I checked up the first few cases from that list of different things that cops find suspicious, and in 100% of them it seems that the person the cops were suspicious about were in fact transporting large quantities of illegal drugs.
What this looks like to me is less “cops will use any excuse to stop anyone they feel like” and more “some cops are actually quite good at spotting the many and varied signs that someone might be a drug dealer, and the particular things they happen to describe having noticed vary a lot”, and there doesn’t seem anything terribly bad about that.
There are a bunch of ways in which the situation could in fact be bad. For instance, maybe the people being stopped by the cops all just happen to be black because the cops are super-racist—no!, I hear you cry, cops in America being racist? say it ain’t so! -- or something like that. But then the problem isn’t “cops have a wide variety of things they find suspicious”, it’s “cops disproportionately turn their drug-dealer-finding skills on a particular group of people they’re biased against”, and the fact that they find a large and “inconsistent” set of kinds of evidence has nothing much to do with it.
(I’m not sure whether Zvi is in fact making the same point as me. Is “this strategy” meant to be “the strategy being employed by the cops” or “the strategy being employed by the person complaining about the cops”?)
I checked up the first few cases from that list of different things that cops find suspicious, and in 100% of them it seems that the person the cops were suspicious about were in fact transporting large quantities of illegal drugs.
What this looks like to me is less “cops will use any excuse to stop anyone they feel like” and more “some cops are actually quite good at spotting the many and varied signs that someone might be a drug dealer, and the particular things they happen to describe having noticed vary a lot”, and there doesn’t seem anything terribly bad about that.
There are a bunch of ways in which the situation could in fact be bad. For instance, maybe the people being stopped by the cops all just happen to be black because the cops are super-racist—no!, I hear you cry, cops in America being racist? say it ain’t so! -- or something like that. But then the problem isn’t “cops have a wide variety of things they find suspicious”, it’s “cops disproportionately turn their drug-dealer-finding skills on a particular group of people they’re biased against”, and the fact that they find a large and “inconsistent” set of kinds of evidence has nothing much to do with it.
(I’m not sure whether Zvi is in fact making the same point as me. Is “this strategy” meant to be “the strategy being employed by the cops” or “the strategy being employed by the person complaining about the cops”?)