Location data show that race affects citations and fines for speeding

What's the variation in ticketing with respect to different police departments? How about geographic location?

Teasing out that data is actually a more fruitful exercise. I don't mean to sound callous at all when I say this, but having a study that says "In the US blacks are discriminated against" is a bit lacking in new data or understanding. Any intellectually honest observer already knows they face discrimination.

https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/black-drivers-are-less...

> 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.

Very clever methodology on this one: they used Daylight Savings to rule out other variables.

> 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.

As a Black person, I don't much see a large difference between the two things you mentioned?

Which is to say, it's certainly convenient to think that racism works like "there are racist cops on one hand and innocent well-meaning cops on the other," but that strikes me as an unhelpful oversimplification.

More specifically, I generally believe that most negative effects of racism come from folks who don't much realize how racist they are.

Putting race aside for a moment - I completely agree, my experience (though not a huge sample set) is that most officers get to your car expecting confrontation, and when they don’t get it end up just issuing a warning / writing a less severe ticket. Given that it’s easy to get out of a ticket afterwards, why argue it on the side of the road?

>how much of the effect is due to first order bias directly due to racial prejudice -- and how much of it is second order biases and miscommunications due to the inherent social tensions of a minority traffic stop in the US.

To me, this sounds like the difference between individual (your "first order") and systemic racism (your "second order'), which is pretty well studied. Some people only choose to recognize the existence of the former.

Shall we chuck in facial recognition too, just in case you half-inched a pack of gum at the Tesco self-checkout?

I don’t like the authoritarian-sounding phrasing here, but upon consideration, would this method of enforcing traffic laws really be much worse than having people with guns chasing people down at high speeds?

That is cost prohibitive. I'd rather replace red lights with traffic circles.

Yes, but a couple problems:

1. Where to put them? In Chicago these cameras unfortunately end up being a regressive tax.

2. What to do with the money? Anytime we give the government money from things like this, we create weird incentives. I've been wondering lately what it would be like if we required all the fees to be returned to the federal treasury / burned... no incentives!

Red light cameras increase the rate of rear ends, sometimes dramatically, as drivers unsafely brake to avoid the fine.

You forgot tracking. Tracking and recording every trip you take.

you described a life under techno-fascism

I wonder why the downvotes. I assume people believe this comment is overly sarcastic... but is it? The absurdity of what the administration is doing automatically makes this comment a legitimate one, and not a troll.

This analysis doesn't say whether minority drivers were more likely to be pulled over for traffic violations, only that they were more likely to be issued a citation and that those citations came with higher fines. I would guess a cop rarely knows the race of a speeding driver before pulling them over. The discrimination would happen either when deciding whether to issue a citation, or after looking up the driver's info on the police car.

When the police look up your info, do they see past citations? If so, it's a self-reinforcing cycle: people more likely to receive citations are more likely to have citations listed, and a cop who sees past citations might be less willing to let the driver off with a warning.

> Let me guess - if the authors did by 5 groups the results they got were not saying something they liked.

The main reason likely is that US race (treating Hispanic ethnicity as a race trumping nominal racial categories, so the other categories all are implicitly prefixed by “non-Hispanic”) is something like (in 5 categories):

59% White, 19% Hispanic, 13% Black, 6% Asian, 3% Other/Mixed.

Or, in two categories:

59% White alone, 41% Other

The two-group breakout takes far less data to get equal statistical utility for its smallest group when compared to the 5 group breakout (that's true even if you don't really care about the Other/Mixed catch-all group in the 5-group breakdown, but only the other four.)

> I don’t even know what to believe anymore

Good research? Even if studies which did not find this problem were not published, if the methodology is correct this study is correct regardless of external pressures.

> The cars know how fast they are going

They don't. My car's displayed speed is 5% higher than actual speed. It will change a little bit again after the next tire replacement.

> the cars know where they are

They don't. Not only are there no up to date maps for permanent roads, roadworks will add changes and in downtown gps will happily put you on the road on the other side of a high-rise.

> the cars know what the speed limit is

Again, up to date global, correct, precise maps do not exist and will not exist. Vision can't be relied on either, because bad luck can make a speed limit invisible.

It's all fun and games until these same concepts are applied to computers and Windows prevents you from typing anything potentially "hateful" while pinging the government so you can get fined appropriately.

We're nearly there actually with technologies like Gatekeeper and OSs requiring account creation to use, so I expect to see it in my lifetime. The missing piece was the ability to classify content automatically in real time, but luckily AI came along.

Also consider that traffic violations are a source of funding for a municipality. Using technology to eliminate violations completely may not be desirable.