[internaut]

In my experience working with a black coworker (doesn't smoke), he would seemingly ignore signals that he needed to modify his behavior example: once he wanted to go into a shop to browse but the shop owner was closing. He talked his way past her, but I distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable; thinking that was something I would never do in a million years, and I'm not the most socially adroit person either. Other than this boorish behavior he is a perfectly reasonable human being who is well known to be very friendly in the community, but I doubt he'd even recognize the existence of the possibility she could have called the police on him.

If people act like boors, it makes sense they are more likely to get arrested.

Another occasion he installed a wooden shed behind the council house (housing for the poor) he lived in. The council predictably told him they would kick his family out of the house if they didn't take it down. Again; another thing I would never have done in a million years because I would have assumed it was obvious I needed permission before building sheds on a property I do not own. Shit, I probably even need planning permission from the government, let alone the property owner in lots of cases.

I strongly suspect it is the same thing with smoking drugs. Some groups act in ways which are far more likely to get them arrested even if they commit those crimes at comparable rates to the native population example: smoking illegal drugs in the street vs smoking them in your own home.

I don't have an explanation for the underlying mechanism but I've seen the same thing time and time again in (five) black persons I've been working with. They're not bad people or stupid, certainly not the ones I work with, but their 'boundaries' just aren't the same as mine and other white coworkers. What is an immediate and definite red flag for trouble ahead to me is invisible to them, it is like there is a communication band they don't access. Which is weird because the five people I worked with were certainly more socially adaptive than I.

My rough guess is that I and other natives have, let us call it: a residual paranoia instinct that black foreigners do not. I expect different groups have different social relations and this is an invisible wall dividing people that hardly anybody feels comfortable thinking or talking about.