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Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
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An awful article, but par for the course for the Halifax examiner.
They offer no real evidence that Halifax is worse than anywhere else in North America. Carding was worse in Toronto than the street checks are in Halifax. The rate was higher and the practice was more invasive.
The street check rate was
6 times higher for black people than white, not 9. But it was also much higher for males than females and it was higher for whites than Asians. I guess the Halifax police are pro-feminist Asian supremacists. The street check seems to match the rate at which these groups are charged. These accusations of racism are generally assuming that the underlying rate of criminality across all of these groups is identical, which is probably not reality. I would guess that the real story behind the street check rates is that there are some high crime parts of the city where there are a lot of checks, and where demographics skew more heavily toward black people. This is not a good situation but in such an environment if the police do their job even-handedly there will still be disparities when the statistics are broken down by race.
It's a touchy issue and it could be that street checks are unfair and it is better to get rid of them. But it's wrong to take incomplete data from one narrow domain and use it to condemn the whole city.