We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10660295 and marked it off-topic.

You reveal your lack of good faith with the slur, "the criminality of the black community". If you were genuinely interested in factual exploration, that's where you'd be least likely to go.

> and marked it off-topic

What does this mean, technically?

It makes the subthread go lower in comment ranking and adds it to a corpus of offtopicness.

Agh, sorry, I downvoted you by accident.

Fixed.

Given that this isn't an isolated incident, and we're seeing black people on the receiving end of a great deal of police misconduct over the past couple of years (Laquan McDonald and the subsequent cover up is the most recent example), perhaps it's time you consider that the reason arrest rates for black people are so high is because they are targeted unjustly. Not because they're actually committing crimes at higher rates.

It could be both. It could also be that the two phenomena are related in more ways than one. I'm not a sociologist and this isn't my wheelhouse, but I can both imagine a world in which exposure to crime can jade law enforcement against a community - and one in which a community can become jaded by corrupt law enforcement.

"criminality" is not an inherent trait in any race, including black Americans. The increased crime rates are a function of a number of inputs, many of which stem all the way back to slavery-- which has never fully been addressed/redressed in our public policy. To fail to recognize this and treat "black criminality" as some initial condition is to fail to critically think about our collective history and the resulting consequences.

This is just made up shit that sounds good in your head. Even if we suppose for a moment that what you should have kept to yourself is true, what do you expect black people to do? In a dysfunctional relationship the person in the position of overwhelming power is the one that needs to change. Who "started" it is irrelevant.

It's sad that you actually think this is true.

You're saying it's not true? That policemen don't assume all blacks must be guilty of something? I'm sure a lot of them really do. That's just how human nature works. We all judge people on flimsy evidence and form prejudices. Police are humans like the rest of us and are bound to have those same kinds of prejudice.

> That policemen don't assume all blacks must be guilty of something?

I believe this is closer to the truth, but that's not what the flagged comment was getting at. His blanket assertion was that blacks committed more crimes than whites.

You can't draw conclusions from one fact and then call your suppositions facts.

> Downvote me all you want: it won't change the facts.

I downvoted you because you are simply incorrect about the facts. Black people make up 12% of the US population, and use illicit drugs at approximately a proportionate rate. Yet, black people make up more than half of the prison population of drug offenders, and nearly two thirds of those under any form of criminal supervision for drug offenses.

Why are you saying otherwise?

I upvoted him because it's difficult to read what he wrote (and I routinely upvote grey comments). HN should decide whether a downvote means ‘I disagree’ or ‘this isn't worth reading’ — ‘I disagree therefore this isn't worth reading’ is incompatible with reasoned discussion.

It's one thing to have a different opinion - I often upvote people with whom I have a different opinion.

It's entirely another to make a claim about facts which is not supported - in this case by evidence that is not controversial.

It's simply not so that black people commit crimes in proportion with the representation in the criminal justice system. In fact, if poverty and geography are controlled for, ethnicity and race seem to be non-determiners of criminality.

This is explained, among many other places, here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-farbota/black-crime-rates-...

If you want to read a faded comment more easily, simply click on its timestamp. Please don't vote for that reason.

"Disagreeing" on facts is not compatible with reasoned discussion too, especially when one couches their opinion in such clearly unreasoned ways such as "go ahead and downvote me." This person knows that they're trolling, and does it anyway.

> I upvoted him because it's difficult to read what he wrote

Does this mean that you upvote greytext comments because it makes the text too difficult to read, and you find that upvoting such a comment not infrequently makes it easier for you to read it?

If yes, then you might be pleased to know that you can solve the contrast issue by selecting the text with your mouse or whatever other pointing device you use.

> HN should decide whether a downvote means ‘I disagree’ or ‘this isn't worth reading'

I can't speak for the community at large, but PG has condoned downvotes as a signal of disagreement.

Just hit ctrl-a.

Unfortunately, Hacker News has decided, and considers the censorship of comments for any reason at all (including no particular reason) to be not only compatible with, but vital to, reasoned discussion.

If you prefer to make your own decisions about what comments are worth reading, and use Firefox, here[0] is a userscript that will unfade them.

[0]https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/5b5e413220afb93c9c93

Without providing a reference backing up your second sentence your claim is no more believable than the OP's.

The reason I mention it is that on average black people tend to be poorer and live in worse neighborhoods, and poor people in bad neighborhoods (of all races) tend to do more drugs. So my expectation would be black people tend to do more drugs than white people, but I still doubt it's enough of a difference to explain the difference in prison population.

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-median-income-in-the-us...

Edit: Just to be clear before I'm downvoted into oblivion, I agree that the police and justice system are heavily biased against black people, I'm just not sure that sentence is true.

> poor people in bad neighborhoods (of all races) tend to do more drugs

This is not true. This matter has been thoroughly studied - have you a source to back up this claim?

Even though the drugs that are often consumed in poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminalized, they are still used at comparable (and sometimes higher) rates in affluent neighborhoods (along with many other drugs in configurations that aren't prohibited).

I don't understand what you are asking me to source - you are the one making the claim.

Here's an easy read that lays this stuff out plainly (I already linked it from my other comment, below):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-farbota/black-crime-rates-...

Correlations with race are highly suspect as well as self-reinforcing. I believe they should be abandoned because the damage they cause (by perpetuating a problem) may be greater than any possible benefit they provide.

Correlations with race are _facts_. Impartially collected data collated with robust statistical methods results in race falling out of the mix as an important correlate with all sorts of things; we then publish these correlations. Which part should we abandon? Impartial data collection? Robust statistics? Publication of the results? Are you suggesting that certain facts are too dangerous to know?

Correlations are never facts: they are interpretations of statistical measurements.

Correlations with eye color may also be _facts_, but this does not mean that they are important. And (hopefully by definition, since these are all just physical attributes), such correlations (as ridiculous as it sounds) should be no more, or less, important than racial, gender, age or other correlations. They're all just tools to oppress minorities and treat people as groups rather than individuals, which is good for a single brain trying to make sense of the world but bad for the individuals in the group.

Are you aware of the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment by teacher Jane Elliott? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

In any event, the problem, if any, is cultural and economic, NOT racial. I lived with a white Irish guy who grew up in an entirely black neighborhood, and if you closed your eyes you would have zero doubt he was black. One of the coolest (and most mind-blowing) guys I've ever met.

Have you read "Night" by Elie Wiesel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_(book) The Nazis had plenty of correlations (I'm sorry, _FACTS_) to being Jewish, put it that way... and we all know how that ended up.

The only racial correlative that makes any sense to track, to me, is sickle-cell anemia, because it is helpful.

The problem is your brain (and my brain, and everyone's brain). As soon as you learn of an unfortunate correlation with race (or sex... did you know almost all rapists are men? Did you know most people interested in math and science are male? Etc.), you tend to lean on it too much to make judgments across ALL of the correlate, and therein lies the serious problem, because the outliers get _the_shaft_. The well-meaning black man experiences bias on a daily basis and gets worse jobs, the science-interested woman gets scoffed at and thus discouraged by male teachers, and the good gentleman never gets the girl because she crosses the street before actually meeting him out of fear.

So, fucking quit it, man. It's not helpful, in any way, shape, or form. It is disingenuous to all humans, to restrict a handful of them based on a correlation with a physical attribute. It's giving in to the laziness of your brain trying to oversimplify a complex world. It's actively evil, in fact, the equivalent of grouping all Koreans together and calling them "gooks" because the idea that you're shooting actual humans is just too distasteful a thought.

Don't you see? It's ENTIRELY easier for you to not hire an entirely qualified black man, if you're spouting this bullshit.

Well, it's not exactly the black people's fault that the police decided to be corrupt. So now they've made their own bed and they'll have to lie in it: if they could have categorically said 'this does not happen' they would have had a strong position. Now everybody that gets in trouble with the police can muddy the waters by saying that the evidence was planted. And in some of those cases that will be the truth.

These officers have all but destroyed the reputation of their force and that's something that they're not going to recover easily - if at all.

So, let's have a productive public conversation: How will guarantees be provided that something like this can never happen again, how will the people affected by this be properly compensated for the crimes done to them, how will everybody involved in these affairs be charged, tried and punished, from high to low and how will the police force change it's inner culture so that if there is another instance of such a thing it will be immediately and swiftly dealt with before another culture like the current one can take root?

All that has nothing to do with the arrest rates of blacks, elevated black criminality and the black community at large, this is a police problem, and only a police problem, the people evidence was planted on are called victims and you don't get to blame those for any misconduct of the other party.

I'm assuming that if they plant evidence they plant evidence where-ever they feel like and if they want to arrest people for no good reason that they'll do that too to whoever they feel like. If they do that more often to blacks than to others then there are yet more problems but these are significant enough by themselves to be extremely damaging.

> While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer.

I can't. If you can't stand the heat stay the fuck out of the kitchen. Good police officers can not function if their not-so-good colleagues spoil the reputation of the whole department like this.

To those that downvoted this comment: feel free to explain your reasons.

> Black Americans commit a wildly disproportionate amount of crime. While police conduct exists and is deplorable, my sense as an observer is that the majority of black anti-police activism is about somehow pinning the criminality of the black community on society at large.

> While I of course condemn polite misconduct, I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer.

This right here, this is what racism looks like. This is its kernel, its essence.

Racism is fundamentally a double standard between an in group and an out group. The in-group is judged compassionately. Wrong-doing is contextualized and labelled as a mistake, an outlier, the doing of a tiny subset, uncharacteristic. The out-group is judged harshly. Wrong-doing is claimed to be characteristic to the point of being universal, it is never contextualized and there is never an allowance for human imperfection.

Here you have a situation where millions of people (black americans) are being characterized by the actions of a tiny subset (criminals), and condemned for it while on the other hand the crimes and abuses of another group (police officers) are contextualized if not excused.

All racism is based on a seed of truth, but you can no more use the higher crime rate of blacks to condemn an entire race than you can use the higher crime rate of men to condemn an entire gender.

Well said.

Actually, black Americans are primed for entry into "the system" from kindergarten. It's called "the school to prison pipeline" and it has been conclusively shown that blacks get disproportionate punishment at every phase of life.

Similar things have been done to other minority populations, especially indigenous populations, in other countries, with much the same results.

If police officers can be made corrupt just by doing their jobs, then we really need to change how that system works.

> I can understand how repeated interaction with a recalcitrant criminal element could harden and corrupt a police officer.

If a job is hard and hardening, and the job requires you to behave fairly, sensibly, and rationally, then a reasonable employer will often and regularly check to ensure that the job hasn't damaged the employee in such a way as to render them useless or ineffective.

One common way to handle this sort of thing is to proactively rotate employees in and out of the stressful portions of the job.

Take your racism somewhere else, it doesn't belong here.