Three Poisonous Peas in a Pod: Dishonesty, Race Huckstering and the Campaign for Lower Standards
One of the most important reasons Donald Trump got elected, and retains a large fan base to this day, is that he was openly contemptuous of the arrogant and largely self-anointed elites who have been running this country, and running it down, for decades. Trump was wrong about many things, particularly in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but he was spot on about that. The Very Educated People in command in academia and allied think tanks are brimming with a sour, condescending view of America, a view they brandish with tonnage quantities of deceit impersonating scholarship. Trump called them on it as no one else would.
A devastating indictment of what Trump saw more clearly than any other candidate was published today by Zac Kriegman in his Substack entry. Kriegman’s piece dissects a supposed “study” by the renowned Vera Institute of Justice and its reporting by the Boston Globe. The entry is long but worth your time.
The nub of it is this: Vera published a paper purporting to find — ready now? — racism in the Boston police force. Vera’s main conclusion was:
“Police disproportionately stop Black drivers in Suffolk County, especially for non-traffic-safety reasons. Police pull over Black drivers at 2.3 times the rate of white drivers for non-traffic-safety violations, such as improperly displayed license plates or a single broken taillight.”
But Vera is curiously obtuse about the reason for the disparity — the same disparity found in an earlier study by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.
So, one might ask, what is the reason?
The previous study provided a clear answer to that question through rigorous statistical analysis of police stop data. It found that during the day, when police can identify the race of drivers, whites were pulled over more often and blacks less often than at night, when police cannot identify race. In other words, police are biased against pulling over black drivers. So, what explains why black drivers are pulled over at higher rates despite police being biased against pulling them over? Much higher rates of driving violations, on average, among black drivers (a fact that should surprise nobody, if driving violations are associated with socioeconomic status, as many types of legal violations are).
Oh, so not to put too fine a point on it, the whole thrust of Vera “study” is a fraud.
As Kriegman continues (emphasis added):
So, what did [the Vera] policy paper contribute to our understanding? Did it use a new methodology that revealed flaws in the earlier study? No. Instead, it mostly ignores the fact that the data clearly shows that police stop black drivers more often simply because black drivers are committing many more violations on average.
By doing so, the paper sidesteps the obvious conclusion: the best way to decrease traffic stops of black drivers would be to increase compliance with traffic laws among black drivers. Ignoring this obvious conclusion provides cover to argue for an approach diametrically opposed to addressing the root problems. The paper proceeds to investigate which types of traffic violation police could stop enforcing altogether in order to most reduce the number of black drivers stopped by police!
All you hayseeds out there need to get your minds right. The problem isn’t disregard of the law — no, not that — the problem is having law to begin with.
Despite the fact that the laws defining all of these traffic violations exist to protect public safety, the “activists” and “advocates” who wrote this policy paper find that these are “non-traffic safety violations”—amazingly including having windows tinted so dark that visibility is impaired, not having working lights, brakes, and horns, driving after your license has been revoked or suspended for repeated drunk or dangerous driving, intentionally falsifying or hiding your license plate number, driving without insurance, driving without a safety inspection, and driving without ever having obtained a license.
Vera’s line mirrors a “criminal justice reform” narrative I’ve seen over and over — that we can reduce enforcement and dilute accountability without a cost to public safety. And I suppose that’s true, it you believe that driving without lights, brakes or horns; or driving on a license suspended for being a chronic drunk; or diving with no license at all, are things we can all wink away while staying “just as safe.”
The paper proposes a set of policy recommendations including that city councils and police departments adopt policies “preventing police from initiating a traffic stop for non-traffic-safety violations”, and that district attorneys decline to prosecute cases that arise from such stops.
Traffic laws today, mugging and yoking tomorrow. Count on it. It’s the same logic grounded in the same racial guilt trip and the same patchwork of lies about how public safety will be just fine.
Buried at the end of the Vera policy paper is an admission, sort of, that the differences in traffic stop rates reflect differences in violation rates and not police bias (emphasis added):
“In a recent report commissioned by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, researchers applied a veil-of-darkness analysis to measure racial disparities in traffic stops occurring across Massachusetts from February to December 2020. A veil-of-darkness test seeks to measure officer bias by comparing traffic stops made during the day to those made at night, based on the assumption that police are less able to determine a driver’s race or ethnicity after dark than during the day. Although officer bias and explicit racial profiling are important considerations, Vera’s analysis centers on disparate impacts, regardless of whether an individual officer is engaging in measurable bias.”
Notice how opaque and dense this wording is, and how fuzzed over the punchline is made to be. With a degree of clever sleaze that would make Bill Clinton blush, Vera is saying just enough to be able to claim to critics that it ‘fessed up at the end, even while doing everything it could to make sure the confession gets missed even by a careful reader.
Did the title of this entry say something about dishonesty?
Spinning it thus helps to obscure the radical policy being proposed. Instead of addressing the root causes of markedly higher rates of crime and other legal violations in many black communities, we are now told that police should simply no longer enforce the laws that black Americans violate at higher rates. To these activists, the problem is not that those communities are plagued with higher rates of illegal activity—hurting, primarily, the residents in those very communities. Rather, the problem is that police are enforcing the laws that are frequently broken in those communities.
It’s hard to overstate how insidious and debasing the Vera “study” is. Supposedly in the name of racial equity, the alleged remedy will not cure the problem of grossly disproportionate black crime victimization, but will affirmatively and intentionally obscure that problem, making it just that much harder to solve in the future. As Kriegman puts it:
Across the board, instead of addressing root problems leading to worse performance by black Americans, we are being told that the solution is to re-engineer our society to do away with the very notions of standards and accountability.
The real problem with the Left’s campaign to lower standards under the guise, and shouting the slogans, of anti-racism is not that it’s failing America. It’s that it’s succeeding in what it truly aims to do.