You really can't, because black people are arrested, tried and convicted WAY disproportionately to the actual rate of crimes. eg white people smoke weed as much or more than black people, and are arrested at a far lower rate for it.
These statistics don't involve a trial or conviction. It's based entirely on the police report when the crime was reported and only includes the race of the offender when that information is known.
A minority of police shootings involve violent crime. You will also notice that nonviolent crimes are the biggest issue, with BLM most concerned about things like Eric Garner or Tamir Rice, who was twelve years old.
"Perusal of Table 4 reveals that suspects were an average age of 36, with whites somewhat older
than blacks. Thirty-nine percent of the suspects were involved in a violent crime, 17% in a property
crime, and 5% in a drug crime. Hispanics were less likely to be involved in a violent crime,
while blacks were more likely to be involved in a property crime than whites or Hispanics.
Blacks are least likely to be armed."
Per my sibling comment, laypeople often assume the UCR cannot be trustworthy because it is collected, compiled, and analyzed by policing agencies; however, it's data are supported by the national crime victimization survey, whose data comes from victims and is collected and compiled by the justice department. So your point is even stronger than you made it out to appear. :)
The national crime victimization survey largely agreed with the FBI's Unified Crime Report (on matters of race and violent crimes, anyway). The latter is data collected by policing agencies and the former comes from victims. If law enforcement discriminated against Blacks, we would expect a discrepancy between these reports (it's possible that the victims are simply "equally racist", but given that the victims of black offenders are themselves overwhelmingly black, this is unlikely). Also, there have been a few other studies like this one[1] which don't find anti-black bias in sentencing, conviction, etc. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that the conclusion of a racist criminal justice system is not entirely supported by the evidence.
One anecdote about the weed thing, since that comes up so often--I live in Chicago and apart from festivals, I never see white people strolling around downtown smoking weed, but I do see this probably once a month, and the user is consistently black. The white people I know who use marijuana do so at home and out of public view. This is just an anecdote, but cultural differences in usage could better explain the arrest discrepancy than police racism. At least I would like to discontinue the trend of assuming that every gap is necessarily and automatically attributable to discrimination.
"The Times analysis found that among the largest police departments in each of those four states, black drivers were between 1.5 and 5.2 times more likely to have their cars searched than white drivers. These searches occur with the consent of the driver, so the officer doesn't need to meet any legal standard, like probable cause, to initiate one. [...] More recent figures from 2014 and 2015 published by the New York Times show blacks who are searched are around 20 percent less likely to be carrying contraband than whites who are searched. "
Studies have also shown that disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among men when adjusted for population (50% of the population are men but 96% of those shot by police are men).
Violent crime rates are the more useful base rate than the general population. This is the best study I've seen to date that attempts to take into account rates of violent crime: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
No, the bank doesn't need to report it, they have transaction records on file. It's specifically about moving cash in excess of 10k euros. It's the same i nthe US, you have to report cash payments in excess to $10k to the IRS.
In Greece they have even extended this to other comodities such as gold and you have to report it regardless if you're moving it or not, otherwise they can freely confiscate it.
> (At least in the U.S. Do EU citizens have to report themselves for such transactions?)
No, but transactions over X € must be conducted using a traceable medium - cheques, credit cards, bank transfer, sometimes Bitcoin. X varies by country.
Conducting transactions above X € in cash doesn't automatically constitute criminal money laundering, of course, it just gets fined.
If a police officer pulls me over and finds that I was driving without a license, they aren't going to let me drive away and file a case the next day. They're going to impound my car. Following that same logic, if a jurisdiction requires licenses for commercial taxi drivers, then operating as a taxi without that license will result in your car being impounded. Why do you feel these should be treated differently?
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know. It just seems to me that if you use infrastructure that crosses state borders, e.g. a telephone or a computer network, to facilitate a crime committed in a state the Federal government has at least some reason to bring a criminal case. I suspect it'd be a law passed under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution.
Sure, but what federal law was broken? I wasn't aware that the federal government enforces local city regulations just because money is moving between states.
I mean, if the feds really wanted to get in to it, Uber is probably guilty of money laundering.
Their service was illegal under local law, Uber moved the money from their illegal activity in to the banking system and across state lines and a slew of other things that would likely trigger the very broad money laundering laws. Interstate transfer of proceeds from a criminal activity is almost certainly an activity the feds can look into.
I'm guessing the feds can also "assist" the local jurisdictions in the case that the local criminals are an interstate organization that has been committing a slew of crimes across the nation.
Because the federal government has jurisdiction over many things that cross state lines. Even if you personally never cross a state line, if you're coordinating people in multiple states to break laws, and sending information to them about what to do and how, there's a good chance you're on the wrong side of some federal laws.
"The nature of any potential federal criminal violation, and the likelihood of anyone being charged, is unclear. The investigation is still in its early stages, the sources said."
Any organization that is suspected of committing one of a list of crimes enumerated in that article, and engages in activity across state lines, falls under federal jurisdiction. In this case, I'm guessing the charge is obstruction of justice. But I'm not a lawyer, and they could be using something other than RICO to press this case
Point taken. I still think it's absurd to have a federal investigation over some city's taxi regulations being evaded, but at least I can follow the potential legal logic. Thanks for the info.
So they misled investigators throughout multiple cities across the United States. Therefore, it's a federal issue. This really isn't that hard to understand.
No. Why it can be made a federal issue has been successfully outlined by others in this thread. Misleading investigators throughout multiple cities, however, isn't the reason.
It seems to be when it's coordinated by single organization across state lines. That's what turns it from a series of totally unrelated crimes in different states into one nation-wide criminal operation.
If any of the false information presented to local regulators feeds into reports those local officials file with the feds (such as for funding or other purposes), yes. Didn't we just have the discussion about how lying to the feds, even indirectly, is a crime?
It might also fit into the federal wire fraud statute (which would also potentially get it into RICO territory.)
How is it an overreach to define finding who is a LEO and feeding them false information to deceive them and waste their time as obstruction of justice?
Because protectionist taxi regulations enacted and enforced by local officials are a local issue. Just because the DOJ can shoehorn a legal argument together to assert jurisdiction doesn't mean it isn't yet another overreach by the already bloated bureaucracy known as the United States government.
If you start with the assumption that the US federal government is bloated and overreaching as a principle, then no matter the facts, you'll still arrive at the conclusion that the US federal government is bloated and overreaching. Logic isn't really relevant.
The whole point of RICO is to allow the feds to intervene when the criminal organization is too large and powerful for local governments to be able to effectively prosecute them. This is exactly what RICO was designed for.
It's not out of scope. Uber is a corrupt organization.
Here's to hoping that one of Travis Kalanick's numerous criminal actions (such as his decision to steal Google's self-driving tech) comes home to roost. There's now a material chance that Ubers investors (and many employees) will get zeroed out due to their reckless, willful, criminal actions.
Do you work for a taxi association? See how that pointless allegation swings both ways?
If you knew anything about civil litigation, you'd know that what is alleged in lawsuit filings is utterly pointless drivel as far as trying to use it to substantiate a point in a debate. Lawsuit allegations don't have to be factually true, which is why I asked where the allegation has actually been proven.
He is playing the word game, what a technical person might call a "backdoor" he will call a "front-door" or something else, so there's technically not a "backdoor" and he technically didn't lie, even if he wants what many of us geeks would indeed call a "backdoor". It's sort of how the NSA redefines the dictionary meaning of common sense words to mean something else, (for example something like: "surveillance" means breaking into someone's home to plant a bug in there, so technically almost no one is under that definition of "surveillance", even if capturing our emails, hacking webcams etc. would be considered surveillance as well, but since no one broke in to plant a physical bug, that's not "surveillance" - it's just a words game).
I thought it was interesting that he talked about breaking into other people's devices while specifying how they would harden their own systems. "We don't want you looking at our stuff, but your stuff is fair game."
Have you adjusted for crime rates?