Elon Musk doubled down on his attacks on the Anti-Defamation League over the weekend while engaging with a notorious antisemite and white nationalist who helped #BanTheADL trend
Consider the counterfactual - that homicide perpetration is evenly distributed and thus actual homicide perpetration should match share of general population. How then do we arrive at FBI UCR stats being what they are?
The easiest possibility would be the FBI disregarding what is reported to them and just making up numbers, but then you’d need a reason why bean counters tallying crime stats would bother and also it would be straightforward to test with a FOIA request.
Maybe the FBI is accurately reporting the numbers they are given, and a large number of police departments are simply reporting a bunch of black folks committing homicide when that’s not happening? That could also be tested using public records (comparing numbers reported to FBI against actual cases), but would be a more involved process unless you have particular districts that you feel are more likely to be fudging the numbers.
Maybe it’s racially biased over/underpolicing? Except we’re talking about homicide, and it’s hard to overpolice homicide (you’ve only got so many corpses to work with), which means underpolicing when white folks commit homicide. But by the same stats 4 in 5 homicides have killer and victim of the same race, which would mean police just ignoring it when white people are killed, which doesn’t sound very white supremacist of them.
Maybe there are white people killing black people and successfully framing other black people for the crime? That could happen, I guess. It would require massive incompetence or overt racism on the part of police, and have to stay secret, and have to be happening at a truly massive scale (we’re talking thousands of cases every year for as long as we’ve been keeping the stats). Which feels unlikely just in sheer scale.
You know what I think is likely? That the stats gathered are accurate, and more homicide is done both by and to black folks because a lot of homicide is gang violence and at a national scale the prime gang recruiting demographic is poor young black men. There are statistical methods by which this too could be tested, but it would be more of an ordeal than the others, and merely admitting that law enforcement statistics regarding race might be accurate probably denies you funding outright.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Well, let’s think on that one.
Consider the counterfactual - that homicide perpetration is evenly distributed and thus actual homicide perpetration should match share of general population. How then do we arrive at FBI UCR stats being what they are?
The easiest possibility would be the FBI disregarding what is reported to them and just making up numbers, but then you’d need a reason why bean counters tallying crime stats would bother and also it would be straightforward to test with a FOIA request.
Maybe the FBI is accurately reporting the numbers they are given, and a large number of police departments are simply reporting a bunch of black folks committing homicide when that’s not happening? That could also be tested using public records (comparing numbers reported to FBI against actual cases), but would be a more involved process unless you have particular districts that you feel are more likely to be fudging the numbers.
Maybe it’s racially biased over/underpolicing? Except we’re talking about homicide, and it’s hard to overpolice homicide (you’ve only got so many corpses to work with), which means underpolicing when white folks commit homicide. But by the same stats 4 in 5 homicides have killer and victim of the same race, which would mean police just ignoring it when white people are killed, which doesn’t sound very white supremacist of them.
Maybe there are white people killing black people and successfully framing other black people for the crime? That could happen, I guess. It would require massive incompetence or overt racism on the part of police, and have to stay secret, and have to be happening at a truly massive scale (we’re talking thousands of cases every year for as long as we’ve been keeping the stats). Which feels unlikely just in sheer scale.
You know what I think is likely? That the stats gathered are accurate, and more homicide is done both by and to black folks because a lot of homicide is gang violence and at a national scale the prime gang recruiting demographic is poor young black men. There are statistical methods by which this too could be tested, but it would be more of an ordeal than the others, and merely admitting that law enforcement statistics regarding race might be accurate probably denies you funding outright.
I think your approach is decent but you’ve perhaps downplayed a thing or two in your analysis of the counterfactual.
removedincluded.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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I meant “included”, not removed. Edited.
Here is a secondary source, with info to link to the primary.
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.
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.
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.