There’s nothing in the article that indicates that cooperating with the enquiry would have been problematic (he appears to have a physical appearance that wouldn’t trigger race-based police prejudices). I do mistrust US police in general, but it must be a bit annoying for them for every good faith investigation direction to be treated adversarially like this.
The other thing to be said here is that, despite the risks of cooperating with a police enquiry, if the choice is between them using objective geolocation data to identify possible leads, versus them stopping off for some donuts before driving around until they find a black guy, then we surely all agree which is preferable.
I guess my justification for my comment is along the lines of "it takes compromise for two parties to start getting along and start improving things". One small compromise that could be made is for white people who don't need to worry about false conviction to not treat a situation like this adversarially. Possibly, that could ultimately lead to improved community relations and an abatement of police racism and general brutality and despicability.
The risk you're accepting by believing it's a "good faith investigation" is too high. If it is, great. If it's not, you've helped them build a case against you.
I also think you're losing perspective: it was just some nobody at the local police station investigating a theft of jewelry from some old woman! I bet it would have been totally fine if he'd popped in and chatted to the detective in question.
It has nothing to do with race, and it's not US-specific. I'm from Germany, I'm ethnically German, I'm not visibly identifiable as a religious, political or sexual-orientation minority. The risk for me to cooperate with the police in Germany (where the police is less trigger happy than in the US) is still too high. Being black in the US just increases that risk by a large amount.
The general advise for everyone is: cooperate to the extent required by law, but don't say anything beyond that unless your lawyer is present. The police are not your friends, if they want to talk to you and you're not 100% sure it's because you got robbed or saw what happened and are obviously and exclusively treated as a victim/witness, they can and will use anything you say against you. Their incentives are solving cases, not serving justice. Their KPIs aren't destroyed if it turns out they went after an innocent citizen, and if they succeed in building a case against an innocent citizen, they are still rewarded, because it does not matter whether you are innocent, it only matters what the judge says you are. The police are not your friends.
You shouldn't drive a car into a wall at 60mph, because the risk to your health is too high. Driving it into a wall at 90mph increases that risk. Are you suggesting it's safe to do at 60mph because it's more dangerous at 90mph?
The fundamental problem isn't 60 or 90mph, the fundamental problem is driving a car into a wall. For police interaction, the fundamental problem isn't being white or black, male or female, it's being on the wrong side of the table.
No, you're still misunderstanding, apparently. Go back to reading what I originally wrote if that helps.
The risk existing and being too high to make it advisable to talk to the police has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with police vs citizen. The relative risk is different for different groups (class, sex/gender, race being the major ones, in that order), but that has nothing to do with the risk itself being there for everyone and therefore the advice being the same for everyone: don't talk to the police, they are not your friends and they are not on your side.
> that has nothing to do with the risk itself being there for everyone
Your words there are clear, and correct.
> it has nothing to do with race.
Your claim there was unclear (what is "it"?) but appeared to be making far too broad a claim.
If "it" is "the degree of worry that you might be falsely convicted", then you're simply wrong: race is a very significant factor in that degree of worry, at least in the USA.
I guess you believe that the baseline degree of worry for white people and black/latino people alike is so unacceptably high that the additional worry attributable to race is irrelevant. To be blunt, I think that is both unsympathetic and neurotic, and I think you might want to consider whether you really have enough knowledge of what life is like for black people in US cities. I am no expert there either, but I err on the side of believing them when they say that there is a non-negligible component of worry attributable to race.
> If "it" is "the degree of worry that you might be falsely convicted", then you're simply wrong: race is a very significant factor in that degree of worry, at least in the USA.
It is the risk being too high. It's higher for a poor black man than for a rich white woman, but it's too high even for the rich white woman to talk to the police when she's a suspect. It's too high for everyone.
Please don't turn this site into a "acknowledge your privilege, heathen"-Twitter-clone. Read what people write, assume good faith, and if you don't understand something, ask. Don't just go "hey, I choose to ignore 90% of what you wrote, make up the gaps in my head and then reply to that". If anyone wanted that, there are Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.
I’ve read and understood everything you’ve written. I think your contention that the baseline risk for all is so high that it renders the additional contributions due to race etc to be irrelevant, is absurd, unsympathetic, and neurotic.
You're making so many assumptions here that I don't even know where to start. But let me pick one: Say the bike rider was a person of color (plenty of those to go around), and the investigator was a racist cop (also plenty of those to go around). Do you think the stakes would have been the same?
Reality is a lot more complex than your world perspective.
If it's me you're referring to, take a look at my comments in this thread. I have twice explicitly drawn attention to the fact that cooperating with the police here is only to be contemplated because the person in question is white, which implicitly acknowledges that doing so would be an instance of "white privilege".
All the US cops want is enough to arrest you. He went past her house 3 times. That's enough for most prosecutors. If you can't make bail you'll be jailed until trial - possibly as much as 3 years out. They drag the process out so you will take a plea deal just to see an end to jail time. Never, ever, talk to the cops in the US. They do not care if you are guilty or innocent. To them a good day is everyone they met that day is in jail.
