of black drivers, in a city or state where blacks make up 19 percent of the population, the police are over-stopping blacks.
"Such an analysis is clearly specious, since it fails to say what percentage of speeders are black, but the data required to rebut it were not available. Matthew Zingraff, a criminologist at North Carolina State University, explains why: “Everybody was terrified. Good statisticians were throwing up their hands and saying, ‘This is one battle you’ll never win. I don’t want to be called a racist.’ ” Even to suggest studying the driving behavior of different racial groups was to demonstrate one’s bigotry, as Zingraff himself discovered when he proposed such research in North Carolina and promptly came under attack. Such investigations violate the reigning fiction in anti-racial profiling rhetoric: that all groups commit crime and other infractions at equal rates. It follows from this central fiction that any differences in the rate at which the police interact with certain citizens result only from police bias, not from differences in citizen behavior."
That won't skew the result. They aren't only taking pictures of speeders; the photos are a mix of speeders and slowpokes. In a different neighborhood you might find more black drivers than elsewhere, but the percentage of speeders within each race should be invariant (unless of course they're dodging stray bullets).
From a previous thread Study Suggests Racial Gap in Speeding in New Jersey:
The study used specially designed radar gun cameras, which are used to photograph the license plates of speeders and whose photos are accepted as evidence in many courts around the country, to capture images of drivers in a variety of locations on the turnpike. The study defined speeding as exceeding the speed limit by 15 miles per hour, and officers are instructed to focus on the most egregious speeders.
Researchers then showed the photos of 38,747 drivers to teams of three evaluators who tried to determine each driver's race, without knowing whether the driver had sped or not. At least two evaluators were able to agree on the race of 26,334 of the drivers photographed, and an analysis of those motorists found that the disparity between white and black drivers widened at higher speeds.
In the southern segment of the turnpike, where the speed limit is 65 m.p.h., 2.7 percent of black drivers were speeders, compared with 1.4 percent of white drivers. Among drivers going faster than 90 m.p.h., the disparity was even greater.
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(snip)
So you see, there was a control group. All drivers were photographed, whether they were speeding or not. Then the percentage of each racial group that was speeding was calculated. The percentage of blacks speeding was disproportionately high, and reflected the rate at which they are stopped on the NJ Turnpike.
It doesn't matter what the proportion of black drivers is. What counts is the proportion of speeders within each subpopulation.
He in DC they had some idiot on in the morning on WMAL (Roger Cossack?) who made the same mistake. It's almost like listening to Cokie Roberts discuss tax brackets. Makes your teeth hurt.
for four hundred years the African-Americans were slaves, so therefore they could not speed, they are just making up for lost time..............
For those not familiar with the NJ turnpike, it is a toll road where the driver gets a card when he gets on and stops at a booth to pay when he gets off. No random speed offramps.
Anecdotally, I drove on I95 north from DC last week - a truly terrifying experience! - and the random lane weavers - who played chicken with the rest of us who were doing 75 (including all of the semi trailors) - were much more than 12% of the cars who passed me. I'd say about 90%!
Those are tiny percentages, among both races. Do people really drive that slowly in New Jersey?
Four hundred years? Lets see, slavery was outlawed around 1866. 1866 less four hundred years = 1466. You mean there were slaves in the US in 1466? Native Americans had slaves? The NAACP would like us to believe there were slaves in this country for 400 years. Slaves were around then alright. For over a thousand years they were traded in Africa.
My dad, who traveled a lot, used to tell me that the fastest thing on the road was a black man in a Cadillac with a clergy sticker. Everytime one would pass us in eastern NC going to the beach, my dad would remark "Uh no. Someone must have just died".
Not surprising.
They are skeptical that as a group blacks commit more violent crime, have greater illegitimacy and use drugs more readily.
And the emperor has no clothes. No not emperor Bokassa.
Now you're changing the subject.
The subject of this thread is this Einstein's perception of math and statistics.
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