On Mon, 03 May 2010 16:00:13 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Further, under US law,
>> if they *did* find illegal substances in my car, if the traffic stop
>> was not legal, they would not be able to prosecute because they would
>> have lacked probable cause to pull me over in the first place.
> 
>   That's one thing I have never understood.

The ends don't justify the means.  To be effective in enforcing the law, 
the police have to follow the law.  The penalty they suffer by not 
following the law is that someone who is guilty may go free - so the 
incentive is for them to follow established police procedures.  Getting a 
warrant before a search (or permission from the property owner) is 
standard procedure.

If the state doesn't follow the rules, the state doesn't get to benefit 
from the rules being broken.  Otherwise, you set up a "whoops, we'll do 
better next time" scenario that repeats itself.

Jim

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> the presumption is "they must be guilty because they're 
> Hispanic" not "they match a description for a specific crime that's been 
> reported".

  Am I being too naive when I make the assumption that it is possible to
check people's IDs without presumption of guilt nor for racist reasons,
even if a choice is made based on typical illegal immigration profiles?

  I do understand people getting angry by such actions, but I really think
it is possible to perform such checks without there being discriminatory
motives behind. The *intent* is not to discriminate, just a honest intent
of catching illegal immigrants. (Of course you can argue that this is not
the most efficient way of doing that, but I'm talking about motivations
and intent. Why is discrimination and racism always assumed as such? Do
we always have to assume the worst about everything and everybody?)

  That was, more or less, my original point in this entire thread, even
if I didn't know how to express myself this clearly back then.

> >   You mean there are people who are complaining about the police
> >   investigating
> > only males in rape cases?

> I'm saying that you don't know the details of every investigation that 
> has ever taken place regarding rape cases in the US.  Or you have a 
> really strange hobby.  The fact that you (or I) are not aware of an 
> instance of this doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

  Of course there always are exceptions. I was talking about normal
occurrences. I don't think it's at all usual for people to complain
about such a thing.

> >   I have heard about criminal profilers on the police force who try to
> > get a picture of what kind of person the criminal might be based on the
> > available clues, and this can include things like ethnicity (such as for
> > example "serial killers are typically white middle-aged males"), but
> > maybe that's just in TV series and movies?

> You're talking about a specific crime.  The point is that there is no 
> *specific* crime in the case of enforcing the AZ law.  In order to 
> prosecute a crime, the prosecution must be able to state with specificity 
> what crime was committed and when.

  Well, one *could* argue that illegal immigration *is* a specific,
existing crime being committed right now... (Not that this justifies
draconian laws and discrimination, but still...)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Mon, 03 May 2010 15:54:06 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> There is a difference between "we have a specific crime that we are
>> looking for suspects for" and "we are doing random checking to see if
>> someone might have committed a crime".
> 
>   There is a difference, but I don't see the random checkings as being
>   all
> that abhorrent in all cases (as I have mentioned, here the police does
> random checkings on drivers even without any reason to suspect them of
> being drunk, and I think that's completely ok).
> 
>   Of course if the police abuse their rights to perform random checking
> in order to harass people they don't like, that's going over the line.

Here in the US, we're very strongly opposed to putting the government in 
a position where it can abuse its power.  There was actually a war over 
this in our history because the government that governed us was seen to 
be abusing its power.  The framers of our government decided that the 
government should not have this power because they'd seen it abused.

>> To use your rape example, suppose instead of "we're looking for a white
>> male because of this specific case we're looking into" the police
>> started by collecting DNA samples from all white males just *in case* a
>> crime were committed.
> 
>   As a side note: Why are people so afraid of DNA databanks? Why is it
> such an abhorrent idea? What kind of "invasion of privacy" is having
> your DNA in a databank? Exactly how does that invade one's privacy?

In 15 years' time, DNA is found to be unreliable for some reason.  A 
whole bunch of innocent people are convicted based on DNA evidence 
because it was irrefutable and infallible back in 2011.

So then what happens?

Again, it comes down to not trusting the government to not abuse its 
power.  It's a means of keeping government power in check.

>   Imagine that if every single citizen had to have their DNA registered,
> and thanks to that the apprehension rate of rapists grows near 100%,
> wouldn't that be a good thing? Not only would the rapists be all caught,
> but it would also act as an effective deterrent.
> 
>   How could DNA information be misused by authorities?

There are lots of ways it could be (and is) misused by authorities.  
Cross-contamination, improper labeling of the dataset - DNA data is 
supposed to be 100% accurate (or better than 99% accurate), but that's 
only as good as we know today based on today's science.  If it's 
mislabeled or miscategorized, how exactly does one challenge that if it's 
supposed to be infallible?

>> That's the difference.  What the Arizona law does is not tie the act of
>> "being an illegal immigrant" to a specific instance of a crime.
> 
>> Does that make sense?
> 
>   I suppose that that kind of law could perhaps have good intentions
> behind it, but in practice it's too radical to have any chance of
> actually working, even if the intentions were good. (Of course I have no
> way of knowing what the actual intentions were behind that law proposal.
> Maybe it *was* made by purely racist reasons.)

Nobody here (as far as I know) has said it doesn't have good intentions 
behind it, but that doesn't make it a good law.  I've actually read the 
law, and while it doesn't specifically say "those of Hispanic descent are 
subject to being stopped", it does IMHO cross the line by making it a 
"specific crime" to "be" in Arizona illegally.  First, that's already 
covered by Federal immigration laws, but the law sets the police up so as 
to be required to engage in racial profiling.  Even the governor of AZ 
(who signed the bill into law) has said she doesn't know how the law 
should be enforced without using racial profiling - but she signed it 
into law anyways.

Jim

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Mon, 03 May 2010 14:40:52 -0400, Warp wrote:

> >   I consider myself to be the exact opposite of a racist in the sense
> >   that
> > I *couldn't care less* about "race" or skin color or anything.

> When you say "race matters", look out, you're making a distinction based 
> on race, whether you want to admit it or not.

  On the contrary: I'm *not* making any distinction based on race. To me
it doesn't matter what race somebody might represent.

  (And yes, I know that the current politically correct multiculturalist
dogma is that "races do not exist". This is motivated only and purely
because of aversion towards racism. "Race" is in no way a negative notion
any more than "nationality" or "gender". Multiculturalists have given it
a bad name because racists use it as an excuse for their bigotry, and
they make it sound that even acknowledging human races to *exist* is
racism all in itself. Bollocks.

  At least wikipedia doesn't seem to have a problem in explaining "race" as
pertaining to humans.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   In other words. The example I gave was correct. You then presented a
> *different* example where the same formulation doesn't work in the same
> way.

No, the example you gave was wrong.

It's like you saying "Every adult is over six feet tall."  I'm saying "No, 
that's factually true only if you pick adults for your sample set that are 
all over six feet tall."

>>  One more time:
> 
>> You can't use the math of proportions of different subgroups of illegals to 
>> target which unknowns you question. You must use different proportions of 
>> subgroups of illegals relative to subgroups of legals.  Once you do that, 
>> there's no reason to favor one particular way of splitting the total 
>> population into subgroups over another way of splitting the total population 
>> into subgroups.
> 
>   I don't see the logical line of reasoning there. It's a non-sequitur.
> 
>   "You must use different proportions of subgroups" -> "there's no reason
> to favor one particular way of splitting over another" does not logically
> follow.

You split the population of size Z into several groups, A, B, C.  Your 
suggestions for splitting criteria have most frequently been based on 
ethnicity or other properties not having to do with behavior.

Each subgroup, A, B, C, has two portions:
A' - The people in group A who are legal residents.
A'' - The people in group A who are illegal residents.
B' - The people in group B who are legal residents.
B'' - The people in group B who are illegal residents.
Etc.

The likelihood of success of stopping a person in group A and finding an 
illegal resident is not in the proportion A'' to Z, as your flawed example 
suggests. That's where I said your math is bogus.

The success is in proportion of A'' to A' (or A'' to A, depending how you 
want to measure proportions). That's the correction I applied to make it 
possible to do the statistics you wanted to do.

However, the choice of which individuals go into group A and which 
individuals go into group B and so on is most efficiently made by making A'' 
very large compared to A while making B'' very small compared to B. Then you 
can stop people in group A and efficiently find lawbreakers, while leaving 
group B alone.

The *most* efficient way to do that is to have group "A" be "the individual 
people we have actual reason to suspect are breaking the law", with group 
"B" being "the people who are doing nothing to arouse suspicion."  And this 
is a division you can't make base on the genetics, age, or any other factor 
of the person in question that the person in question cannot control.

There's no reason to *logically* believe that splitting A and B based on 
ethnicity is better or worse than splitting A and B based on religion or age 
or neighborhood of residence or value of automobile being driven.   There's 
no reason to believe and no statistics to support that anything you can tell 
simply by looking at a person has any correlation with their illegal 
immigrant status.

>   It intended to demonstrate a *point*. The numbers weren't important,
> no matter how much you like to nitpick about them.

The numbers *are* important. See above.

Now, if you're suggesting that the police should concentrate their attention 
on groups of people who demonstrate through their behavior that they might 
be illegal immigrants, nobody would be arguing with you.

>   Where? All I said is that your implication "your example doesn't work in
> this case" -> "statistics cannot be used at all" does not follow.

See above. I'll say it again here: The best statistic is probable cause.

>> Outrageous and outlandish have very similar meanings here. I simply 
>> misremembered which word you used.
> 
>   Really? I would say that outrage and strangeness are quite different
> things. Not even comparable. The first describes a feeling while the second
> describes the understandability of something.

They're not identical in meaning. But similar enough to be confusing I suppose.

>> Had you simply said "police should use statistical models to figure out 
>> which possible suspect is most likely breaking the law and concentrate on 
>> those," I would have said "They already do. It's called Probably Cause. And 
>> the current law in Arizona is targeted at preventing police from doing that."
> 
>   Yeah, using ethnicity as an example is forbidden because you are immediately
> a racist if you do.

Do you understand the difference between using someone's behavior as a 
trigger and using someone's appearance as a trigger? That using statistical 
models based on statistics that are too vague for the crime being committed 
is a bad idea? That 99% of every person you stop is going to be here 
legally, and that using statistics not based on individual behavior to 
narrow that down in any significant way isn't going to work?

It's not just ethnicity. It's anything that's irrelevant to the actual crime 
under consideration. It would be just as bad if you targeted the people in 
red automobiles, because that hasn't anything to do with the crime either.

>> Given the history of *this* country, I'm pretty sure it's in *our* best 
>> interests.
> 
>   Maybe distrust of authorities is a self-feeding process which never ends.

They have to start being trustworthy before we can start trusting them. I'm 
pretty sure it works both ways. Just like in clean cities, people put their 
trash in the trash cans in public. In cities where there's already trash all 
over the ground, people don't bother.

If we didn't get screwed by trusting our leaders, we'd be more likely to be 
trusting. But trustworthy leaders ought to be able to lead even in an 
environment of distrust.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> supposed to be 100% accurate (or better than 99% accurate), 

Read "better than 99% accurate" as "less than 3 million false positives" in 
a nation-wide DNA database.

> how exactly does one challenge that if it's 
> supposed to be infallible?

To be fair, that's a pretty damn easy thing to challenge. "Here, take my DNA 
again."

Of course, every accused criminal will try this approach, at which point, 
what did you save by doing a giant collection in the first place.

> but the law sets the police up so as 
> to be required to engage in racial profiling. 

It's also a witch-trial law. If someone reports you as illegal, the police 
are required to come and make you prove you're not.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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On Mon, 03 May 2010 16:14:31 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> the presumption is "they must be guilty because they're Hispanic" not
>> "they match a description for a specific crime that's been reported".
> 
>   Am I being too naive when I make the assumption that it is possible to
> check people's IDs without presumption of guilt nor for racist reasons,
> even if a choice is made based on typical illegal immigration profiles?

Yes.  Because in the US that is specifically not allowed because it is 
racial profiling if the illegal immigration profile is "the person 
appears to be of Hispanic descent or origin".

>   I do understand people getting angry by such actions, but I really
>   think
> it is possible to perform such checks without there being discriminatory
> motives behind. The *intent* is not to discriminate, just a honest
> intent of catching illegal immigrants. (Of course you can argue that
> this is not the most efficient way of doing that, but I'm talking about
> motivations and intent. Why is discrimination and racism always assumed
> as such? Do we always have to assume the worst about everything and
> everybody?)

Because it is racial prejudgment that brings the person to being 
stopped.  Not anything they've done, not any specific crime they've 
committed.  No probable cause for the stop.

>   That was, more or less, my original point in this entire thread, even
> if I didn't know how to express myself this clearly back then.
> 
>> >   You mean there are people who are complaining about the police
>> >   investigating
>> > only males in rape cases?
> 
>> I'm saying that you don't know the details of every investigation that
>> has ever taken place regarding rape cases in the US.  Or you have a
>> really strange hobby.  The fact that you (or I) are not aware of an
>> instance of this doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
> 
>   Of course there always are exceptions. I was talking about normal
> occurrences. I don't think it's at all usual for people to complain
> about such a thing.

I think if someone is wrongly accused (and asking for a DNA sample can be 
seen as an accusation) because they declined to provide a DNA sample, 
then yes, it would be usual to complain.  The 5th amendment of the US 
constitution allows people to decline to answer questions or to not 
incriminate themselves.

In fact, the advice I see most often from people in law enforcement is 
"don't answer questions or provide anything that could be used against 
you in any way unless you have consulted a lawyer".  The police *can* 
ask, but the citizen can refuse and require that the officer obtain a 
warrant - and in order to obtain a warrant, the police have to 
demonstrate that there is probable cause to guess that the suspect 
committed the crime - in other words, the evidence the police have to 
that point has to reasonably suggest that the person they're 
investigating committed the crime; they can't ask for it because they 
think there's a chance - they can't go on a hunch or gut feeling.

>> >   I have heard about criminal profilers on the police force who try
>> >   to
>> > get a picture of what kind of person the criminal might be based on
>> > the available clues, and this can include things like ethnicity (such
>> > as for example "serial killers are typically white middle-aged
>> > males"), but maybe that's just in TV series and movies?
> 
>> You're talking about a specific crime.  The point is that there is no
>> *specific* crime in the case of enforcing the AZ law.  In order to
>> prosecute a crime, the prosecution must be able to state with
>> specificity what crime was committed and when.
> 
>   Well, one *could* argue that illegal immigration *is* a specific,
> existing crime being committed right now... (Not that this justifies
> draconian laws and discrimination, but still...)

No, it's not a specific existing crime - because there's no date/time 
that the "event" took place.  If you can tie the person specifically to a 
specific border crossing, then yes, there is - but "just being" isn't a 
crime.

A person can't be arrested for having blue eyes because people with blue 
eyes are more likely to use drugs.  Someone with blue eyes can be 
arrested, though, if the police can show that that specific individual is 
a drug dealer.

So in order for the police to stop someone for being an illegal 
immigrant, they have to be able to demonstrate that that *specific 
individual* is *likely* to be an illegal immigrant - and that 
determination cannot be based on race, religion, or other demographic 
statistical factors (unless, again, they can point to a specific instance 
of illegal entry and say "we suspect this person entered the country 
illegally at such and such time and date and physical location.".

Jim

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On Mon, 03 May 2010 16:22:04 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> On Mon, 03 May 2010 14:40:52 -0400, Warp wrote:
> 
>> >   I consider myself to be the exact opposite of a racist in the sense
>> >   that
>> > I *couldn't care less* about "race" or skin color or anything.
> 
>> When you say "race matters", look out, you're making a distinction
>> based on race, whether you want to admit it or not.
> 
>   On the contrary: I'm *not* making any distinction based on race. To me
> it doesn't matter what race somebody might represent.

Um, you are, if you say "90% of illegal immigrants are of Hispanic 
origin, so we should stop people of Hispanic origin in order to ensure 
they're here legally".  That's the textbook definition of racial 
profiling.

Jim

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On Mon, 03 May 2010 13:31:46 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> supposed to be 100% accurate (or better than 99% accurate),
> 
> Read "better than 99% accurate" as "less than 3 million false positives"
> in a nation-wide DNA database.

True....

>> how exactly does one challenge that if it's supposed to be infallible?
> 
> To be fair, that's a pretty damn easy thing to challenge. "Here, take my
> DNA again."
> 
> Of course, every accused criminal will try this approach, at which
> point, what did you save by doing a giant collection in the first place.

Unless of course the problem is caused by contamination of the crime 
scene, planting of DNA evidence, or contamination of the evidence after 
it's collected.

>> but the law sets the police up so as
>> to be required to engage in racial profiling.
> 
> It's also a witch-trial law. If someone reports you as illegal, the
> police are required to come and make you prove you're not.

Yep.

Jim

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> You've said that there's nothing wrong with law enforcement asking random 
> people for their ID.

  In fact, what I have done is to oppose the idea that law enforcement asking
random people for their ID (or doing other types of checking) is *always* a
bad thing, which seemed to be what was being suggested here. That's a bit
different from claiming that it's always a good thing.

  As I said, the police checks random drivers here, and I don't see it as a
bad thing. Hence it's not *always* a bad thing.

> The Arizona law makes "being brown in public or private places in 
> Arizona" a crime.

  I have hard time believing the law actually says that...

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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