This post takes as a priori knowledge (i.e. not something I necessarily believe to be true based on my experience) that white flight is still a thing – that African Americans primarily live in urban centers – and that these urban centers are an absolute wreck of violent crime and disintegration.

I’ll admit to being advantaged by a lot of implicit bias — I’m a grown up white person. A female, though … and a female in science/technology fields … so it is something I’ve experienced occasionally. The first major company for which I worked, a top-level manager in the IT org hired in a lot of his at-the-time girlfriends. The new girl showing up was assumed to be incompetent, and it is a lot harder to convince someone of your competence if they start out knowing that you are only here because you are sleeping with the boss. Frustrating, but nowhere near the level of “the cops got called when I was standing at my front door trying to find my key”.

My specifics don’t give me a lot of understanding of minorities who suffer implicit bias, racial profiling, and outright discrimination … but I cannot fathom how “stop and frisk” is meant to solve either problem. Even if 25% of the people who live here are degenerate criminals, 75% of the people aren’t. Statistically you spend a lot of time hassling innocents — who may well not consider it a worthwhile trade-off to eliminate one burglar.

The nearest analogy in my life-experience is DUI and seat-belt check-points. I remember being late to work one morning because a seat-belt check-point was on my route. Slowed down traffic quite a bit, stopped on the queue waiting for my turn. Plus it took a couple of minutes for the check itself (they were doing about the nosiest check-point I’d ever seen — basically taking as much time as they could to peruse the plain-sight contents of your vehicle, asking questions, etc). There’s a sanctity of human life argument that says that the potential to save one life has more weight than a hundred people being delayed for twenty minutes that morning. Which, as a one-off … whatever. How many times, though, could I be detained before *I* don’t care all that much about the life of some goober who intentionally refused to fasten their seat belt.

And there’s a difference between reducing and relocating crime. New York City got very “tough on crime” and was able to reduce crime significantly. But Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in crime — NY didn’t stop people from committing crime, they just stopped people from committing crimes *in NYC*. I don’t see stop-and-frisk having the slightest chance of reducing crime. Relocating, sure, but not reducing.