I got pulled over about a month ago when I was driving on the freeway in the pre-dawn hours to the airport for an early morning flight. I was going the speed limit in the far right lane when he lit me up (always disconcerting when it happens).
He had the bright spotlights on from behind and he used his loudspeakers to tell me to roll down all four windows, obviously worried the car was full of gangbangers or drug cartel members.
Then he walked up to the passenger window, realized he had pulled over an old white guy wearing khakis and a short sleeve dress shirt, and then mumbled some bullshit excuse about giving me a warning for failing to signal a lane change and I was free to go. It was obviously just a pretext to pull me over because he thought there were some bad guys in the car.
And I didn’t mind at all. That’s how it is supposed to work.
Had I been given a ticket and had to deal with that hassle and bullshit for something so minor and made up, then yes. I would have been extremely bothered by the whole thing. But aside from wasting 5 minutes on the side of the road, no. He did the right thing and let me go and went on looking for the real bad guys instead of acting as a minor-league tax collector for the county.
BS, not really. It takes some introspection to reveal that. I was pulled over for a DUI whan I was a grad student. Cuffed, jailed, 'public defender', guilty of a misdemeanor. I derserved it. In retrospect, I'm glad it happened. 'That's how it is supposed to work'.
Definitely wasn't flashing signal for a car full of blacks (especially at 5:00 in the morning) but he wasn't looking for those. He was looking for Mexicans and I can easily see how he thought he might have found some given that type of vehicle here in Houston.
Without meaning (too much) disparagement to LEOs, it's also a lot safer rousting a business owner for mistakes in his paperwork than extracting illegally owned guns from known felons
That decision is not the police's, but federal prosecutors'. The federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), carries a maximum of 15 years' imprisonment, far exceeding most, if not all, of the maximum penalties for violations of analogous state statutes.
The upshot is that, if a defendant is selected for federal prosecution on a gun charge, there are pretty good reasons for it. Two of the most common reasons are that (1) the defendant is a problem child in the area who has a lot else going on (murders, assaults, drug dealing), who (2) repeatedly escapes serious punishment in state prosecution through witness intimidation, prosecutorial laziness, and/or state judges' anticarceral philosophies.
A federal FIP charge is easy to prove and under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines reliably leads to imprisonment. Incapacitating the person is a net plus for the community, and has the ancillary benefit of giving law enforcement time to investigate more serious crime that the defendant was involved in or knows about.
So it's the feds doing what the local commonwealth's attorney won't. I'd assumed the perp had gotten a civil rights lawyer to go to federal court. That's what they did here when the county sheriff arrested too many drunk Hispanics.
Southern California law enforcement started rounding up gangs about 20 years ago from top to bottom (not just the kingpins) and sending them to federal prisons thousands of miles away on federal RICO charges where their girlfriends couldn't drop by on visiting hours and get orders for the guys left on the street (if any).
Back then, it probably worked. Nowadays, the Bureau of Prisons is helpless to stop contraband cell phones being heaved over fences or dropped in by drones.
All of the questions of legal "disproportionality" stem from the Griggs-v.-Duke-spawned precept of "disparate impact". But the law—particularly the common law—isn't supposed to work that way. You are supposed to be prosecuted or freed based on whether or not you committed a crime, not based on whether or not your prosecution falls within or without a preconceived quota.
"Disparate impact" is unconstitutional and an affront to justice generally. Unfortunately it has also been US law for the last half century. Maybe the Vibe Shift and Students v. Harvard will turn the tide against "disparate impact", as seems to have happened at this Appellate Court. But ultimately the Supreme Court will have to overrule the Disparate Impact doctrine explicitly, as Dobbs did to Roe, and Students v. Harvard did to affirmative action. Maybe this will be case that does it?
The legal doctrine of "disparate impact" is itself based on the obviously and provably false assumption that all US races must behave exactly the same at all times, now and forever, despite the fact that nothing in nature is always equal, and that the government accepts and promotes gross ethnic disparities in other spheres. So avoiding a respawn of the toxic "disparate impact" concept requires the polity to grow up and accept the facts of life and stop trying to enforce a mollifying fantasy. Will the passing of the Boomers suffice?
It's a good question, but probably too early to answer.
An Executive Order obviously can't overrule a Supreme Court decision, but the original Griggs decision didn't create the entire Disparate Impact doctrine at once, much of it subsequently grew out of regulatory decisions (and executive orders), so Trump's EO can demolish some of the peripheral structure.
Possibly the core Griggs holding could become sort of dead letter law: technically valid but practically unused, but much more likely is that someone (maybe Keith Moore) will eventually get a case before SCOTUS where Disparate Impact itself is at issue, and then the outcome will depend on whomever happens to be wearing the Nine Black Robes at that moment.
Still, the omens are favorable. Back in 2007, relentless straddler Justice Roberts already wrote in a plurality opinion that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race", a seemingly obvious bon mot that directly indicts the leftist presumption of justice through social engineering. Leftist-intelligentsia outlets such as The New Yorker, their antennae ever sensitive to tremors in their foundational lies, have been fretting that Affirmative Action won't survive and are scheming what to do about it.
With Trump, several Supreme Court rulings against affirmative action and anti-white discrimination, and the general vibe shift, disparate impact seems doomed. Going back to merit cripples the power of not just the Democratic Party but the entire woke progressive left, and Trump knows it.
Thank you for the discussion on "disparate impact"; it's so lacking in legal thought and unconstitutional that it could have been written by Thurgood Marshall!
Well, the Griggs decision was authored by Warren Burger (with Marshall's concurrence), but AFAICT the concept itself was originally cooked up by white leftist academics from whom it infected the legal process.
Social justice thinking doesn't only screw over individuals, it also screws over the entire society who have to live with Social Justice's maladaptive consequences. So "social justice" isn't even _social_ or _just_ on its own terms.
Duke Energy did not use tests until the federal courts order them to stop discriminating directly of blacks. Thus, the use of a general IQ test was not done to pursue a much better workforce but to just keep blacks out of the higher paying jobs just like the blatantly racist hiring practices had before the Civil Rights Acts were passed.
As true as all that is, it's sort of irrelevant under the facts of this case. In U.S. v. Moore, you had an undisputed circumstance possibly unique in the history of traffic stops: on the same evening in December 2023, these cops had previously stopped two other cars with the same temporary tag number as Moore's. Even assuming these cops could tell Moore was black before walking up to his window, which is doubtful in this age of near-ubiquitous window tint and obstructive C-pillars, the existence of a third temporary tag with the same number objectively justifies the stop. If the judge is straight not crooked, the only way Moore wins is if his expert witnesses (whose testimony concededly was the sole foundation of the ruling) testified that known duplicate tags are ignored in the case of whote drivers, and there was no such showing.
Well, Moore won in the District Court with Judge Gibney, who appears to be corrupted only by wokeness. The basis of the Gibney's ruling was "disparate impact", even though—as you say—that seems factually absurd in this case. Apparently, the judge had some six month dataset that he said showed bias and therefore Moore is innocent. Yeah, that doesn't make sense, but that's woke pseudo-logic for you.
It sounds like you read the ruling. Where did you find it?
Nothing in American society is more obvious than the chasm between black criminality and everyone else, and for three generations it’s basically the most forbidden topic to openly address. On the one hand, I do think there is something of a vibe shift going on when it comes to honesty on this. On the other hand, blacks are concentrated in areas where they have significant political influence and their political sponsors will do just about anything to avoid real consequences.
Ultimately I think this probably leads to increased stratification of society as people vote with their feet, and a lot of mid sized cities will lose population, as we have seen before and which was partly halted or reversed in the aughts and teens. The city I live in is about 30 percent black and has been losing population every year since 2020. Meanwhile multiple suburbs have been deliberately crafting their land use so they have sufficient office, shopping and restaurants so their residents have no need to travel to the urban core for any reason other than a pro sports game. This pattern is present all over the country and means cities will get even more broke and dysfunctional. Red state legislatures will leave these cities to their fates but blue states will probably force taxpayers elsewhere to subsidize them as their tax bases erode and expenses rise.
Indeed. The main difference is that overall black political and cultural power will be significantly less in the years ahead than it was then, and that will affect how any assistance is doled out. Urban renewal initiatives in the past poured billions into public housing agencies, non-profits, and city governments that mostly squandered it on quixotic initiatives or outright graft. The same happened during Covid through ARPA and the Inflation Reduction Act, but that money is basically all spent now and with nothing to show for it. My city, like others, adopted the fiction that non-profits who employ "violence interruptors" would tamp down crime and spent huge amounts of ARPA funds to support them, but obviously it didn't work and it seems like a lot of our violence interruptors have their lives interrupted by violence themselves.
I don't think a lot of the Dems that run our cities understand that the twin effects of the 2020 riots and 2021 lockdowns totally killed the return-to-the-cities momentum that had building the previous 15 years and that's over for at least a generation. This means employers/white collar employees and their money leaving downtown offices for suburban locations, less private development investment, fewer families and therefore public school systems operating far more buildings than they actually needs, etc. They are going to preside over cities that are losing residents and revenue as infrastructure crumbles, and I don't think the surrounding communities are going to have much pity, they will just do what they can to keep people leaving the cities below a certain income level out.
It’s also rough on city public transit systems. In the SF Bay area BART has always run at a loss, but the pandemic effects you mention have cut ridership so severely that the whole system is in danger of bankruptcy.
There will be a lot of flailing by politicos as a result, no doubt. The central business district of my city has high office vacancy so some restaurants and things like that have closed, plus you have homeless people scattered around along with "youths" at night and the weekend. What was our city council's response to try and clean things up so it still feels welcoming to visitors and help businesses? I special tax on commercial property owners downtown to fund more workers to clean things up!
Good point. I live in Hong Kong, which has one of the world's best public transit systems, and I've ridden local buses and trains in many countries, the USA included. Feeling safe on public transport is utterly crucial to its success. This is just one of the rich panoply of unpleasant 'issues' that's been swept under the rug for decades in the USA, as progressive public transport fans whine about why they can't have nice trains like the Europeans.
> This means employers/white collar employees and their money leaving downtown offices for suburban locations, less private development investment, fewer families and therefore public school systems operating far more buildings than they actually needs, etc. They are going to preside over cities that are losing residents and revenue as infrastructure crumbles, and I don't think the surrounding communities are going to have much pity, they will just do what they can to keep people leaving the cities below a certain income level out. <
Yep, it was crazy to see libs say the path back for dying rust belt towns was to turn them into favelas dominated by random ethnic groups from abroad. Who knows what alien blood feuds could come to dominate local politics?
The demented disparate impact idea is particularly damaging in our public schools. Our Jr. High School had a tough discipline regime that required following simple rules to ensure a safe environment in the classroom and throughout the rest of the school. Break the rules, face the consequences. That changed when the civil rights division of the Department of Education invoked new rules on school officials to use the disparate impact philosophy to prevent most discipline in the classroom. There was a marked rise in fights, misconduct and disrespect in the classroom and the halls. We had a large retention problem with experienced teachers and administrators which effectively turned the classrooms over to a small group of “students “ who were more than willing to take charge.
The school has gone from having a stellar reputation for providing a good education to having low ratings for safety and quality of the educational environment.
I am a proponent of the 5% rule. If you asked a school’s teachers, or neighborhood leaders to identify the 5% of students whose removal from the school would have a positive impact upon school performance and gave that 5% the boot, things would improve significantly in short order.
All children are entitled to a public education. If you put all the 5% kids in one scary special school what do you do with the worst 5% of kids there?
Schools have to be designed and run to each deal with the children who turn up locally. I think schools are making a lot of bad decisions but I also think this is genuinely inherently challenging to do, which is part of why they cycle through so many fads they hope will make it easier.
Maybe the question is, since most public schools now are daycare centers with free lunch and phone charging, why not keep that status for the few kids whose education wouldn’t be affected by the change anyway, while the rest of the schools are converted back to places to learn?
Because cynicism when applied directly to children is a corrosive substance
Adult cynicism is useful in thinking sensibly about how to raise and educate children, but it is not good to prepare an acid bath of it to plop kids into.
I would recommend signing up to be a substitute teacher if you’re able. I certainly understand that we all have lives. I was a regular teacher, the a substitute later in life. I was a popular substitute because, in the words of one of my students, I was tough but fair and I made the classroom a place where everyone who wanted to could learn. I did that because I was willing to use the discipline that was available to move those who didn’t want to learn to another environment. That discipline is rarely available anymore and the students who wanted to learn are being punished for it. That’s my experience, others may have other experiences but I haven’t met any.
It’s interesting that blacks kill themselves at twice the white rate in car accidents in Richmond; more interesting to know would be the rate at which they kill other races in car wrecks.
While it is inherently challenging, I'd suggest you're missing the point of his post as well as ignoring a century of history in the U.S. While there have always been disruptive and violent students, we DID know how to deal with them--through discipline--until the 1970's, when the Feds got involved. We now allow the 5% to destroy the education of the other 95%. (As an aside, until the Great Society destroyed the black family, rates of black student truancy & violence were not much worse than that of Whites. Thanks, liberals.)
You’re looking at this backwards. This solution improves schooling for 95%, which you should applaud. Now that the problematic 5% have been separated, we can try various targeted solutions for their problems, and find out what works. It’s a win all around.
Eventually you get down to just a few kids and, unfortunately, you can’t save them all. But if you spend all your time and energy on the few, you are liable to lose the rest.
Do you realize there was a time when the courts simply turned their backs on questions of school administration? The reasonable assumption was that school superintendents/principals were motivated by good faith, and that if they kicked someone out it was likely for a good reason. Coincidentally, that judicial attitude ended right around the time of the Griggs decision.
Also note that a number of school shooters benefited from disparate impact theory. They weren’t sufficiently restrained/treated/punished early on because that would have made the numbers look bad, so they got to skate until they murdered. Then the gun got blamed.
[The three judges favoring the Sailer position (?) that it's okay to stop Blacks on the road at a higher rate on suspicion of crimes]
--> Niemeyer (b.1941, White-Protestant),
--> Harris (b.1962, Jewish),
--> Berner (b.1965, Jewish and Israel dual-citizen).
.
[The one judge who said it's RACIST, and therefore banned, to stop Blacks at a higher rate on the road on suspicion of crimes]
--> Gibney (b.1951, White-Catholic).
__________
Profiles for each:
1.) PAUL V. NIEMEYER (b.1941): White-Protestant. Grew up in Princeton, Washington, New York, and Notre Dame. His father, Gerhart Niemeyer, was of German origin (emig. from Europe to the USA in 1937, but not Jewish). The father emerges in the 1940s-50s as a principled Western-Tradition conservative and friend of William F. Buckley from mid-1950s onward, which shaped also outline of son Paul (the now-judge)'s outlook. Paul Niemeyer's schools: Kenyon College, BA; University of Munich; Notre Dame, JD. Appointed to his high judgeship (US Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit) in 1990 (George H. W. Bush).
2.) PAMELA A. HARRIS (b.1962): Jewish. Grew up in Hartford, Connecticut and later in Bethesda, Maryland. Yale BA, JD. Appointed to her high judgeship in 2014 (Obama).
3.) NICOLE G. BERNER (b.1965): Jewish. Grew up in Bay Area California. Israel dual-citizen (has spent many years of her adult life in Israel). LGBT. Berkeley BA, JD. Appointed to her high judgeship in 2024 (by Biden, the most-Jewish administration in US history, which in appointing her characteristically ignored the principle that dual-citizens ought not hold high office).
.
4.) JOHN A. GIBNEY JR. (b.1951): White-Catholic (?), indications of Irish-Catholic origin. Grew up in Westwood, Chester County, Pennsylvania, until leaving ca.1969. He has spoken of how he fondly recalls Westwood's small-town feel and 1950s-60s safe-wholesomeness. Gibney is however associated in professional life entirely with Virginia. College of William & Mary, BA; University of Virginia, JD. Appointed to his high judgeship in 2010 (Obama). "Judge Gibney has been a superb judge." -- Tim Kaine, 2023.
_____
On John A. Gibney's hometown of Westwood PA: It is a "suburb" of the small city of Coatesville, which in turn is now a kind of exurb-city to Philadelphia (in the motoring age).
There are Gibneys associated with Coatesville and vicinity back to the 1870s at least, many/most of them of Irish-Catholic origin. (A famous Pennsylvania-origin Gibney is the journalist and East-Asianist Frank Gibney (b.1924, Scranton). Frank Gibney was an Irish-Catholic by personal origin, even if circulating in Protestant circles much of his life, such as the strong layer of U.S.-White-Protestant missionary-layer long so influential in the study of East Asia.)
The city of Coatesville PA slowly lost population slowly since the 1930s, reached a low-point in the 1980s. It recovered in numbers-terms, if certainly not spiritual terms, when incoming Blacks began to replace the ghosts of the decamped Whites. Many of the thousands of Blacks coming in were probably chain-migrating from nearby Philadelphia. A story repeated in many such post-industrial kind-of places, they successfully colonized a cheap-declining city; and now control it. The city tipped into a Black>White population around early-mid 1990s.
The 2020 Census counted 3,137 Whites in Coatesville, the same number as had lived there in the early 1880s. In 2020 they are watched over by some 10,200 Nonwhites, mostly Blacks. (Coatesville in the 2020s has 2.5% of Chester County's total population but 17.5% of its Blacks. That is to say, most places in Chester County's 750-square-mile area have few Blacks.)
The whole of Chester County's electorate is probably 90% White, but voted for the D-candidate about 57-42 in the 2016, '20, and '24 elections. This same county had voted Republican in all but two of the elections between the Civil War and 2012 (1964 and 2008). Around 1-in-7 White normal-R voters in Chester County PA (1980s to early 2010s baseline) switched to anti-Trump voters in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Overall, about 55% of Chester County PA Whites voted for Hillary, Biden, and then Kamala. John A. Gibney, if he were still around, would've been among that group.
_____
THE VERDICT ON JOHN A. GIBNEY: His overstepping on the law to signal he is against anti-Black Racism was probably based on the usual idealistic biases we see associated with the b.1940s and b.1950s cohort, really of White-Western people all across the world.
His own mental-frame was formed back in the 1950s-60s, in all-White Westwood (a poetic name). By the time local city Coatesville "tipped" into majority-Blacks status, he was long gone. Naturally he could observe similar things elsewhere, but in the years his perception of baseline-reality was formed, it never quite did come up. Or, rather, if it came up it was a problem of Bad Whites down there somewhere.
There may also have been a lingering bias against Virginia by someone from north of Mason-Dixon, quite highly anachronistic in the 2020s, but, then, the man is in his mid-70s now.
This interesting Sailerian analysis omits one key factor: Judge Gibney’s young law clerks who draft his opinions.
Shameless speculation here, but 2020-21 must have been a heck of a time to be a clerk confronting the question whether the police are hopelessly racist.
I suspect Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson's roundly mocked and derided writings this past term were largely authored by woke clerks, and she lacks the intellectual heft and gravitas to tell them to do better.
Yes -- when a sub-midwit like Sotomayer has to explain something to you, it's an indication you're not ringing the right end of that Bell curve . . . .
Judge John A. Gibeny Jr.'s decision that it is unconstitutional to stop Black drivers at a rate he deems too high was read on:
February 12, 2024.
(That's 3 years, 2 months after the arrest [Dec 2020]; and 2 years, 9 months after the federal indictment against the Black driver for the gun-possession charge [May 2021]. The Feb 2024 decision was after the case had worked its way through other courts (?), in 2022-23.)
The case in 2022-23 involved a long series of expert testimony by Racism experts. At the fore of these were:
- Dr. Eli Coston and
- Dr. Marvin Chiles.
(NOTE: "Eli Coston, Ph.D., is an activist-scholar who received their [sic] doctorate in sociology from Stony Brook University, specializing in criminology, gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity. Their [sic] research examines how the intersections of race, class and gender...")
Judge John A. Gibney in his Feb 2024 decision endorsed these Racism Experts' testimony.
According to the Sailer Timeline of Wokeness, though, February 2024's mean Wokeness-scores were well below peak levels seen in 2020 and 2021.
The date of the order dismissing the indictment is mildly relevant, but probably less so than (1) when the hearings were held, and more importantly (2) when the clerks went through their prestigious law schools, a couple of years before they were hired. One can only imagine the environment in a top law school circa 2020-21. Not to mention, these students were perspicacious enough to earn good grades by writing exam answers that agreed with their right-thinking professors’ philosophies.
Any info on crimes committed by the perp since his initial arrest? I assume he was released on bail at some point.
In the 90s, Law & Order and other TV detectives were always threatening ex-cons with violating parole and being sent back to prison if they didn't spill the beans. That trope seems to have disappeared with the black career criminal.
Here is the list of criminal charges in Virginia against KEITH RODNEY MOORE, the Black man arrested in December 2020 in Richmond after the traffic stop:
- May 3, 2007: Arrested for assault on family member. Criminal proceeding began but charges dropped in August 2007;
- September 11, 2010: Arrested for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Convicted; sentenced to 5 years in prison, of which 4 years and 5 months suspended; and to 10 years probation; and to suspension of driver's license for six months.
- July 6, 2012: Manufacturing, selling, giving, or distributing a controlled substance. Convicted, sentenced to 5 years in prison, of which 3 years and 8 months suspended. (Evidently released a lot sooner than the implied 16-month detention, see next item.)
- January 9, 2013: Charged with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and probation violations. Convicted, sentenced to 4 years, 5 months in prison, of which 3 years and 5 months suspended.
- (Released from prison by early 2014?)
- July 2015: Charged with trespassing. Charges dropped;
- February 2016: His supervised probation related to the 2010 conviction was terminated but those from 2012 and 2013 remained.
- November 3, 2016: Driving with a suspended license, and various motor-vehicle violations. Guilty. Paid various fines. Associated probation violations led to an additional sentence of 6 months in jail, of which 5 months and 20 days were suspended. After ten days in jail, he was released.
- August 10, 2019: Operating a motor vehicle without insurance; driving with a suspended license; using fake license plates. Guilty. Paid fines.
- September 28, 2019: Arrested for petty larceny of under $500 not from a person; and destruction of property Charges dropped.
- October 9, 2020: Driving under a suspended license Guilty. Paid fines and an additional period of suspension of driver's license imposed.
- December 5, 2020: Arrested during a traffic stop. Charged with being a nonviolent felon in possession of a gun. ---> This case was unable to be prosecuted due to veto by a high court (Judge John A. Gibney's ruling that Anti-Black Racism was involved). Impasse resolved by a higher U.S. court, August 2025, that it can be prosecuted after all.
- January 4, 2021: Failure to appear before court summons. Sentenced to five days in jail.
- July 12, 2024: A variety of motor-vehicle related offenses: (1.) Operating a vehicle with illegal (excessive) sun-shading/tinting. Guilty, paid fine; (2.) again driving on a suspended license. Guilty, 30 days in jail, of which 24 days suspended and an additional 90-day suspension of license; (3.) operating an uninsured vehicle. Guilty, paid fine; (4.) expired registration. Guilty, paid fines; (5.) failure to wear a seat belt. Guilty, paid fine; (6.) improper license plate. Guilty, paid fine.
- December 10, 2024: Arrested and charged with: (1.) firearm larceny, not from person; (2.) assault and battery on a family member; (3.) violent felon in possession of a weapon. Arraigned and sent remanded into custody (jail), February 6, 2025. A subpoena for key witness, a "Ja'mesha Kiana Marable," issued February 7.
- February 20, 2025: Bond appeal. Keith Rodney Moore remained in custody of the state (i.e., in jail). Last action, April 1, 2025.
At least he hasn't killed anyone. When I was on a VA jury in '91, the Commonwealth had a mandatory minimum 5 year sentence for selling $20 of crack. Juries had the option to impose more (juveniles were sentenced by the judge). We assumed he'd serve half or a third of it. If the judge suspended some, it was out of our hearing.
Who finds and funds these cases? I doubt the guy with the gun and fake tags who ran stop signs and then crashed fleeing the police thinks “ah, mine is an ideal test case for police bias” but somebody did, and found him, and paid for the fees that advanced this case through the system. How did that happen? I am not even mad, I am genuinely befuddled.
Except democrats believe the greatest danger to their personal safety is armed rednecks who would kill them all---if only they weren't fat, lazy and too stupid to figure out a map to the big city.
I was a grad student at Stanford in the 1980s. At that time, the neighborhood adjacent to Palo Alto's wealthiest neighborhood (Old Palo Alto) was East Palo Alto which was a poor, black and crime ridden. I believe it had the highest murder in the US for many of those years. You might ask how could those 2 neighborhoods exist so closely to each other?
I found out the answer: Heavy handed policing!
Before, I went to grad school my dad got me a used car, a lime green 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a landau roof (it was long, but sporty since it only had 2 very heavy doors). In grad school I used the mainframe computer which was only available at night (I did not have the funds to use it during the day) and would drive home at 3 or 4 in the morning. I was pulled over at least once a week. Sometimes the cops, after they saw I was a nerdy white student, would just let me go, although usually though they would claim I was driving poorly and make me do drunk tests (once I actually had to do a breathalyzer). Eventually, I got tired of the harassment and didn't go home until the morning.
I read that last year there were no murders in East Palo and the community was now completely hispanic. I guess being able to replace violent blacks with the hispanic servant class is why wealthy liberals support illegal immigration.
You've identified exactly Ron Unz's position on immigration. By exactly, I mean down to the places, experiences, and population movements/displacements that formatively influenced those views.
My nextdoor neighbor in 1974-75 had the exact same car! She was the principal of Francisco Middle School in SF (2 blocks from a Project) and liked to tell me how wonderful her students were, especially Mike Norris, the A's pitcher: "Oh I just love Mike, he's such a sweet boy!" Around the same time, I asked her husband, a longshoreman, how he thought the Giants were going to do that season. He said, "Ah, they got too many n......"
My first car in the early 80s was a '74 Fleetwood. Merging onto the Beltway was easy--people would get out of the way. Wish new cars rode as smoothly as that beast.
"This seems like a legal question that should have been answered once and for all over the last 60 years, but instead it seems to have hardly been discussed.
Is the purpose of traffic stops purely to improve driving safety? Or is it to improve public safety in general, such as by catching criminals carrying illegal handguns?"
It has been discussed and answered implicitly. IANAL but I watch a lot of YouTube videos on this topic and the ruling from the Supreme Court (as summarized for me by GPT) is:
In the U.S., police can only detain you during a traffic stop for as long as is reasonably necessary to complete the purpose of the stop — which typically means:
Checking your license and registration
Running your information for warrants
Writing a ticket or issuing a warning
This was clarified by the U.S. Supreme Court in Rodriguez v. United States (2015). The Court ruled that extending a stop beyond the time reasonably required to handle the traffic violation — for example, to conduct a dog sniff for drugs — without reasonable suspicion of another crime is unconstitutional.
It's the same issue as "Stop and Frisk". Effective but unconstitutional.
I can tell you that if blacks in Richmond are dying at *only* 2x the rate of whites it’s not for lack of trying. Though to be fair, in the post-reckoning/covid era, running red lights has become endemic in greater Richmond overall. I think people got used to blowing through lights on often empty roads with no cops around and it never went back to normal. It’s somewhat insane, actually.
Re: shootings, some even more insane things have been happening. One historic neighborhood known for nightlife gets taken over in the evening by crowds of black guys milling around in the streets partying while openly carrying (VA is an open carry state).
It’s a shame, because Richmond had something of a renaissance after violent crime including murder plummeted in the late ‘00s. In the ‘20s it’s back up to Baltimore-like levels.
Richmond Whites are overwhelmingly hipsters and DINKs. They definitely aren’t shooty types but are happy to be the worst kind of liberal and crow about racism in the police all while hiding behind it in their nice neighborhoods.
Yes, and a lot of students, gays, and artsy types who don’t remember what cities were like in the 90s. And shop owners who stick the “ICE not welcome here” signs in their windows.
But they, like everyone else there, are all trying to make a life in a city with its own vibe and many advantages. I hope it doesn’t crash and burn, not least because I like it, too.
Definitely one of Americas cool “weird” cities. Unfortunately, they’re becoming all the same and at some point Richmond won’t be noticeably different in character than basically anywhere else.
Also haha “ICE not welcome”…give me an “IRS not welcome” sign.
You’re the first person to actually comment on the handle! Not sure if you had to look it up but you’re a true fan if you got the reference without needing to.
I saw the same headline and had to check to see that Sailer's law of mass shootings applied and it did.
Sergeant Quornelius struck me as being very short (but still taller than the female MP escorting him). I remember Snowdrops having a reputation as near-giants, where Reacher would not be atypical. The US Army is a large and remarkable organisation in so many ways
I try to share these stats with liberal leaning friends and usually just see blank stares / cognitive dissonance as a reaction. The facts make no dent in their worldview, unfortunately.
I got pulled over about a month ago when I was driving on the freeway in the pre-dawn hours to the airport for an early morning flight. I was going the speed limit in the far right lane when he lit me up (always disconcerting when it happens).
He had the bright spotlights on from behind and he used his loudspeakers to tell me to roll down all four windows, obviously worried the car was full of gangbangers or drug cartel members.
Then he walked up to the passenger window, realized he had pulled over an old white guy wearing khakis and a short sleeve dress shirt, and then mumbled some bullshit excuse about giving me a warning for failing to signal a lane change and I was free to go. It was obviously just a pretext to pull me over because he thought there were some bad guys in the car.
And I didn’t mind at all. That’s how it is supposed to work.
> And I didn’t mind at all
Bullshit
Had I been given a ticket and had to deal with that hassle and bullshit for something so minor and made up, then yes. I would have been extremely bothered by the whole thing. But aside from wasting 5 minutes on the side of the road, no. He did the right thing and let me go and went on looking for the real bad guys instead of acting as a minor-league tax collector for the county.
"Smoke detector Americans" is a thing of beauty.
BS, not really. It takes some introspection to reveal that. I was pulled over for a DUI whan I was a grad student. Cuffed, jailed, 'public defender', guilty of a misdemeanor. I derserved it. In retrospect, I'm glad it happened. 'That's how it is supposed to work'.
Yeah, calling bullshit on this one, too
were you driving a dodge challenger, charger, or similar common ride of smoke detector americans?
No, I drive an older model GMC Yukon.
Definitely wasn't flashing signal for a car full of blacks (especially at 5:00 in the morning) but he wasn't looking for those. He was looking for Mexicans and I can easily see how he thought he might have found some given that type of vehicle here in Houston.
You probably signaled improperly. Most drivers do, most of the time
Will we see a return to “stop and frisk” if disparate impact can be ignored? I’m guessing no. Zohran probably won’t push it.
No, instead there will be more of "stop and piss".
There are other cities besides for New York, you know
Yes, there is “The City”, and there are “other cities”.
I’ve lived in some of those other cities. 😊
Without meaning (too much) disparagement to LEOs, it's also a lot safer rousting a business owner for mistakes in his paperwork than extracting illegally owned guns from known felons
Another problem is making a federal case out of a traffic stop. Richmond is far from a sundown town.
That decision is not the police's, but federal prosecutors'. The federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), carries a maximum of 15 years' imprisonment, far exceeding most, if not all, of the maximum penalties for violations of analogous state statutes.
The upshot is that, if a defendant is selected for federal prosecution on a gun charge, there are pretty good reasons for it. Two of the most common reasons are that (1) the defendant is a problem child in the area who has a lot else going on (murders, assaults, drug dealing), who (2) repeatedly escapes serious punishment in state prosecution through witness intimidation, prosecutorial laziness, and/or state judges' anticarceral philosophies.
A federal FIP charge is easy to prove and under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines reliably leads to imprisonment. Incapacitating the person is a net plus for the community, and has the ancillary benefit of giving law enforcement time to investigate more serious crime that the defendant was involved in or knows about.
So it's the feds doing what the local commonwealth's attorney won't. I'd assumed the perp had gotten a civil rights lawyer to go to federal court. That's what they did here when the county sheriff arrested too many drunk Hispanics.
Southern California law enforcement started rounding up gangs about 20 years ago from top to bottom (not just the kingpins) and sending them to federal prisons thousands of miles away on federal RICO charges where their girlfriends couldn't drop by on visiting hours and get orders for the guys left on the street (if any).
That works pretty well.
Back then, it probably worked. Nowadays, the Bureau of Prisons is helpless to stop contraband cell phones being heaved over fences or dropped in by drones.
All of the questions of legal "disproportionality" stem from the Griggs-v.-Duke-spawned precept of "disparate impact". But the law—particularly the common law—isn't supposed to work that way. You are supposed to be prosecuted or freed based on whether or not you committed a crime, not based on whether or not your prosecution falls within or without a preconceived quota.
"Disparate impact" is unconstitutional and an affront to justice generally. Unfortunately it has also been US law for the last half century. Maybe the Vibe Shift and Students v. Harvard will turn the tide against "disparate impact", as seems to have happened at this Appellate Court. But ultimately the Supreme Court will have to overrule the Disparate Impact doctrine explicitly, as Dobbs did to Roe, and Students v. Harvard did to affirmative action. Maybe this will be case that does it?
The legal doctrine of "disparate impact" is itself based on the obviously and provably false assumption that all US races must behave exactly the same at all times, now and forever, despite the fact that nothing in nature is always equal, and that the government accepts and promotes gross ethnic disparities in other spheres. So avoiding a respawn of the toxic "disparate impact" concept requires the polity to grow up and accept the facts of life and stop trying to enforce a mollifying fantasy. Will the passing of the Boomers suffice?
Does any one know what the "impact" has been, if any, of the April 2025 Trump executive-order against Disparate Impact Law?
It's a good question, but probably too early to answer.
An Executive Order obviously can't overrule a Supreme Court decision, but the original Griggs decision didn't create the entire Disparate Impact doctrine at once, much of it subsequently grew out of regulatory decisions (and executive orders), so Trump's EO can demolish some of the peripheral structure.
Possibly the core Griggs holding could become sort of dead letter law: technically valid but practically unused, but much more likely is that someone (maybe Keith Moore) will eventually get a case before SCOTUS where Disparate Impact itself is at issue, and then the outcome will depend on whomever happens to be wearing the Nine Black Robes at that moment.
Still, the omens are favorable. Back in 2007, relentless straddler Justice Roberts already wrote in a plurality opinion that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race", a seemingly obvious bon mot that directly indicts the leftist presumption of justice through social engineering. Leftist-intelligentsia outlets such as The New Yorker, their antennae ever sensitive to tremors in their foundational lies, have been fretting that Affirmative Action won't survive and are scheming what to do about it.
With Trump, several Supreme Court rulings against affirmative action and anti-white discrimination, and the general vibe shift, disparate impact seems doomed. Going back to merit cripples the power of not just the Democratic Party but the entire woke progressive left, and Trump knows it.
'relentless straddler Justice Roberts' made me LOL.
Thank you for the discussion on "disparate impact"; it's so lacking in legal thought and unconstitutional that it could have been written by Thurgood Marshall!
Well, the Griggs decision was authored by Warren Burger (with Marshall's concurrence), but AFAICT the concept itself was originally cooked up by white leftist academics from whom it infected the legal process.
It’s classic “social justice” thinking: screwing over individuals for the sake of certain favored groups.
Social justice thinking doesn't only screw over individuals, it also screws over the entire society who have to live with Social Justice's maladaptive consequences. So "social justice" isn't even _social_ or _just_ on its own terms.
Duke Energy did not use tests until the federal courts order them to stop discriminating directly of blacks. Thus, the use of a general IQ test was not done to pursue a much better workforce but to just keep blacks out of the higher paying jobs just like the blatantly racist hiring practices had before the Civil Rights Acts were passed.
As true as all that is, it's sort of irrelevant under the facts of this case. In U.S. v. Moore, you had an undisputed circumstance possibly unique in the history of traffic stops: on the same evening in December 2023, these cops had previously stopped two other cars with the same temporary tag number as Moore's. Even assuming these cops could tell Moore was black before walking up to his window, which is doubtful in this age of near-ubiquitous window tint and obstructive C-pillars, the existence of a third temporary tag with the same number objectively justifies the stop. If the judge is straight not crooked, the only way Moore wins is if his expert witnesses (whose testimony concededly was the sole foundation of the ruling) testified that known duplicate tags are ignored in the case of whote drivers, and there was no such showing.
Well, Moore won in the District Court with Judge Gibney, who appears to be corrupted only by wokeness. The basis of the Gibney's ruling was "disparate impact", even though—as you say—that seems factually absurd in this case. Apparently, the judge had some six month dataset that he said showed bias and therefore Moore is innocent. Yeah, that doesn't make sense, but that's woke pseudo-logic for you.
It sounds like you read the ruling. Where did you find it?
https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/244201.P.pdf
Nothing in American society is more obvious than the chasm between black criminality and everyone else, and for three generations it’s basically the most forbidden topic to openly address. On the one hand, I do think there is something of a vibe shift going on when it comes to honesty on this. On the other hand, blacks are concentrated in areas where they have significant political influence and their political sponsors will do just about anything to avoid real consequences.
Ultimately I think this probably leads to increased stratification of society as people vote with their feet, and a lot of mid sized cities will lose population, as we have seen before and which was partly halted or reversed in the aughts and teens. The city I live in is about 30 percent black and has been losing population every year since 2020. Meanwhile multiple suburbs have been deliberately crafting their land use so they have sufficient office, shopping and restaurants so their residents have no need to travel to the urban core for any reason other than a pro sports game. This pattern is present all over the country and means cities will get even more broke and dysfunctional. Red state legislatures will leave these cities to their fates but blue states will probably force taxpayers elsewhere to subsidize them as their tax bases erode and expenses rise.
Suddenly, it's 1975 again.
Indeed. The main difference is that overall black political and cultural power will be significantly less in the years ahead than it was then, and that will affect how any assistance is doled out. Urban renewal initiatives in the past poured billions into public housing agencies, non-profits, and city governments that mostly squandered it on quixotic initiatives or outright graft. The same happened during Covid through ARPA and the Inflation Reduction Act, but that money is basically all spent now and with nothing to show for it. My city, like others, adopted the fiction that non-profits who employ "violence interruptors" would tamp down crime and spent huge amounts of ARPA funds to support them, but obviously it didn't work and it seems like a lot of our violence interruptors have their lives interrupted by violence themselves.
I don't think a lot of the Dems that run our cities understand that the twin effects of the 2020 riots and 2021 lockdowns totally killed the return-to-the-cities momentum that had building the previous 15 years and that's over for at least a generation. This means employers/white collar employees and their money leaving downtown offices for suburban locations, less private development investment, fewer families and therefore public school systems operating far more buildings than they actually needs, etc. They are going to preside over cities that are losing residents and revenue as infrastructure crumbles, and I don't think the surrounding communities are going to have much pity, they will just do what they can to keep people leaving the cities below a certain income level out.
It’s also rough on city public transit systems. In the SF Bay area BART has always run at a loss, but the pandemic effects you mention have cut ridership so severely that the whole system is in danger of bankruptcy.
There will be a lot of flailing by politicos as a result, no doubt. The central business district of my city has high office vacancy so some restaurants and things like that have closed, plus you have homeless people scattered around along with "youths" at night and the weekend. What was our city council's response to try and clean things up so it still feels welcoming to visitors and help businesses? I special tax on commercial property owners downtown to fund more workers to clean things up!
Good point. I live in Hong Kong, which has one of the world's best public transit systems, and I've ridden local buses and trains in many countries, the USA included. Feeling safe on public transport is utterly crucial to its success. This is just one of the rich panoply of unpleasant 'issues' that's been swept under the rug for decades in the USA, as progressive public transport fans whine about why they can't have nice trains like the Europeans.
> This means employers/white collar employees and their money leaving downtown offices for suburban locations, less private development investment, fewer families and therefore public school systems operating far more buildings than they actually needs, etc. They are going to preside over cities that are losing residents and revenue as infrastructure crumbles, and I don't think the surrounding communities are going to have much pity, they will just do what they can to keep people leaving the cities below a certain income level out. <
That's why we need .... more immigration!
Yep, it was crazy to see libs say the path back for dying rust belt towns was to turn them into favelas dominated by random ethnic groups from abroad. Who knows what alien blood feuds could come to dominate local politics?
It’s hard to avoid conspiracy theories about that, isn’t it? To try to make it make sense.
The demented disparate impact idea is particularly damaging in our public schools. Our Jr. High School had a tough discipline regime that required following simple rules to ensure a safe environment in the classroom and throughout the rest of the school. Break the rules, face the consequences. That changed when the civil rights division of the Department of Education invoked new rules on school officials to use the disparate impact philosophy to prevent most discipline in the classroom. There was a marked rise in fights, misconduct and disrespect in the classroom and the halls. We had a large retention problem with experienced teachers and administrators which effectively turned the classrooms over to a small group of “students “ who were more than willing to take charge.
The school has gone from having a stellar reputation for providing a good education to having low ratings for safety and quality of the educational environment.
I am a proponent of the 5% rule. If you asked a school’s teachers, or neighborhood leaders to identify the 5% of students whose removal from the school would have a positive impact upon school performance and gave that 5% the boot, things would improve significantly in short order.
All children are entitled to a public education. If you put all the 5% kids in one scary special school what do you do with the worst 5% of kids there?
Schools have to be designed and run to each deal with the children who turn up locally. I think schools are making a lot of bad decisions but I also think this is genuinely inherently challenging to do, which is part of why they cycle through so many fads they hope will make it easier.
Maybe the question is, since most public schools now are daycare centers with free lunch and phone charging, why not keep that status for the few kids whose education wouldn’t be affected by the change anyway, while the rest of the schools are converted back to places to learn?
Because cynicism when applied directly to children is a corrosive substance
Adult cynicism is useful in thinking sensibly about how to raise and educate children, but it is not good to prepare an acid bath of it to plop kids into.
Are you a classroom teacher?
No
I would recommend signing up to be a substitute teacher if you’re able. I certainly understand that we all have lives. I was a regular teacher, the a substitute later in life. I was a popular substitute because, in the words of one of my students, I was tough but fair and I made the classroom a place where everyone who wanted to could learn. I did that because I was willing to use the discipline that was available to move those who didn’t want to learn to another environment. That discipline is rarely available anymore and the students who wanted to learn are being punished for it. That’s my experience, others may have other experiences but I haven’t met any.
I am not an education expert, but it seems like idealism applied directly to children has been an unmitigated disaster.
No, better to plop them into a hellhole run by criminal perverts who want to rape and mutilate them.
It’s interesting that blacks kill themselves at twice the white rate in car accidents in Richmond; more interesting to know would be the rate at which they kill other races in car wrecks.
While it is inherently challenging, I'd suggest you're missing the point of his post as well as ignoring a century of history in the U.S. While there have always been disruptive and violent students, we DID know how to deal with them--through discipline--until the 1970's, when the Feds got involved. We now allow the 5% to destroy the education of the other 95%. (As an aside, until the Great Society destroyed the black family, rates of black student truancy & violence were not much worse than that of Whites. Thanks, liberals.)
You’re looking at this backwards. This solution improves schooling for 95%, which you should applaud. Now that the problematic 5% have been separated, we can try various targeted solutions for their problems, and find out what works. It’s a win all around.
Eventually you get down to just a few kids and, unfortunately, you can’t save them all. But if you spend all your time and energy on the few, you are liable to lose the rest.
Do you realize there was a time when the courts simply turned their backs on questions of school administration? The reasonable assumption was that school superintendents/principals were motivated by good faith, and that if they kicked someone out it was likely for a good reason. Coincidentally, that judicial attitude ended right around the time of the Griggs decision.
Also note that a number of school shooters benefited from disparate impact theory. They weren’t sufficiently restrained/treated/punished early on because that would have made the numbers look bad, so they got to skate until they murdered. Then the gun got blamed.
I think that you are right, almost without exception. The same people who yell about disparate impact deflect with the gun did it argument.
[The three judges favoring the Sailer position (?) that it's okay to stop Blacks on the road at a higher rate on suspicion of crimes]
--> Niemeyer (b.1941, White-Protestant),
--> Harris (b.1962, Jewish),
--> Berner (b.1965, Jewish and Israel dual-citizen).
.
[The one judge who said it's RACIST, and therefore banned, to stop Blacks at a higher rate on the road on suspicion of crimes]
--> Gibney (b.1951, White-Catholic).
__________
Profiles for each:
1.) PAUL V. NIEMEYER (b.1941): White-Protestant. Grew up in Princeton, Washington, New York, and Notre Dame. His father, Gerhart Niemeyer, was of German origin (emig. from Europe to the USA in 1937, but not Jewish). The father emerges in the 1940s-50s as a principled Western-Tradition conservative and friend of William F. Buckley from mid-1950s onward, which shaped also outline of son Paul (the now-judge)'s outlook. Paul Niemeyer's schools: Kenyon College, BA; University of Munich; Notre Dame, JD. Appointed to his high judgeship (US Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit) in 1990 (George H. W. Bush).
2.) PAMELA A. HARRIS (b.1962): Jewish. Grew up in Hartford, Connecticut and later in Bethesda, Maryland. Yale BA, JD. Appointed to her high judgeship in 2014 (Obama).
3.) NICOLE G. BERNER (b.1965): Jewish. Grew up in Bay Area California. Israel dual-citizen (has spent many years of her adult life in Israel). LGBT. Berkeley BA, JD. Appointed to her high judgeship in 2024 (by Biden, the most-Jewish administration in US history, which in appointing her characteristically ignored the principle that dual-citizens ought not hold high office).
.
4.) JOHN A. GIBNEY JR. (b.1951): White-Catholic (?), indications of Irish-Catholic origin. Grew up in Westwood, Chester County, Pennsylvania, until leaving ca.1969. He has spoken of how he fondly recalls Westwood's small-town feel and 1950s-60s safe-wholesomeness. Gibney is however associated in professional life entirely with Virginia. College of William & Mary, BA; University of Virginia, JD. Appointed to his high judgeship in 2010 (Obama). "Judge Gibney has been a superb judge." -- Tim Kaine, 2023.
_____
On John A. Gibney's hometown of Westwood PA: It is a "suburb" of the small city of Coatesville, which in turn is now a kind of exurb-city to Philadelphia (in the motoring age).
There are Gibneys associated with Coatesville and vicinity back to the 1870s at least, many/most of them of Irish-Catholic origin. (A famous Pennsylvania-origin Gibney is the journalist and East-Asianist Frank Gibney (b.1924, Scranton). Frank Gibney was an Irish-Catholic by personal origin, even if circulating in Protestant circles much of his life, such as the strong layer of U.S.-White-Protestant missionary-layer long so influential in the study of East Asia.)
The city of Coatesville PA slowly lost population slowly since the 1930s, reached a low-point in the 1980s. It recovered in numbers-terms, if certainly not spiritual terms, when incoming Blacks began to replace the ghosts of the decamped Whites. Many of the thousands of Blacks coming in were probably chain-migrating from nearby Philadelphia. A story repeated in many such post-industrial kind-of places, they successfully colonized a cheap-declining city; and now control it. The city tipped into a Black>White population around early-mid 1990s.
The 2020 Census counted 3,137 Whites in Coatesville, the same number as had lived there in the early 1880s. In 2020 they are watched over by some 10,200 Nonwhites, mostly Blacks. (Coatesville in the 2020s has 2.5% of Chester County's total population but 17.5% of its Blacks. That is to say, most places in Chester County's 750-square-mile area have few Blacks.)
The whole of Chester County's electorate is probably 90% White, but voted for the D-candidate about 57-42 in the 2016, '20, and '24 elections. This same county had voted Republican in all but two of the elections between the Civil War and 2012 (1964 and 2008). Around 1-in-7 White normal-R voters in Chester County PA (1980s to early 2010s baseline) switched to anti-Trump voters in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Overall, about 55% of Chester County PA Whites voted for Hillary, Biden, and then Kamala. John A. Gibney, if he were still around, would've been among that group.
_____
THE VERDICT ON JOHN A. GIBNEY: His overstepping on the law to signal he is against anti-Black Racism was probably based on the usual idealistic biases we see associated with the b.1940s and b.1950s cohort, really of White-Western people all across the world.
His own mental-frame was formed back in the 1950s-60s, in all-White Westwood (a poetic name). By the time local city Coatesville "tipped" into majority-Blacks status, he was long gone. Naturally he could observe similar things elsewhere, but in the years his perception of baseline-reality was formed, it never quite did come up. Or, rather, if it came up it was a problem of Bad Whites down there somewhere.
There may also have been a lingering bias against Virginia by someone from north of Mason-Dixon, quite highly anachronistic in the 2020s, but, then, the man is in his mid-70s now.
This interesting Sailerian analysis omits one key factor: Judge Gibney’s young law clerks who draft his opinions.
Shameless speculation here, but 2020-21 must have been a heck of a time to be a clerk confronting the question whether the police are hopelessly racist.
I suspect Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson's roundly mocked and derided writings this past term were largely authored by woke clerks, and she lacks the intellectual heft and gravitas to tell them to do better.
She must think they are doing fine, but let’s see if she “evolves.” It must really sting when a fellow lefty like Sotomayor calls her out.
I must jave missed this. What was it? Perplexity says the opposite, i.e. that Brown criticized Sotomayor for not joining her dissent.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/07/sotomayor-had-to-explain-the-law-to-kbj-like-she-was-a-5th-grader/
Yes -- when a sub-midwit like Sotomayer has to explain something to you, it's an indication you're not ringing the right end of that Bell curve . . . .
Judge John A. Gibeny Jr.'s decision that it is unconstitutional to stop Black drivers at a rate he deems too high was read on:
February 12, 2024.
(That's 3 years, 2 months after the arrest [Dec 2020]; and 2 years, 9 months after the federal indictment against the Black driver for the gun-possession charge [May 2021]. The Feb 2024 decision was after the case had worked its way through other courts (?), in 2022-23.)
The case in 2022-23 involved a long series of expert testimony by Racism experts. At the fore of these were:
- Dr. Eli Coston and
- Dr. Marvin Chiles.
(NOTE: "Eli Coston, Ph.D., is an activist-scholar who received their [sic] doctorate in sociology from Stony Brook University, specializing in criminology, gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity. Their [sic] research examines how the intersections of race, class and gender...")
Judge John A. Gibney in his Feb 2024 decision endorsed these Racism Experts' testimony.
According to the Sailer Timeline of Wokeness, though, February 2024's mean Wokeness-scores were well below peak levels seen in 2020 and 2021.
The date of the order dismissing the indictment is mildly relevant, but probably less so than (1) when the hearings were held, and more importantly (2) when the clerks went through their prestigious law schools, a couple of years before they were hired. One can only imagine the environment in a top law school circa 2020-21. Not to mention, these students were perspicacious enough to earn good grades by writing exam answers that agreed with their right-thinking professors’ philosophies.
Any info on crimes committed by the perp since his initial arrest? I assume he was released on bail at some point.
In the 90s, Law & Order and other TV detectives were always threatening ex-cons with violating parole and being sent back to prison if they didn't spill the beans. That trope seems to have disappeared with the black career criminal.
Here is the list of criminal charges in Virginia against KEITH RODNEY MOORE, the Black man arrested in December 2020 in Richmond after the traffic stop:
- May 3, 2007: Arrested for assault on family member. Criminal proceeding began but charges dropped in August 2007;
- September 11, 2010: Arrested for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Convicted; sentenced to 5 years in prison, of which 4 years and 5 months suspended; and to 10 years probation; and to suspension of driver's license for six months.
- July 6, 2012: Manufacturing, selling, giving, or distributing a controlled substance. Convicted, sentenced to 5 years in prison, of which 3 years and 8 months suspended. (Evidently released a lot sooner than the implied 16-month detention, see next item.)
- January 9, 2013: Charged with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and probation violations. Convicted, sentenced to 4 years, 5 months in prison, of which 3 years and 5 months suspended.
- (Released from prison by early 2014?)
- July 2015: Charged with trespassing. Charges dropped;
- February 2016: His supervised probation related to the 2010 conviction was terminated but those from 2012 and 2013 remained.
- November 3, 2016: Driving with a suspended license, and various motor-vehicle violations. Guilty. Paid various fines. Associated probation violations led to an additional sentence of 6 months in jail, of which 5 months and 20 days were suspended. After ten days in jail, he was released.
- August 10, 2019: Operating a motor vehicle without insurance; driving with a suspended license; using fake license plates. Guilty. Paid fines.
- September 28, 2019: Arrested for petty larceny of under $500 not from a person; and destruction of property Charges dropped.
- October 9, 2020: Driving under a suspended license Guilty. Paid fines and an additional period of suspension of driver's license imposed.
- December 5, 2020: Arrested during a traffic stop. Charged with being a nonviolent felon in possession of a gun. ---> This case was unable to be prosecuted due to veto by a high court (Judge John A. Gibney's ruling that Anti-Black Racism was involved). Impasse resolved by a higher U.S. court, August 2025, that it can be prosecuted after all.
- January 4, 2021: Failure to appear before court summons. Sentenced to five days in jail.
- July 12, 2024: A variety of motor-vehicle related offenses: (1.) Operating a vehicle with illegal (excessive) sun-shading/tinting. Guilty, paid fine; (2.) again driving on a suspended license. Guilty, 30 days in jail, of which 24 days suspended and an additional 90-day suspension of license; (3.) operating an uninsured vehicle. Guilty, paid fine; (4.) expired registration. Guilty, paid fines; (5.) failure to wear a seat belt. Guilty, paid fine; (6.) improper license plate. Guilty, paid fine.
- December 10, 2024: Arrested and charged with: (1.) firearm larceny, not from person; (2.) assault and battery on a family member; (3.) violent felon in possession of a weapon. Arraigned and sent remanded into custody (jail), February 6, 2025. A subpoena for key witness, a "Ja'mesha Kiana Marable," issued February 7.
- February 20, 2025: Bond appeal. Keith Rodney Moore remained in custody of the state (i.e., in jail). Last action, April 1, 2025.
.
At least he hasn't killed anyone. When I was on a VA jury in '91, the Commonwealth had a mandatory minimum 5 year sentence for selling $20 of crack. Juries had the option to impose more (juveniles were sentenced by the judge). We assumed he'd serve half or a third of it. If the judge suspended some, it was out of our hearing.
Who finds and funds these cases? I doubt the guy with the gun and fake tags who ran stop signs and then crashed fleeing the police thinks “ah, mine is an ideal test case for police bias” but somebody did, and found him, and paid for the fees that advanced this case through the system. How did that happen? I am not even mad, I am genuinely befuddled.
That would be the Office of the Federal Public Defender, which gets its funding from the federal judiciary’s budget.
The experts brought out by the defendant, who convinced Judge Gibney that Racism was afoot, were: Dr. Eli Coston and Dr. Marvin Chiles.
(See also my reply to this comment: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/gun-control-point-of-sale-vs-point/comment/143063201).
Democrats want gun control / confiscation.
Democrat voters do most of the gun crimes
So prohibit Democrats from buying, possessing and owning guns.
Democrats couldn’t complain. Society would be safer.
Except democrats believe the greatest danger to their personal safety is armed rednecks who would kill them all---if only they weren't fat, lazy and too stupid to figure out a map to the big city.
I was a grad student at Stanford in the 1980s. At that time, the neighborhood adjacent to Palo Alto's wealthiest neighborhood (Old Palo Alto) was East Palo Alto which was a poor, black and crime ridden. I believe it had the highest murder in the US for many of those years. You might ask how could those 2 neighborhoods exist so closely to each other?
I found out the answer: Heavy handed policing!
Before, I went to grad school my dad got me a used car, a lime green 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a landau roof (it was long, but sporty since it only had 2 very heavy doors). In grad school I used the mainframe computer which was only available at night (I did not have the funds to use it during the day) and would drive home at 3 or 4 in the morning. I was pulled over at least once a week. Sometimes the cops, after they saw I was a nerdy white student, would just let me go, although usually though they would claim I was driving poorly and make me do drunk tests (once I actually had to do a breathalyzer). Eventually, I got tired of the harassment and didn't go home until the morning.
I read that last year there were no murders in East Palo and the community was now completely hispanic. I guess being able to replace violent blacks with the hispanic servant class is why wealthy liberals support illegal immigration.
You've identified exactly Ron Unz's position on immigration. By exactly, I mean down to the places, experiences, and population movements/displacements that formatively influenced those views.
Yes, and David Cole has long been a proponent of that position as well.
My nextdoor neighbor in 1974-75 had the exact same car! She was the principal of Francisco Middle School in SF (2 blocks from a Project) and liked to tell me how wonderful her students were, especially Mike Norris, the A's pitcher: "Oh I just love Mike, he's such a sweet boy!" Around the same time, I asked her husband, a longshoreman, how he thought the Giants were going to do that season. He said, "Ah, they got too many n......"
My first car in the early 80s was a '74 Fleetwood. Merging onto the Beltway was easy--people would get out of the way. Wish new cars rode as smoothly as that beast.
"This seems like a legal question that should have been answered once and for all over the last 60 years, but instead it seems to have hardly been discussed.
Is the purpose of traffic stops purely to improve driving safety? Or is it to improve public safety in general, such as by catching criminals carrying illegal handguns?"
It has been discussed and answered implicitly. IANAL but I watch a lot of YouTube videos on this topic and the ruling from the Supreme Court (as summarized for me by GPT) is:
In the U.S., police can only detain you during a traffic stop for as long as is reasonably necessary to complete the purpose of the stop — which typically means:
Checking your license and registration
Running your information for warrants
Writing a ticket or issuing a warning
This was clarified by the U.S. Supreme Court in Rodriguez v. United States (2015). The Court ruled that extending a stop beyond the time reasonably required to handle the traffic violation — for example, to conduct a dog sniff for drugs — without reasonable suspicion of another crime is unconstitutional.
It's the same issue as "Stop and Frisk". Effective but unconstitutional.
I can tell you that if blacks in Richmond are dying at *only* 2x the rate of whites it’s not for lack of trying. Though to be fair, in the post-reckoning/covid era, running red lights has become endemic in greater Richmond overall. I think people got used to blowing through lights on often empty roads with no cops around and it never went back to normal. It’s somewhat insane, actually.
Re: shootings, some even more insane things have been happening. One historic neighborhood known for nightlife gets taken over in the evening by crowds of black guys milling around in the streets partying while openly carrying (VA is an open carry state).
https://rvamag.com/community/the-bottom-line-whats-really-happening-in-shockoe-and-what-needs-to-change.html
Other insanity: https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/adam-turck-obit-aug-4-2025
It’s a shame, because Richmond had something of a renaissance after violent crime including murder plummeted in the late ‘00s. In the ‘20s it’s back up to Baltimore-like levels.
Richmond Whites are overwhelmingly hipsters and DINKs. They definitely aren’t shooty types but are happy to be the worst kind of liberal and crow about racism in the police all while hiding behind it in their nice neighborhoods.
Yes, and a lot of students, gays, and artsy types who don’t remember what cities were like in the 90s. And shop owners who stick the “ICE not welcome here” signs in their windows.
But they, like everyone else there, are all trying to make a life in a city with its own vibe and many advantages. I hope it doesn’t crash and burn, not least because I like it, too.
Definitely one of Americas cool “weird” cities. Unfortunately, they’re becoming all the same and at some point Richmond won’t be noticeably different in character than basically anywhere else.
Also haha “ICE not welcome”…give me an “IRS not welcome” sign.
It would be nice if you were wrong about former but the latter actually worked.
Btw, I’m sure your life is insured for a surprisingly large amount.
You’re the first person to actually comment on the handle! Not sure if you had to look it up but you’re a true fan if you got the reference without needing to.
No recourse to the internet was necessary.
Same here. It's sad to think how that show went downhill and then fell off a cliff.
Sailer's law of mass shootings strikes again, even in the Army.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/quornelius-radford-know-fort-stewart-shooting-suspect-rcna223529
I saw the same headline and had to check to see that Sailer's law of mass shootings applied and it did.
Sergeant Quornelius struck me as being very short (but still taller than the female MP escorting him). I remember Snowdrops having a reputation as near-giants, where Reacher would not be atypical. The US Army is a large and remarkable organisation in so many ways
I try to share these stats with liberal leaning friends and usually just see blank stares / cognitive dissonance as a reaction. The facts make no dent in their worldview, unfortunately.
It's a victory for truth, though, if you can help alter the viewpoint of just one of your friends.
This could be a comment beneath just about any iSteve post.