The "racial impact" on the war on drugs.

Rand Paul asserts that the "racial" disparity of arrests vs usage is simply caused by the fact that it is MUCH easier to patrol inner cities than cookie cutter suburbs. I agree with him.

White people overwhelmingly live in suburbs, and governments don't invest as much in police force in the burbs as they do in the cities.

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The "racial impact" on the war on drugs

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How much of the racial impact is due to stupidity

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Did you REALLY just start a thread asking if black people get arrested more because they are stupid?

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How much of the racial impact is due to stupidity (smoking in public or dealing to strangers) vs not patrolling as much in white areas?

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which race are you presuming is the dumbest?

I think the neighborhood has a lot to do with it....and I think that race is not a causation factor as much as education, % of single family households, average AGI, and neighborhood population density.

I think that police are going to have a greater impact in higher crime areas, which are typically lower income neighborhoods where people are less likely to have decent employment, kids are less likely to have adequate adult supervision, and are more likely to do stupid things....making them an easier target for law enforcement. Law enforcement is typically more visible and better equipped in more densely populated urban areas- especially in areas with crime problems.

When I was younger, we were more worried about our parents or a game warden catching us breaking the law than a sheriff's deputy in our sparsely populated rural area. Sheriff's deputies would only come by our area if someone's cattle got lose. They were probably 20+ minutes away on a typical day.....which is in stark contrast to most major cites, where police are always around.

I do think patrol frequency has something to with it, along with ingrained wealth (you can smoke weed in your house in the suburbs all day long, but if you're in a little tenement you might need to move onto the porch or the balcony or the corner to do the same) , leniency (cops run into some college kids with a bit of weed on them they often confiscate and warn, cops run into the same situation but with a young black male they probably think "dealer" and bust him, etc) and finally the disparities in sentences for the various drugs of choice (meth is the first "white" drug to be treated like say crack-- its not a coincidence that its a drug for poor white people, if stock brokers and sorority girls were smoking meth it'd be a serious but not life altering sentence).

See the thread on the OT