Awsome million dollar traffic facts - 5.2.2007.1

I decided to address the obvious for a moment. It seems that the Bureau of Justice Statistics has determined that its most recent report confirms and earlier report in 2002. What might the reports be looking into? It is now well studied and determined that African Americans and Lationo/Hispanic Americans are more likely to have an negative expirence once pulled over by the police. I know, you are sitting there shocked.

Once your amazement at this ‘newfound’ fact subsides you might be interested to know what both studies confirmed. The first thing is that roughly 10% of the driving population are pulled over, and that this figure is consistently similar for all races. Obviously this study wasn’t done in New Jersey. I recall one time where I was in a minivan with my best friend Mike, driving to a meeting when we were pulled over for speeding. While the technical answer was yes, the flow of traffic was about 70 which is what we were doing, and while we had the State Police pointing guns at us I counted 5 cars driving past at what I would guess was 85. Oh, I forgot to mention a couple of things, just before we were pulled over 3 cars passed us at about 90, and when the officers came to the window and pulled the guns on us we were in suits. The time was about 12:30 in the afternoon. But this study says being pulled over is an equal chance event. OK.

Other facts that will awe you include:

Blacks (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent). There were slight but statistically insignificant declines compared with the 2002 report in the percentages of blacks and Hispanics searched.

Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected to force or the threat of force by police officers.

Thank goodness for this report, because no one would ever imagine that the chance of violence against Black Americans [I wonder if Mr. Rodney King was asked about this report] and Latino/Hispanic Americans [This report couldn’t include the May 1st protest in L.A. could it?] would be roughly 400% and 200% respectively higher than to White drivers. I’m so relieved now. My life has changed. This is EXACTLY how the government should spend an unknown millions of our tax dollars. We don’t need more money in education, or to fund our soldiers in Iraq.

Yep this is where we need to spend our money. And hey, this time we even got to hear about the report. Let us count our lucky stars that the economy has improved so we could afford to tell people about this recent report, unlike the shortfall that must have prevented any public notice of the 2002 report. I mean the $100 it would cost to use PRWeb to make a press release is way too expensive.

This is what I think, what do you think?