207 blacks in Missoula; 160 blacks pulled over by Missoula police last year

http://missoulian.com/articles/2008/08/16/news/local/news02.txt

Patrol officers are pulling over black people in Missoula at a rate that's four times greater than their representation in census data, officials said this week.

Police Chief Mark Muir delivered the news Wednesday to a Missoula City Council committee, and Ward 1 Councilman Jason Wiener reported it on a local government listserv.

... However, if traffic stops followed census data, patrol officers would have stopped just 40 blacks instead of the 160 they did stop, according to Wiener's report. But Muir told the committee that census data might not reflect Missoula's actual demographic, and the analysis isn't complete.

... The 2000 U.S. Census puts the population of the city of Missoula at 57,053. Blacks account for 207 of the total, or 0.4 percent.

through there. It is a college town though so there are probably students and academics there who are not white.

and not in a flattering way for the popo.

“Every now and then, you get a complaint about someone feeling like the contact may have been a result of their ethnicity, but it's very, very few,"

If a person suspects a cop pulled them over because of racist profiling (more accurate term than racial profiling, imho), they aren't all that likely to react by saying "I think you pulled me over because you don't like black people." Most likely they'd keep their hands on the steering wheel and do a whole lot of yes sir/yes mams and try to get out of the situation without the cop claiming they were uncooperative and escalating it into violence.

DWB comes with a host of predictable behaviors which are counted on to keep those "complaints" mighty low

8X as often as white men.

:kick:

from driving, or exercising any other of their rights, will be less likely to show up to vote on election day.

This kind of "damping down" is classic suppression of civil participation.

K&R.

If you're in the South, next time you buy gas check the bumper sticker display at the cashier station. You'll probably find one that says "I'm not speeding, I'm qualifying."

On Interstate 90--the freeway that runs right through the middle of Missoula--they pull over a lot of people for driving fast enough to take the pole at Martinsville, Richmond and Darlington, all tracks where qualifying speed is about 100mph. And yes, the city police go up on I-90--it's the quickest way to get from the smoke jumper school on the west side of town to the trailer court on the east side.

Until I know WHERE in Missoula these stops occurred, I won't know if we're looking at a DWB problem, or if 120 out-of-area blacks were trying to race their way into the Southern 500. Either way's possible.

This is clearly racism, just like it was clearly racist when the NJ State Troopers mostly just pulled over black people.

Montana is ALSO on the longest east-west Interstate freeway in America. Lots of people of all races drive that freeway.

Allow me to reminisce a bit: The speed limit on I-90 through Montana used to be Reasonable and Prudent. They finally set it to 85 because people were defining "reasonable and prudent" as "top speed in a Lamborghini Murcielago." The law was written this way because Montana I-90 is 560 miles long, and it's reasonably straight, reasonably flat and reasonably uncrowded, so if you felt it was prudent to drive the 120 miles from Missoula to Butte in an hour and a half instead of two hours, the cops would leave you alone.

You STILL have assholes trying to go 100mph-plus on that freeway.

Now let me ask you: if you're a cop and someone blows past you doing 115mph, are you going to check what race he is, or are you going to pull him over?

(The comment about the South was to bring a semi-relevant comparison into the mix: driving fast enough to win the pole at Martinsville--97mph--will get you a $25 traffic ticket in Montana.)

Now, it could easily be racism. I didn't discount that possibility at all--racist asshole cops are not uncommon. But if it turns out the cops are just cruising I-90 pulling over everyone doing over 95, they are GOING to get a bunch of black people. I assume black guys with fast cars like to put their foot into it as much as white guys with fast cars do.

So to really solve this, we need some information we don't have here, namely the number of tickets written on the Interstate and how many of those tickets were written to out-of-state motorists.

It wouldn't surprise me, I'm from MT and I've never heard of any police force in those small towns being anything but total a-holes. In my hometown, Cut Bank, we had the county sheriff and a deputy go to prison for ripping off some govt program etc. But since the city borders a reservation, you can see a stark difference in how races are treated too. More than anything though, they just aren't all that good at their jobs.

not too many people who've been abused actually report the abuse, esp not to the abuser.

hey, you! you're raping me!
hey, you! you're a racist pig!
hey, you! you're profiling me!

I'm thinking usually a person is focused on survival, not antagonizing the person in power with the truth.

that all of the black people in Montana are really, really, bad drivers. Gotta look at all of the angles ya know.

They'd all be on first name terms and therefor no reason to pull anyone over at all.

No sirree, that's not harassment at all.

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If things like broken tail lights, noisy muffler, cracked windshield, then I would expect a higher % of poorer people would be pulled over.

What's the % of blacks in the lower socio-economic group, and is that group being pulled over at the same rate as the blacks?

Missoula is a college town. It's campus has a fair number of frats and sororities surrounding the campus.

So the figures could very easily get very, very skewed.