this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
312 points (92.2% liked)

politics

18828 readers
4572 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
  2. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  3. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  4. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
  5. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  6. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think your approach is decent but you've perhaps downplayed a thing or two in your analysis of the counterfactual.

  • The rate goes from 50% to 40% when the "race: unknown" cases are ~~removed~~ included.
  • A black person is 7 times more likely than a white person to be wrongly accused of homicide.
  • The US police force (including the FBI) are unfortunately, institutionally, foundationally racist.
  • Most crucially, the 50% refers only to arrests made, not convictions. This is especially interesting when taken with the above points (though coming up with corrected figures is too much hard work for me today)

Finally, if we were to assume the numbers are true and accurate, what would that actually tell us? White supremacists would have you believe it's proof of some kind of genetic inferiority. I could get into why that argument is utterly retarded but it would be a wall of text so, unless you ask. I think what it points to are two things: systemic racism in policing and crime reporting, and a race-biased wealth gap causing greater crime in African-American communities.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

White supremacists would have you believe it’s proof of some kind of genetic inferiority. I could get into why that argument is utterly retarded but it would be a wall of text so, unless you ask.

Of course it's utterly retarded. Like I said, I would predict it's due to the largest target demo for gang recruitment being young black men. Combine endemic fatherlessness with poor socioeconomic options and you have a demographic that is ripe for recruitment by groups that offer money, male bonding and a kind of sex appeal but also results in being a root cause for a lot of violent crime. It's basically the black version of tradcon alt-lite recruiting - you offer pseudo-paternal figures, a route to money, and a claim to be able to attract women and fatherless, sexless young men with no real purpose will flock. The main difference is that the alt-lite groups for the most part aren't dealing drugs and shooting at each other, their game is marginally more subtle and longer term.

The rate goes from 50% to 40% when the “race: unknown” cases are removed.

How does that work? If a category is some share of the whole, and I remove some number from the whole but not from that category, how can the share go down? Or am I misunderstanding what you are getting at? It's not like UCR numbers count anything with an unknown race perpetrator as having a black perp.

A black person is 7 times more likely than a white person to be wrongly accused of homicide.

I'd be curious of this: Out of cases where a person is wrongly accused of homicide and arrested, how often is the correct person later identified and more importantly, how frequently is the correctly identified person a different race than the wrongfully arrested one? Because (ignoring the injustice of wrongful arrest for a moment), arresting the wrong person for a crime done by a person of the same race isn't going to have an impact on your racial breakdown of perpetrators.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does that work?

Sorry, I meant "included", not removed. Edited.

I'd be curious of this

Here is a secondary source, with info to link to the primary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sorry, I meant “included”, not removed. Edited.

That makes a lot more sense. I tried to figure out what you were doing math wise to make that happen and I couldn't come up with anything coherent.

Here is a secondary source, with info to link to the primary.

Interesting, nothing I'm really surprised by (the criminal justice system in general fucks you over if you are poor, black or male and the effects of all three compound) but it doesn't hit the million dollar question, which is how often wrongfully convicted people are convicted in place of an actual perp of a different race? I don't know if the data even exists to answer that one, though I suspect the set of cases where both the wrongly convicted killer and the actual killer are both known is probably too small to do anything useful with.

If you don't see what I'm getting at, if a black man is wrongfully convicted of a murder committed by another black man, that doesn't impact the racial breakdown because it doesn't change what group the perpetrator belonged in. Is the implication that there is a number of black men wrongfully convicted of homicide where the actual killer was white large enough that it would have a meaningful impact on the stats?

EDIT: Fixed formatting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I see what you're getting at. Cleaning up the statistics, researching the answer to your question and finding upper and lower bounds for actual figures is beyond what I've got time or patience to do though. There also remains the problem that the FBI stats are self-reported by officers working in a fundamentally racist institution, so it would be likely a biased (and therefore useless) sample and therefore a pointless waste of time.