Is it though? Necessary, I mean?

children under the age of 15

I don’t doubt you, but that is fucking sick on both sides if it is the case. Surely there is a better method than blindly strip searching underage minorities

Edit: I can almost guarantee racism by the police, and if not, systematic racism put them in the situation to be targeted by the gangs

Strangely enough the people who make up largest market for drugs are never stopped and searched because they are rich middle class people.

Looking at the situation in the US, I long ago concluded that Wealth Discrimination is the mechanism via which Racism gets turned into people living hard miserable lives 24/7/365 - poor people have bad houses, bad furniture, lower life expectancy, lots of money related stress, live in more dangerous neighbourhoods, spend a lot more time commuting and so on, and their children only have access to bad underfunded schooling, so have little or no hope of leaving that pit: Racism pushes people into poverty and ghettos (for example by not having access to certain jobs or not being allowed to buy or rent houses in certain places) and once there it’s the high uneveness of access to resources depending on one’s Wealth (i.e. Wealth Discrimination) that grinds them day in and day out and makes sure that subsequent generations cannot climb out of it.

Whenever someone hears a “liberal” politicians claiming to be against Racism whilst at the same time being for Private Education and Private Healthcare, they should ponder on why would an “anti-Racists” want to maintaining and even expand the mechanisms that make life be unending misery for the racially discriminated against and their children.

Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?

Do you really think that there’s a bunch of children running drugs around so they need to be strip searched? Let me repeat that: do you think children are committing crimes right and left?

The police searched them, so if there was “evidence” they would have been arrested. “Child drug gangs” would be all over the news. Since that didn’t happen, we know that these children were targeted based on assumptions (probably race).

Black children have a problem with people assuming they are older than they really are and treating them like adults. If you think there’s a ton of “evidence” that literal children are committing a ton of crime, you’re part of the problem.

Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?

You can follow this down the pipe and find a pattern of behavior. This doesn’t just end with searches. More cases get dismissed when you’re rich and white. More acquittals happen when you’re rich and white. Fewer and lesser charges are leveled against rich white defendants for the same actions and convictions carry lighter sentences. And jail populations reflect these figures.

All could reach the same result, but the solution is vastly different.

One result rests on the theory that poorer, blacker residents are naturally more criminal than their richer, whiter peers.

The other rests on the theory that there’s systematic discrimination in policing, prosecuting, and sentencing.

Both functionally lead you to the same conclusion - that the system is biased against a particular race/class cohort. But the first theory asserts that this a desirable outcome due to faults of the race/class cohort, while the second asserts it is a structural problem with law enforcement.

The question is not “Are police being fair or racist/classist?” This question is “Is being racist/classist a smart policing policy?”

“B-but then how will I poison the well for anything that challenges a center-right status quo by introducing it as biased (relative to the US’ center) and questionable without using an armchair analyst whose methodology is in no way scientific?”

Edit: to clarify what MBFC considers “MIXED”:

Further, while The Guardian has failed several fact checks, they also produce an incredible amount of content; therefore, most stories are accurate, but the reader must beware, and hence why we assign them a Mixed rating for factual reporting.

They list like five fact checks, while The Guardian puts out basically quintuple that every day. And moreover, this is the sort of asinine nitpick that they classify as a “fact check”.

“Private renting is making people ill.” “Private renting is making people ill, but maybe this happens with other housing situations too, we don’t know, so we rate this as false.”

MBFC is a fundamentally flawed credibility gatekeeper. Lemmy.World loses credibility every day this bot continues to operate.

Absolutely. It’s hilarious that people care about fact checking enough to want to rate sources but apparently extend no skepticism whatsoever to these ratings. “Let’s just ask that one dude and go with whatever he says, I’m sure it’ll be fine”

While that does show how unreliable mbfc can be, that isn’t quite the full picture. They do rate breitbart significantly lower in the credibility category compared to the guardian, as well as tagging them as propaganda, extreme right, and conspiracy theorists, which is an accurate takeaway for breitbart. Factual reporting is not all that mbfc covers