Apparently a former FBI agent and Florida cop – now a defense attorney – named Dale Carson wrote a book on “arrest-proofing” yourself. Basically, how to avoid doing obvious things that will lead to the police targeting you. I ran across this snippit on white trash:
They’re fond of the magic herb and can be seen growing their very own shipboard marijuana bushes, which they mist and fertilize lovingly. Nothing, of course, replaces beer. They consider the 24-pack and the kegger to be the most important advances in human convenience in the last century. When in need of jollification, they hie forth to roadhouses and biker bars, where misunderstandings about women sometimes require the intervention of civil authority. When their women are in need of enlightenment, they improve their lady’s understanding with a few sharp raps to the head. Their dress code runs to jeans and T-shirts. Their hair is long or shaved off, their beards scruffy, and their skin adorned with tattoos and piercings.
Got the picture? These are petty criminals, but why aren’t more of them in jail? Because they’re not totally clueless. Using the Cluelessness Quotient chart and the Golden Rules for comparison, let’s consider manners first. Although low on the social food chain, these characters don’t have a chip on their shoulders about race. They are less likely to act out in the presence of police. Generally they can stifle the profanity during those crucial minutes and mumble “Yes, officer” and “No officer” until the heat has passed.
Most important, they don’t adopt the outdoor lifestyle. They’re almost never visible walking on streets where they can be seen by cops riding around in cars. When they drive, their cars and pickups may be junkers, but they’re street legal, so they have fewer traffic stops. They get wasted indoors, where search warrants are required, and are less likely to carry dope on their persons and in their cars. Often they grow their own marijuana, so they do not buy drugs and fall victim to police stings, undercover cops, and confidential informants. Their dress is scruffy, but T-shirts and jeans blend in better than gang colors and hip-hop gear, so they don’t get targeted as quickly by police.
Once they do get arrested, they have some resources. For time management, they generally can muster an alarm clock and a watch, and in emergencies, a calendar. They often marry their women, so they have a wife, the “old lady,” in addition to Mama and sisters to pay legal fees and bail bonds. When driving, they get their buzz from beer rather than marijuana. This means that if they’re stopped and are not legally intoxicated, they will receive only a citation for driving with an open container—and not even that if they can slide the can out the rear window and into the truck bed before the cop gets close. Rednecks have some knowledge of police procedure. They know that police do not like to find guns, so they carry the all-purpose and legal knife. When they do carry guns, they are likely to have a permit.
I quoted the whole thing because I found it fascinating, but I’m going to comment primarily on a single part: It’s a product of my upbringing, I suppose, that leads me to so completely fail to understand the dressing and grooming habits of much of the underclass. In this case, “Their hair is long or shaved off, their beards scruffy, and their skin adorned with tattoos and piercings.” Even among a criminal group that seems to have a better handle on the social cues than most, you still have all this.
Their hair is long or shaved off, their beards scruffy, and their skin adorned with tattoos and piercings. I have on a couple of occasions grown my hair out. I sometimes keep a goatee. I have here and there considered a tattoo, but only on a place easily concealed. I never cease to be amazed by the sleeve tattoos. While I would not pierce my ear under any circumstances – my wife doesn’t even have pierced ears – the shift from some of piercings to those big giant holes that make it so that you can’t reverse it… I just don’t get any of this. I do understand the desire to stand out. I understand the desire to be a little weird. I never dyed my hair blue, but the idea has appealed to me.
Some of the above is aesthetic. I just prefer things plain. But it goes beyond that. The notion of doing something to myself – to make a statement, to fit in, whatever – just horrifies me. Even when I used to dress strange, or considered dyeing my hair, I took a great amount of comfort in knowing that I could, with a good shower, become a Respectable Citizen once again quite easily. Which I guess only matters if you see the appeal of being a respectable citizen to begin with.
I’m a serial loiterer. Mostly due to my smoking. I get hassled by the cops about it occasionally (though never ticketed). But even with me, a white guy with not-long hair and a conventional goatee (if I have anything at all), I notice the difference in the way I am treated when I am dressed business casual versus when I am slumming it. I can only think of one time I have ever been hassled when I wasn’t in the latter state. The rest of the time it is a combination of t-shirt and jeans (I guess I don’t get any points for it being tucked in and wearing a belt…) and in a dubious neighborhood (where, as a conspicuous white guy, they are more likely to think I am looking for drugs than that I actually live there, I would guess).
Doing something permanent to myself that would make me forever provoke caution, or that would forever disassociate me from being Respectable Citizen, is just an alien concept. Perhaps it is because I am so weird on the inside that I tend to aim for conventional on the outside.
Yes, I’m plagued by a serious case of Upper Middle Class White Boy Syndrome myself.
I don’t get tattoos and piercings: they seem like primitive self-defacements to me. On top of which, they seem to show serious disrespect for the miracle that is our body. And beyond that, they present some real problems of social signalling–you pretty much know the story when you meet someone that has, say, a neck tattoo.
I grew up in the 60s, and caught plenty of shit from the older generation of my family about my long hair. And I vowed to myself that I would be open-minded and accepting of whatever fashions the generation after mine would adopt. But I really can’t get past piercings and tattoos. So I find myself, at 54, one of those grumpy, judgmental middle aged guys that I swore I would never be.
Snarky,
I remember back when I was in high school, a much-tatooed girl saying that her body was a temple. I wondered if the tatoos constituted graffiti.
To some extent, when you present yourself a certain way, you’re asking to be judged on that basis. I mean, maybe someone with the neck tattoo or whatever is actually a perfectly well-behaved citizen from the posh suburbs. Even so, though, he has chosen to signal an affiliation with the kind of person you are tentatively judging them to be. I tend to get annoyed when people send out signals and then get all grumpy that not all of them are received positively.
Sometimes I think I am curmudgeon beyond my years.
“I tend to get annoyed when people send out signals and then get all grumpy that not all of them are received positively.”
Me too, at least to a degree. I think there are definite extremes where what one wears cannot be thought of as anything other than making a statement about one’s identity or beliefs or whatever, and there are lots of gray areas where the way one dresses, etc., says something about that person, but it’s not always easy to tell what.
Snarky: [Tattoos and piercings] present some real problems of social signalling–you pretty much know the story when you meet someone that has, say, a neck tattoo.
Will: To some extent, when you present yourself a certain way, you’re asking to be judged on that basis.
I’m going to agree with Will that if you get tattoos and piercings, you are going to have to accept the fact that people are going to judge you on that basis. That is, people are going to assume, as Snarky does, that they know your story. That’s the burden.
Of course they don’t actually know your story. They pretty much don’t know anything at all about you except that you have a tattoo or a piercing. They don’t know the motivation, and they don’t know what it signifies. But they like to think they do because it’s a comfortable heuristic that reduces cognitive effort.
So, yeah, they’re a real problem for social signalling, and the tattoee/piercee who can’t accept that is being unrealistic. But they’re a problem for social signalling because most people are not only quick to judge but proud of it.
I live in a place where tattoos and piercings are so common among pretty much all socioeconomic groups that I don’t even notice them, and I doubt most people who live here do either. When my parents come, though, they’re always taken aback. It’s strange: I have a few tattoos, and here, I never feel particularly “tattooed.” Back home? I definitely stand out. Fortunately my piercings left early in grad school, but people talking to me do occasionally notice the holes. Again, here in Austin, no one would care. Back home? I wonder if they think they know my story.
By the way, perhaps it’s because I’ve lived here so long, and spent enough time among academics (who are, surprisingly to some, quite tattooed), but I find tattoos on women attractive. I probably wouldn’t have said that when I was just leaving my small southern hometown long, long ago.
Snarky,
Officially, my line on tattoos is “it’s okay for others to do it, but they’re not for me.” Unofficially, I make a lot of the same judgments you do when I see tattoos, at least indiscreet ones. For whatever reason, I think anything more than a small tattoo is disgusting, and I tsk tsk to myself, “how are they ever going to get a job looking like that?”
The second part of that excerpt has a too high opinion on the ‘resources’ of white trash, and in any case the whole thing is not followed by any given member of the same that shows up on COPS.
One does not get on COPS by acting in such a way as to avoid arrest.
Even though I’m 38, I’m told I look young for my age. I’m also a graduate student and look like a student of some sort–I carry a backpack with me almost everywhere I go. I tend not to get harassed by cops (also, I’m white, so that probably helps), but my student-lookingness probably makes me suspicious to some people. Sometimes, my job requires me to go to a warehouse, and I usually walk there because I need the exercise, but I have to go through what a lot of people consider a dicey neighborhoods–one of those neighborhoods that have a lot of police cars but that don’t seem safe at all–and I’m sure the police think I’m there to get drugs.
I usually wear my hair very short. I simply like having short hair (also, since I cut my own hair, I often have a “buzz cut” look). And yet, I don’t think I fit the stereotypes of short-hair wearers. Yet I think my short hair probably makes me seem respectable than long hair would.
Up until relatively recently (I’m in my low 30’s), I looked as young as 15 without facial hair. I just have one of those faces (age is finally starting to set in, assisted by the smoking). My wife commented that it makes her feel like a cradle-robber when I’m all shaven. However, she is also young in appearance, and when I have my facial hair, I look a bit the cradle-robber.
That’s a little bit of a tangent. When thin and wearing glasses, I look kind of clean-cut nerdy-ish, which helps. My height can throw people off, though, especially when it’s accompanied by size.
You are younger than I thought. I was guessing mid 30s.
Very, very soon…
Will,
My old(er) age is starting to set in, too. I don’t smoke….it must be the beer.
I always thought I never gota tattoo only because I always thought a tattoo had to be a symbol of an idea that I believed in absolutely and would for all my life, or at least that I was willing to say to myself that I would, and my mind just doesn’t work that way. I don’t think I hold any belief to that degree of certainty, and certainly none that i do are the kind of thing I want to emblazon indelibly under my skin.
But some of the tattoo shows have recently made me realize that was a completely false construct. Body art seems an attractive enough concept. I think a sweet sleeve looks pretty damn cool frankly, even though the “respectability” consideration is indeed proven to be very real in the professional world. I guess it turns out i don’t have a tattoo simply because i don’t care enough about it to got to the trouble, discomfort, and expense of it. (Also because I’m past the time in my life when I feel like I can get my body in shape enough to feel like it’s something really worth beautifying in that way – I’m not a worthwhile canvass physically speaking anymore, while once I maybe felt I was). And that’s okay.
That actually makes me think of another thing, which is that there are two kinds of people. The first are people with less-than-good bodies (I fall under this category). These people often mark their body up (or get piercings) seemingly in a way to detract from the imperfections of their body. But it doesn’t really work, in my view. Then there are those with great bodies, where the tattoos can actually look good… but their body doesn’t need the help to begin with and it’s marking up a perfectly good body.
I know what kind of tattoo I would get if I did get one. A Blue Beetle insignia (except black instead of blue). It’s the only “mark” that seems to fit, really. But the idea of having a tatooed bug logo… well, no. I know someone that has a giant tattoo with The Tick. It doesn’t go over well with the ladies.
The Tick? Yeah. Yikes.
That actually makes me think of another thing, which is that there are two kinds of people. The first are people with less-than-good bodies (I fall under this category). These people often mark their body up (or get piercings) seemingly in a way to detract from the imperfections of their body. But it doesn’t really work, in my view.
This reminds me of my theory on blondes. I don’t find blonde hair particularly unattractive. But I noticed that I found the average brunette to be considerably more attractive than the average blonde. The theory I settled on for this is that since natural blonde hair is rare, the average blonde is actually a brunette who bleached her hair because she wasn’t happy with her appearance.
I’m kind of stunned that you just take this guy’s strange rant at face value. It reads to me like an apologia for institutionalized racism and a very disturbing look into a warped mind.
Who happened to have a badge and a gun for decades.
Why aren’t more whites in jail? “Because they’re not totally clueless,” like all those other races who DO seem to wind up in jail more often.
The fact your takeaway from this was “glad I don’t have tattoos” really baffles me, but that’s a good thing. I like new reality tunnels. Thanks for a tour of yours.
That’s not my takeaway, Justin, that’s just the part I chose to focus on.
As for whether or not we can take this guy at face value… I don’t know. I do think that there is more racism involved than he is discussing. However, (a) his book is built around what people can do to avoid getting arrested, and so it makes sense to focus on things that people can control, and (b) he has worked on both sides of the divide as a cop and a defense attorney and I have worked on neither.
His book isn’t “yay cops”, but rather “how to avoid getting screwed by them.”
There is at least one comedy routine called “how to not get your ass kicked by a cop”. Chris Rock’s is pretty good. I’m pretty sure that a transcript of it would be called a whole lotta things if it had your name signed to it rather than his.
Half Sigma has covered this book as well.
“Although low on the social food chain, these characters don’t have a chip on their shoulders about race. They are less likely to act out in the presence of police. Generally they can stifle the profanity during those crucial minutes and mumble “Yes, officer” and “No officer” until the heat has passed.”
Yes, it’s all the fault of non-white people for having a chip on their shoulders about race. Why can’t they be more like white people?
Not a criticism of your post, Will, which is very interesting. I’m just flabbergasted that the author you cited can write that sentence with a straight post in a book.
“straight face”
Its not that it is wrong to have a chip on your shoulder, or that it is something to be blamed for. The thing is that even if one is even justifiably resentful of cops (and reasonably suspects that one is being stopped because of one’s race) it is still a bad idea to mouth off to a cop. So, this raises a few questions:
1. Do non-white minorities react more aggressively to cops?
2. If yes, why? (This is especially salient since it obviously seems like a really bad idea to do so)
Carson’s answer to these questions is really politically incorrect. He says that they live in a pre-moral world. Half-sigma’s is even worse. He says that they have little to no future time orientation. i.e. that they are little more than animals. I’m more inclined to think that many poor young non-white men are not being socialised properly if they are at all. I dont really buy into the whole quasi-racist HBD thing.
Saying that they should behave more like poor white criminals in order to not get arrested sooften, while having certain connotations, isnt straightforwardly racist (or maybe even ultimately racist either if it is indeed true that they would be better off if they did behave more like white folk)
1) How about we flip the question? Do cops perceive the same action differently when they are done by non-whites as opposed to whites? For example, a white guy mouthing off is just a jerk, while a black guy mouthing off is a menacing threat and a problem that must be taken care off?
Generally speaking, cops do not respond well to any sort of mouthing off from anybody.
There is a perception thing, there, certainly.
There is also the fact that many minorities have probably already had more negative interactions with the police than the average middle class white folk will ever have, so they’re probably more inclined to be actually pissed off.
I mean, I would be.
“There is also the fact that many minorities have probably already had more negative interactions with the police than the average middle class white folk will ever have, so they’re probably more inclined to be actually pissed off. I mean, I would be.”
Which is why the book’s point about “white trash” (ughh, I don’t like this term, can we retire it?) not being arrested that often because they don’t have a chip on their shoulders about race is absurd. Well, of course they don’t! So how is that helpful advice to non-whites? They should magically turn themselves white?
I agree that we should retire the “white trash” term. At least, that’s my vote.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a hell lot of racist cops in the US. I’m even sure that they behave a lot more agressively and a lot more in your face towards black people and hispanics. But it is still a crappy decision to make.
I can imagine one way to explain this, and it has to do with a survival tactic of the ghetto. The ghetto environment is a lot like prison. In prison, if someone tries to walk over you, if you don’t immediately strike back to show that you are an alpha dog, you get eaten. Thinking about it makes the response delayed. The only way to survive in prison is to make the alpha dog response reflexive. Well, once it is reflexive, what you are is basically a hyper aggressive anti-social guy (at least to the rest of us) That’s why recidivism rates in the US are so high. Now, if the ghetto is a lot like prison, then only the most hyperagressive alpha dog survives. The person who thinks before responding agressively ends up at the bottom of the food chain with a very short life expectancy. That’s why the average minority is going to respond agressively in police interactions. The additional agression by police exacerbate the problem. I dont know how probable my explanation is, but that is the best I can come up with
Half Sigma is Steve Sailer and those crowd, right? Not really interested in what they have to say. Maybe that’s closed-minded of me, but there it is.
There is no “maybe” about it.
They don’t have to be more like white people. They could just be more like the black people who don’t get arrested.
Because black people aren’t actually all interchangeable. I worry that sometimes leftists tend to lose sight of that.
Yup, cause we all know Democrats/liberals/leftists/progressives are the real racists.
That’s not the point the book was making though, right? (At least the part quoted by Will here). I worry that sometimes people tend to lose sight of that in an attempt to score political points against “leftist”.
The point is the specific behaviors.
Yes, and the portion of the book quoted was comparing the behavior to “white trash”, not to black people who don’t get arrested.
There’s a completely valid point here, which is that there are times when a police officer has some discretion about what he’s going to do with you. For example, a while back a police officer stopped me for jaywalking while I was on the elevated median, and told me to walk back to the side I came from (at that point no safer than continuing to the other side of the street) and cross at an intersection. I was annoyed with him because it was completely safe–no cars were coming–and I was running a bit late.
I kind of wanted to tell him to go to hell. But I’m not a total dumbass, and I knew that he was legally entitled to write me a ticket at that point. So I shut the hell up and did what he said that so that he would refrain from exercising that right.
It’s not ideal that whether you get ticketed/arrested/whatever is partly a function of how nice you are to the cop, but it’s not racism, either.
As an aside, that reminds me of the time a black journalist published an op-ed in which he cited, as an example of the racist indignities he had to put up with as a black man, a time when he was hassled by a police officer for jaywalking, and let off with a warning. I giggled because the same thing had happened to me three times in the last two years.
Expectations of racism are self-fulfilling. If a black person expects racist treatment, then he’ll interpret any slight from a white person as such. But the reality is that white people slight each other all the time. Really, it would be racist if we didn’t act like jerks to black people sometimes.
“Expectations of racism are self-fulfilling. If a black person expects racist treatment, then he’ll interpret any slight from a white person as such.”
History, data, means nothing? It’s all about self-victimization perception?
Have a class of 2nd graders today, so I’ll have to be brief. The following two things are not mutually exclusive:
1) Being a minority means you are more likely to attract police attention and that your behavior is more inclined to be interpreted as hostile.
2) Acting in a hostile manner are more likely to result in negative consequences and black individuals are more likely to respond with hostility.
Whether #1 or #2 is more important depends on what you’re looking at. For a police handbook, #1 is more important because it’s the police’s responsibility to not unfairly target minorities. However, if you’re writing something for how civilians and criminals should act to avoid police attention, #2 matters more because it’s the thing you have control over.
The last clause of #2 sounds like an invidious stereotype to me. I’d appreciate a clarification about why you believe (at least according to what you wrote) that black people are more likely to be hostile.
Because they have reason to be? Because they have a long history of contentious relations with police? Because when I get pulled over unfairly or pestered about loitering, I have no reason to believe it’s anything but rotten luck or just police-being arseholes, but they have reason (and not illegitimate reason) to believe it’s something else?
Personally, I don’t know if #2 is true or not (I’m just saying that it is not mutually exclusive with #1). Carson seems to believe it, and I don’t feel qualified to say that he’s wrong*. But I don’t know that he’s right, either.
* – It bears repeating that the above snippit does not come from a piece defending police conduct, but rather explaining how to best avoid becoming a victim of police conduct. We can say “Oh, well he’s a former cop, so of course he would say that,” but he’s not really acting on the blue team here.
Thanks for clarifying.
Sorry if my comment came across as harsh-sounding. It’s harder to edit and clarify on my increasingly antiquated phone and on re-reading it, it didn’t come out as I had intended.
It didn’t sound harsh at all.
For what it’s worth, my phone doesn’t even get reception. (I’m serious…..it’s a track phone, but I quit buying minutes because it stopped working. Now it’s a glorified (but for that purpose useful) pocket watch.)
Okay, good. I realized after I wrote it that my question marks could have come across as mocking (like “No, duh!”) rather than as suggestions of uncertainty that I use questions marks for from time to time.
Your phone sounds like a particularly inept PDA. Back when I had a PDA and a phone, rather than a smartphone, I never forgot the former but often forgot the latter.
(I actually got a smartphone for a stupid reason, though the stupidity wasn’t mine. A former employer had a “no PDA policy” due to security concerns but allowed smartphones, which are PDAs with phone capability and a camera.)
So black people are more likely than white people to act in an inappropriately emotional manner.
And that’s white people’s fault.
Maybe. That’s Carson’s assertion, anyway.
It’s not about fault. If true, it’s counterproductive to their own situation. That’s different, however, from saying that there is absolutely no reason that they might look at the police – and behave towards them – differently than we do, absent some decision on their part, made in a vacuum.
Oh, I did want to add something here: This post has absolutely nothing to do with the thing in Florida. It was written a month ago and I forward-posted it last week before that happened to get it out of the drafts folder. No one has suggested otherwise, but I wanted to be clear.
As far as the original piece is concerned, here are my thoughts…
I tend to give Carson the benefit of the doubt as an “honest broker”, despite that it doesn’t exactly correspond with my observations, as he’s worked on both sides of the line and my experience in that area is rather limited. That doesn’t mean what he says is absolutely right, because he is a person with his own biases.
He does seem to give actual racism the short end of the stick, at least in this excerpt. It’s not central to what he is saying, but when discussing such a contentious subject, more care needs to be given in delivery than in how he delivered it.
I think (as suggested elsewhere), that if minorities have a chip on their shoulder with regard to the police, it’s an understandable one. But that is not mutually exclusive with the notion that the response can be counterproductive compared to someone who has been conditioned differently.
I kept the whole thing there, rather than just the part I was wanting to talk about, because it brought up things that I had not fully considered before, such as the social network that allows some criminals to get bailed out, and the different ways in which people commit crimes that might make them more or less of a target (in addition to race, which I am not saying is not an issue).
I have actually lived in two strongly majority-minority neighborhoods, once in the Pacific Northwest (yes, they do exist up there) and once in the Inner Southwest. The relationship between the neighborhood and the police could barely have been more different. In the former case, a real effort had been made at community relations and it showed. In the latter case, the police only seemed to come around in a perfunctory manner. They never left their cars. Ever. There was a drug den a couple houses down that they never touched and was only busted up once the state police got involved.
I’m not sure how all this relates to the post itself, but I would not be surprised if there were a difference in the overall perceptions of the community wherein the criminals reside and the police, in addition to the habits of the criminals themselves. In addition to the race issues, it’s likely easier to show respect to authorities that you see more than just through the tinted windows of their squad car (unless you’ve done something wrong).
Did you ever read the Half Sigma take on it?
Yeah. Half Sigma has the tendency to lean on HBD without regard to any and every other explanation, especially when you’re looking at a set of people of various backgrounds that are displaying a remarkable lack of future time orientation.
I have no tattoos largely because I have little I am so passionate about that I’d want it on my body permanently. But I think a nice sleeve tattoo can look awesome. I guess I’m in the minority here.