A few days ago, I stumbled across this study of over 7 million people that found in-group bias among black Americans is approximately 5 times stronger than in-group bias among white Americans. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised to find a difference. There are many reasons, good and bad, why the notion of black solidarity exists. But
Yep, agreed. I think there's more to it that *just* poverty, there are other cultural and societal elements that disproportionately funnel black people towards crime (racial discrimination, glorification of black criminality in music, movies), but poverty is obviously a huge factor.
A while back I watched an interview (wish I could recall who the host was so I could link it here) of three conservative black thought leaders, two of whom were Glenn Loury and Bob Woodson (who marched with MLK Jr.). Woodson described growing up in a very poor neighborhood in Philly in the pre-civil rights era (he was born in '37), and he spoke about how safe his neighborhood was back then, even at night. I also read not long ago about the poverty that has existed in certain Chinese American neighborhoods which yet has not correlated to high crime rates among that population. And Asians have certainly experienced their share of discrimination; currently they are increasingly the targets of hate crimes, as well.
Far more than poverty, it seems cultural factors play a more decisive role in criminal behavior within specific populations. I was really struck by the picture Woodson painted of the poverty he grew up in. From a cultural viewpoint, the stark change for black families between his childhood and now is that their family structure has been decimated by very high rates of fatherlessness. I suspect one of the largest factors contributing to disproportionate high crime rates in American black communities is how relatively few young men grow up in stable two-parent homes with a dad, or any positive male role model. And that same fatherlessness also feeds heavily into the cycle of poverty, as demonstrated in the literature on the detrimental impacts of fatherlessness.
So I'd say that if poverty and discrimination were the real drivers, then Woodson would have grown up amidst crime and violence and we'd see it also among poor Chinese-Americans going back through history. But he didn't and we don't. This article gives some interesting insight on the cultural component, as well:
Asian Americans are a wealthier group than white Americans. The reason is our immigration requirements ensured they had more resources than average Americans of all races.
Except that Asian Americans are not a monolith. What you say may be true for immigrants of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent. It is not true for immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam.
No one is a monolith. But on average, Asian Americans are richer than other American groups except for Jewish Americans, just as Black Americans are poorer than other American groups except for American Indians.
You make a good point (you always do! I've enjoyed your writing here and on the infernal Medium). But the gap is not a large one between white Americans and Asian Americans as a group. I just looked up data for 2019, so perhaps the gap has widened since then. But in that year, white American average household income was @ 80k. For all Asian Americans, it was 86k.
But if you break it down by ethnicity, only Chinese-, Japanese-, Flipino-, and Indian-Americans had incomes higher than whites. Burmese, Nepalese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Hmong, even Korean-Americans, several others, were all under 80k. When you look at the starkly varying circumstances - i.e. Chinese/Japanese/Korean immigrants are often well-positioned financially prior to immigration while many other ethnicities are not - I do think it is important to not look at "Asian Americans" as a cohesive group. Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group. To quote one of the articles I've just read: "While Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups."
That may be true, but doesn't mean all Asian Americans are wealthy and/or there are no enclaves of poverty within that population. My point was referencing those who live in poverty. From the first paragraph of the link I shared:
"The Columbia [University] study revealed the startling news that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of New York City’s Asian population was impoverished, a proportion exceeding that of the city’s black population (19 percent). This was surprising, given the widespread perception that Asians are among the nation’s more affluent social groups. But the study contains an even more startling aspect: in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand."
Those impoverished Asians ... do their houses look dilapidated and shabby? No, They're immaculate.
People of European ancestry rarely speak their ancestral language in the second generation. My grandfather came from Germany at age 12, spoke with an accent all his life, and I never heard him speak a word of German. I learned it in high school.
The Chinese who came to America from Toisan Province in the 1840s to work on the railroads still speak Toisan at home, nine generations later. Maybe they've shifted to Cantonese and/or Mandarin, but they still speak Chinese.
We will know that poverty is the only factor when prison populations are racially proportionate to poverty. I believe we’re getting closer to that, but haven’t gotten there yet.
The other factor is urban vs rural poverty. White and Hispanic poor people are more rural than black poor people.
Hey Steve, have you ever heard of the Duncan Lemp case? In one of the wealthiest, most Dem/progressive counties in America (Montgomery, in MD, where I grew up but no longer live), police barged into a house where this young, right-wing, too-online guy lived with his parents and pregnant girlfriend. Family claims he was shot in his bed- the same bed where pregnant GF was sleeping. Because he was associated- at least online- with right-wing (and presumably unsavory) groups, the left has said nothing about this killing which was in some ways similar to that of Brionna Taylor.
So now this guy is a martyr to the incel and alt-right set, and I just want to bang my head against the wall and say, you know what nobody- not right, not center, not left- likes? Police shooting people in their freaking beds! If left and right could make common cause on police brutality we could move the needle, and to me (middle age white lifelong Dem) that's the tragedy of BLM. When they focussed solely on police brutality, they had a sympathetic ear on the right. When they became a catch-all movement of progressive mantras, it's culture war all the way down. Blech.
PS- re: Duncan Lemp. Of course the investigations cleared the cop who shot Lemp and they never released the video footage. To be clear, I'm not a fan of the groups Lemp was part of - not at all- and I have no reason not to believe the policy claims that indeed there were illegal weapons in the house. But they shot the dude in his bed without even trying any other way, about a mile or two from my childhood home, and because of our divided politics, none of the usual suspects said a word.
Yep, I've heard of Duncan Lamp. The details of the case are pretty murky. Lemp's girlfriend claims he was in bed, the police claim he was shot after refusing to comply with orders to get on the ground and trying to get to his gun. Sadly, no video evidence of who is telling the truth, but it's a pretty long way from Breonna Taylor's case.
The police were at the right house, they'd received an accurate tip off that Lamp had illegal firearms, and, if the police testimony is true, fired only when the Lamp refused to follow orders. None of this is true in Breonna's case.
I have to say, I'm not convinced BLM ever had a sympathetic ear on the right. And the idea that the police decided to target this random guy out of the millions of people with horrible politics like his is ridiculous. But there's no doubt the story would have been handled very differently if Lemp were black.
Dear Steve: thank you for your thoughtful reply, which illustrates where I wasn't clear earlier. Of course I didn't mean to suggest that the Taylor and Lemp cases were exactly the same, but they were both no-knock raids where the police made claims that were soundly refuted by the other folks in the residence. In Lemp's case, the police had bodycams but there is no footage of the raid itself. Did they turn the bodycams off? Or destroy the evidence later?
I'm not arguing that Lemp was a saint, and I'm not a right-winger who believes he's a Boogaloo martyr. I'm saying that even in the bluest of blue America, police go guns blazing into residences where there are other people than the suspect, without even trying other means first. I'm trying- perhaps unsuccessfully- to back up your point that that police brutality is a problem that transcends race. I also believe, and I think the Lemp case illustrates this, that with a different framing, common cause around police militarism could bring some right and some left groups together on this particular issue.
Re: BLM and the right, I didn't use the best language. I should have said that at different points, prominent Republicans have expressed some interest and sympathy in police shootings of unarmed civilians. For example, MItt Romney marched in a post-George Floyd vigil. Tim Scott gave speeches on the Senate floor back in 2016 about being stopped around DC as a black man and several of his GOP colleagues were supportive of police reform bills that Scott was sponsoring. Again, it's a very narrow point I'm making, which is there is a constituency on both left and right for police reform, if that issue can be separated from other culture war battle cries.
Thank you for your continued exploration of sensitive topics.
A man was killed by the police in a raid pertaining to illegal firearms, a victimless crime. America has the world's largest prison population. What would it be if crimes had to have a victim? Would there be any story at all here?
Eric Garner was choked to death in a confrontation with the police about illegally selling cigarettes. It is probably safe to assume that the cigarettes had been taxed. Who was a victim in this crime? Why is it a crime? A man died.
We could reduce police interactions with the public that have a possibility of turning deadly by having fewer crimes that shouldn't be a crime. Something that gets little to no discussion.
Feels like something is missing here. As written the story implies that the cops burst into a man's house and killed him in his bed for the crime of posting right wing horseshit on the Internet. Sorry but I don't believe that. Not for a minute.
The edit button is missing, so I have to reply to my own post to extend it.
If the guy was a gun nut then he likely had a pistol under his pillow but it would be nuts to shoot him without first ordering him to hold his hands in the air.
Something is missing in this story, and "the left" has nothing to do with it.
Fathers. Bring back the fathers. Incentivize involvement. Disincentivize abandonment, for whatever reason. Do it at a policy level and a community level simultaneously. In the wider culture, black and white, value men and boys properly. Recognize their intrinsic worth and how that is their contribution to society. All of the stats and history aside, this, I believe, is the thing that will make the biggest difference.
One of my really big issues with white lefties is the white guilt thing. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of white people as well as black people trying to shut down conversations they don't want to have with 'white privilege' accusations. The difference between the right and left is in who they hate. The right hates non-whites and the left hates whites. I used to say the right hates women and the left hates men, but I'm coming to realize the left has just been better at hiding its misogyny, or maybe I was just blind to it. 'Bernie bros' and the transactivists are lifting the blinders from my eyes. Am I getting 'woke' to left misogyny? LOL.
(One of my censored articles on Medium before I got kicked off was "White People Who Hate White People Are Racist". Vocal.media a few months later approved it without any fuss.)
The problem with the police, as the world is slowly getting woke to :) is police brutality overall, black people only being a slice of it. Now that we know the number of unarmed black men killed by police in America every year is in the very low double digits, and the number of unarmed white men killed always a few bodies higher (literally, like <10), it looks like BLM formed to save, like, two dozen black lives a year when thousands more are taken every bit as unjustly by others, mostly other black men or POC. (Interestingly, BLM Memphis was rather silent about Tyre Nichols in the days after his death on Twitter. I looked.)
Black people are arsed about police brutality (which affects them poorly even when they're not murdered) because it affects *them*. This isn't really racist so much as human. If the media focused more on white murders by cops, white people would get arsed more. And I try to get women arsed more by pointing out cops have a 40% higher DV rate than other professions, in fact I wrote about it recently.
From what I've been reading, and this includes the Memphis PD, many police departments are now lowering their standards to recruit new police officers because so many have retired or just left in the wake of so much anti-police hate (part deserved, part not). They'll take anyone with a pulse, and they don't bother too much about prior records. It'll be interesting to see where these five bozos came from.
So the problem may now be shitty humans as cops, as well as the historical racism, misogyny, homophobia, and violent right-wing leanings of many. But for sure the more recent militarization of the police, which could morph into a more police-like state, especially with violent crime spiralling everywhere (including historically safe Toronto, where I now carry a can of hair spray in my coat pocket with my hand on it in case anyone pulls anything.)
Statistics are often horribly abused. Comparing percentages of something while ignoring the percentage of population because the ignored percentage might lead to the conclusion that the issue is being blown out of proportion. X occurs five times more often than Y with regard to something with a 0.00001% chance of happening for example.
Anyone who believes that an "unarmed" 6'3" 225 LB man in his physical prime is not dangerous, especially when confronting a 5'4" 120 LB policewoman has led a very privileged and sheltered life, but most people have. "Who was not presenting a threat" is far more honest than "unarmed."
There are so many considerations in the human condition beyond race that honest, and more importantly, useful studies are hard to find. Not just bias, but error of honest omission. I am becoming more inclined to question relevance of statistics than ever.
There may be another issue here, hidden in the statistics, but hard to deal with.
How many reported crimes are not solved by the police, and how many are never reported? And (of course we don't know) how many of those unsolved cases were committed by white folks?
If a black criminal is more likely to get caught than a white one, no wonder crime rates for black people seem higher.
And that ignores the other question: how often are people convicted for crimes they didn't actually commit, and are there racial differences there too?
It's tempting to say stuff about people like the very wealthy families committing white-colour crime - corruption, drug companies pushing highly addictive substances at doctors, landlords & company owners breaking the rules, all that stuff. There are a lot of wealthy crims out there who never see a court-room.
But the real lesson is: don't believe the statistics until you think around what's not being measured.
You would be highly interested in the excellent quantitative research carried out by U of Michigan Professor Shea Streeter produced in her Ph.D dissertation at Stanford. Her conclusion dovetails with yours--the positive correlation between the frequency of citizen/police interactions overall between "races" and the higher number of those interactions escalating into violence. That is, the percentage of police interactions that escalate is about the same among racial categories, but since "Blacks" have a much higher percentage of overall police interactions, there is a higher percentage of these interactions that escalate into violence leading to police-caused fatalities. This runs against the common wisdom that "Blacks" handle police interactions worse than whites do or that cops are more likely to be violent against the Blacks" that they do detain. Rather, it's more because it's "Blacks" who are always the ones getting detained on a percentage basis. See https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/703541?journalCode=jop
I forgot to add---the higher detention rates for "Blacks" have both legitimate and illegitimate bases. It is both because of the higher relative crime rates AND the well-documented phenomenon of detention for "driving while Black" and for "innocently standing on the street-corner while Black in the "wrong" (i.e., white) neighborhood."
Is the topic black crime or BLM? I think the BLM topic has been flayed to equine bone dust, I would like to know more about that black crime statistic.
Pleasant to read a respectful conversation between you and Wanda and find value in everything that was said.
The reason black people seem to be over-represented in crime is they're over-represented in poverty. Class matters far more than race.
Yep, agreed. I think there's more to it that *just* poverty, there are other cultural and societal elements that disproportionately funnel black people towards crime (racial discrimination, glorification of black criminality in music, movies), but poverty is obviously a huge factor.
A while back I watched an interview (wish I could recall who the host was so I could link it here) of three conservative black thought leaders, two of whom were Glenn Loury and Bob Woodson (who marched with MLK Jr.). Woodson described growing up in a very poor neighborhood in Philly in the pre-civil rights era (he was born in '37), and he spoke about how safe his neighborhood was back then, even at night. I also read not long ago about the poverty that has existed in certain Chinese American neighborhoods which yet has not correlated to high crime rates among that population. And Asians have certainly experienced their share of discrimination; currently they are increasingly the targets of hate crimes, as well.
Far more than poverty, it seems cultural factors play a more decisive role in criminal behavior within specific populations. I was really struck by the picture Woodson painted of the poverty he grew up in. From a cultural viewpoint, the stark change for black families between his childhood and now is that their family structure has been decimated by very high rates of fatherlessness. I suspect one of the largest factors contributing to disproportionate high crime rates in American black communities is how relatively few young men grow up in stable two-parent homes with a dad, or any positive male role model. And that same fatherlessness also feeds heavily into the cycle of poverty, as demonstrated in the literature on the detrimental impacts of fatherlessness.
So I'd say that if poverty and discrimination were the real drivers, then Woodson would have grown up amidst crime and violence and we'd see it also among poor Chinese-Americans going back through history. But he didn't and we don't. This article gives some interesting insight on the cultural component, as well:
https://www.city-journal.org/poverty-and-violent-crime-dont-go-hand-in-hand
Asian Americans are a wealthier group than white Americans. The reason is our immigration requirements ensured they had more resources than average Americans of all races.
Except that Asian Americans are not a monolith. What you say may be true for immigrants of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent. It is not true for immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam.
No one is a monolith. But on average, Asian Americans are richer than other American groups except for Jewish Americans, just as Black Americans are poorer than other American groups except for American Indians.
You make a good point (you always do! I've enjoyed your writing here and on the infernal Medium). But the gap is not a large one between white Americans and Asian Americans as a group. I just looked up data for 2019, so perhaps the gap has widened since then. But in that year, white American average household income was @ 80k. For all Asian Americans, it was 86k.
But if you break it down by ethnicity, only Chinese-, Japanese-, Flipino-, and Indian-Americans had incomes higher than whites. Burmese, Nepalese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Hmong, even Korean-Americans, several others, were all under 80k. When you look at the starkly varying circumstances - i.e. Chinese/Japanese/Korean immigrants are often well-positioned financially prior to immigration while many other ethnicities are not - I do think it is important to not look at "Asian Americans" as a cohesive group. Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group. To quote one of the articles I've just read: "While Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups."
That may be true, but doesn't mean all Asian Americans are wealthy and/or there are no enclaves of poverty within that population. My point was referencing those who live in poverty. From the first paragraph of the link I shared:
"The Columbia [University] study revealed the startling news that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of New York City’s Asian population was impoverished, a proportion exceeding that of the city’s black population (19 percent). This was surprising, given the widespread perception that Asians are among the nation’s more affluent social groups. But the study contains an even more startling aspect: in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand."
It would be interesting to know if the Asian poor are as isolated as the black poor.
Good question. At least in NYC it seems they are; from the link below:
***************
"They don't want to step forward and admit, 'I'm in a situation where I need some need.' It's a cultural barrier," Kim said.
Advocates say part of the problem is that poverty in the community is often unseen.
"They are the hidden homeless," explained Chris Kui with Asian Americans for Equality.
"They are doubling up and tripling up, living in these cubicles that they share with 10 people within a one-bedroom apartment, for example."
****************
https://abc7news.com/our-america-asian-voices-sang-ki-chun-assemblymember-ron-kim-american-poverty-new-york/10578934/
Those impoverished Asians ... do their houses look dilapidated and shabby? No, They're immaculate.
People of European ancestry rarely speak their ancestral language in the second generation. My grandfather came from Germany at age 12, spoke with an accent all his life, and I never heard him speak a word of German. I learned it in high school.
The Chinese who came to America from Toisan Province in the 1840s to work on the railroads still speak Toisan at home, nine generations later. Maybe they've shifted to Cantonese and/or Mandarin, but they still speak Chinese.
No. The reason is culture. Achievement and education are esteemed over here. Teachers are revered.
"when you ain't got nothin'
you got nothin' to lose"
—pre-Happy Bob Dylan
We will know that poverty is the only factor when prison populations are racially proportionate to poverty. I believe we’re getting closer to that, but haven’t gotten there yet.
The other factor is urban vs rural poverty. White and Hispanic poor people are more rural than black poor people.
Hey Steve, have you ever heard of the Duncan Lemp case? In one of the wealthiest, most Dem/progressive counties in America (Montgomery, in MD, where I grew up but no longer live), police barged into a house where this young, right-wing, too-online guy lived with his parents and pregnant girlfriend. Family claims he was shot in his bed- the same bed where pregnant GF was sleeping. Because he was associated- at least online- with right-wing (and presumably unsavory) groups, the left has said nothing about this killing which was in some ways similar to that of Brionna Taylor.
So now this guy is a martyr to the incel and alt-right set, and I just want to bang my head against the wall and say, you know what nobody- not right, not center, not left- likes? Police shooting people in their freaking beds! If left and right could make common cause on police brutality we could move the needle, and to me (middle age white lifelong Dem) that's the tragedy of BLM. When they focussed solely on police brutality, they had a sympathetic ear on the right. When they became a catch-all movement of progressive mantras, it's culture war all the way down. Blech.
PS- re: Duncan Lemp. Of course the investigations cleared the cop who shot Lemp and they never released the video footage. To be clear, I'm not a fan of the groups Lemp was part of - not at all- and I have no reason not to believe the policy claims that indeed there were illegal weapons in the house. But they shot the dude in his bed without even trying any other way, about a mile or two from my childhood home, and because of our divided politics, none of the usual suspects said a word.
Yep, I've heard of Duncan Lamp. The details of the case are pretty murky. Lemp's girlfriend claims he was in bed, the police claim he was shot after refusing to comply with orders to get on the ground and trying to get to his gun. Sadly, no video evidence of who is telling the truth, but it's a pretty long way from Breonna Taylor's case.
The police were at the right house, they'd received an accurate tip off that Lamp had illegal firearms, and, if the police testimony is true, fired only when the Lamp refused to follow orders. None of this is true in Breonna's case.
I have to say, I'm not convinced BLM ever had a sympathetic ear on the right. And the idea that the police decided to target this random guy out of the millions of people with horrible politics like his is ridiculous. But there's no doubt the story would have been handled very differently if Lemp were black.
Dear Steve: thank you for your thoughtful reply, which illustrates where I wasn't clear earlier. Of course I didn't mean to suggest that the Taylor and Lemp cases were exactly the same, but they were both no-knock raids where the police made claims that were soundly refuted by the other folks in the residence. In Lemp's case, the police had bodycams but there is no footage of the raid itself. Did they turn the bodycams off? Or destroy the evidence later?
I'm not arguing that Lemp was a saint, and I'm not a right-winger who believes he's a Boogaloo martyr. I'm saying that even in the bluest of blue America, police go guns blazing into residences where there are other people than the suspect, without even trying other means first. I'm trying- perhaps unsuccessfully- to back up your point that that police brutality is a problem that transcends race. I also believe, and I think the Lemp case illustrates this, that with a different framing, common cause around police militarism could bring some right and some left groups together on this particular issue.
Re: BLM and the right, I didn't use the best language. I should have said that at different points, prominent Republicans have expressed some interest and sympathy in police shootings of unarmed civilians. For example, MItt Romney marched in a post-George Floyd vigil. Tim Scott gave speeches on the Senate floor back in 2016 about being stopped around DC as a black man and several of his GOP colleagues were supportive of police reform bills that Scott was sponsoring. Again, it's a very narrow point I'm making, which is there is a constituency on both left and right for police reform, if that issue can be separated from other culture war battle cries.
Thank you for your continued exploration of sensitive topics.
A man was killed by the police in a raid pertaining to illegal firearms, a victimless crime. America has the world's largest prison population. What would it be if crimes had to have a victim? Would there be any story at all here?
Eric Garner was choked to death in a confrontation with the police about illegally selling cigarettes. It is probably safe to assume that the cigarettes had been taxed. Who was a victim in this crime? Why is it a crime? A man died.
We could reduce police interactions with the public that have a possibility of turning deadly by having fewer crimes that shouldn't be a crime. Something that gets little to no discussion.
Feels like something is missing here. As written the story implies that the cops burst into a man's house and killed him in his bed for the crime of posting right wing horseshit on the Internet. Sorry but I don't believe that. Not for a minute.
What's the rest of it?
The edit button is missing, so I have to reply to my own post to extend it.
If the guy was a gun nut then he likely had a pistol under his pillow but it would be nuts to shoot him without first ordering him to hold his hands in the air.
Something is missing in this story, and "the left" has nothing to do with it.
Fathers. Bring back the fathers. Incentivize involvement. Disincentivize abandonment, for whatever reason. Do it at a policy level and a community level simultaneously. In the wider culture, black and white, value men and boys properly. Recognize their intrinsic worth and how that is their contribution to society. All of the stats and history aside, this, I believe, is the thing that will make the biggest difference.
One of my really big issues with white lefties is the white guilt thing. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of white people as well as black people trying to shut down conversations they don't want to have with 'white privilege' accusations. The difference between the right and left is in who they hate. The right hates non-whites and the left hates whites. I used to say the right hates women and the left hates men, but I'm coming to realize the left has just been better at hiding its misogyny, or maybe I was just blind to it. 'Bernie bros' and the transactivists are lifting the blinders from my eyes. Am I getting 'woke' to left misogyny? LOL.
(One of my censored articles on Medium before I got kicked off was "White People Who Hate White People Are Racist". Vocal.media a few months later approved it without any fuss.)
The problem with the police, as the world is slowly getting woke to :) is police brutality overall, black people only being a slice of it. Now that we know the number of unarmed black men killed by police in America every year is in the very low double digits, and the number of unarmed white men killed always a few bodies higher (literally, like <10), it looks like BLM formed to save, like, two dozen black lives a year when thousands more are taken every bit as unjustly by others, mostly other black men or POC. (Interestingly, BLM Memphis was rather silent about Tyre Nichols in the days after his death on Twitter. I looked.)
Black people are arsed about police brutality (which affects them poorly even when they're not murdered) because it affects *them*. This isn't really racist so much as human. If the media focused more on white murders by cops, white people would get arsed more. And I try to get women arsed more by pointing out cops have a 40% higher DV rate than other professions, in fact I wrote about it recently.
From what I've been reading, and this includes the Memphis PD, many police departments are now lowering their standards to recruit new police officers because so many have retired or just left in the wake of so much anti-police hate (part deserved, part not). They'll take anyone with a pulse, and they don't bother too much about prior records. It'll be interesting to see where these five bozos came from.
So the problem may now be shitty humans as cops, as well as the historical racism, misogyny, homophobia, and violent right-wing leanings of many. But for sure the more recent militarization of the police, which could morph into a more police-like state, especially with violent crime spiralling everywhere (including historically safe Toronto, where I now carry a can of hair spray in my coat pocket with my hand on it in case anyone pulls anything.)
"As Mark Twain put it (is there a single pithy quote that isn’t attributed to Mark Twain??), there are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
In this case, he actually said it but attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli. http://www.twainquotes.com/Statistics.html
Statistics are often horribly abused. Comparing percentages of something while ignoring the percentage of population because the ignored percentage might lead to the conclusion that the issue is being blown out of proportion. X occurs five times more often than Y with regard to something with a 0.00001% chance of happening for example.
Anyone who believes that an "unarmed" 6'3" 225 LB man in his physical prime is not dangerous, especially when confronting a 5'4" 120 LB policewoman has led a very privileged and sheltered life, but most people have. "Who was not presenting a threat" is far more honest than "unarmed."
There are so many considerations in the human condition beyond race that honest, and more importantly, useful studies are hard to find. Not just bias, but error of honest omission. I am becoming more inclined to question relevance of statistics than ever.
There may be another issue here, hidden in the statistics, but hard to deal with.
How many reported crimes are not solved by the police, and how many are never reported? And (of course we don't know) how many of those unsolved cases were committed by white folks?
If a black criminal is more likely to get caught than a white one, no wonder crime rates for black people seem higher.
And that ignores the other question: how often are people convicted for crimes they didn't actually commit, and are there racial differences there too?
It's tempting to say stuff about people like the very wealthy families committing white-colour crime - corruption, drug companies pushing highly addictive substances at doctors, landlords & company owners breaking the rules, all that stuff. There are a lot of wealthy crims out there who never see a court-room.
But the real lesson is: don't believe the statistics until you think around what's not being measured.
Steve,
You would be highly interested in the excellent quantitative research carried out by U of Michigan Professor Shea Streeter produced in her Ph.D dissertation at Stanford. Her conclusion dovetails with yours--the positive correlation between the frequency of citizen/police interactions overall between "races" and the higher number of those interactions escalating into violence. That is, the percentage of police interactions that escalate is about the same among racial categories, but since "Blacks" have a much higher percentage of overall police interactions, there is a higher percentage of these interactions that escalate into violence leading to police-caused fatalities. This runs against the common wisdom that "Blacks" handle police interactions worse than whites do or that cops are more likely to be violent against the Blacks" that they do detain. Rather, it's more because it's "Blacks" who are always the ones getting detained on a percentage basis. See https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/703541?journalCode=jop
Is that supposed to mitigate? It doesn't for me.
Mitigate what?
I forgot to add---the higher detention rates for "Blacks" have both legitimate and illegitimate bases. It is both because of the higher relative crime rates AND the well-documented phenomenon of detention for "driving while Black" and for "innocently standing on the street-corner while Black in the "wrong" (i.e., white) neighborhood."
Is the topic black crime or BLM? I think the BLM topic has been flayed to equine bone dust, I would like to know more about that black crime statistic.
Which black crime statistic?