With all due respect, I don’t think that the experience of the guy who got himself arrested is telling at all. It’s a typical leftist tactic to indict a healthy psycho-epistemology as willfully malicious simply because it isn’t omniscient and has to prioritize values.

If you are walking down a street late at night, and on one side of the street there’s a group of black men, and on the other there’s a group of white men, ceritus paribus, I don’t care who you are (black, white, male, female, alien), the rational thing to do is to go to the side with the white men. That isn’t racism, it’s reasonable caution. It’s attempting to ensure the greatest likelihood of the best possible outcome. It is patently ridiculous to claim that simply because 1% of crimes in a given neighborhood are committed by people who look a certain way, while 99% are committed by people who look a (different) certain way, that that constitutes racism. Of course people should be judged as individuals, and particular situations should be judged on the particular facts, but if you’re a beat cop, in order to function in a manner that looks like anything approaching effectiveness, you have to go with your “gut” (ie: your experience about what is the actual outcome 99% of the time, no matter how straight-forward or circuitous the discovery of it might be).

As for his experiences after his arrest with the criminal justice system: all I gathered was that the DA and the judge saw this guy for what he was: a political activist trying to embarrass them. The judge probably went overboard with the punishment precisely because he didn’t want to be accused – by this guy, in some article in The Atlantic – of being “too light” on “the professional white guy from the suburbs.” But, of course, this won’t deter this “journalist” from concluding that his treatment was par for the course with non-violent first time offenders (which, curiously, is exactly what he said wasn’t par for the course – but I guess a concept like “par for the course” relies too much on perceptual evidence, and therefore isn’t valid – even if it is inherently provisional).