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by kartman
4218 days ago
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i was in court to clear a minor ticket yesterday in SF and noticed the demographic of folks in there. the demographic of the traffic court was mostly minorities and poor folks, completely out of whack with SF general population and what you expect traffic case tickets to reflect. Imagine the criminal cases. this skew is even after accounting for pre filtering that happens before someone walks into the courtroom (who is ticketed by police, who pays early, who appears etc). Felt I was seeing the results of a system not working right. |
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Minorities have become the face of this issue because they are more likely to get caught up in the system in the first place. But the issue affects us all - perfectly non-racist cops would still run roughshod over plenty of people. What we need to repair is eventually-consistent justice so the murderers end up in jail (criminal) and wrongfully-harmed people are compensated for their losses directly from operating budgets (civil).
The injustice system has been allowed to degrade to its present state because most innocent people simply will not be harmed by it. It's only by getting the majority to see that injustice could have happened to them will you ever make them feel affected. Framing the issue around racism is ultimately self defeating - it turns the issue into one of those longstanding happens-to-other-people problems that people from the dominant group care about just enough to fit in/get laid/assuage conscience.