I think it's reasonable to remember that Blacks (and especially young Black men) commit proportionally more violent crimes; it is also useful to remember that black people in general are much more likely to be the victims of crime. The latter point is a much more reasonable way to view the experience of being black in America -- constantly in danger of crime, and then being treated like a criminal by the people who are supposed to protect you from crime.

The police -- and I do believe that the vast majority are well intentioned -- too often think that aggressive tactics are the answer, because the way to reduce crime must be to catch more criminals, right? So, when a police officer is assigned to a rough area with lots of crime, he tends to treat the citizens like criminals instead of victims. Maybe not everyone is treated this way -- but young, poor, black men certainly are in many cases, especially when they're involved in petty criminal activity like selling bootleg CDs that leads to tense interactions with police.

It's a really tough problem, and I don't have a good idea about what could be done to solve it -- but local governments are failing these communities, and we should demand something better from our leadership.

The leadership that's failing them most is the leadership of the black community. They're laser focused on selling a victimhood narrative that reduces all problems to racism and oppression by the white man. Meanwhile, black children are raised in single-parent homes in record numbers, are joining gangs due to poor parental supervision, and very often grow up in an environment that frowns upon success as some kind of racial betrayal ("acting white"). Blacks who speak out about the social and cultural problems within the black community are labeled Uncle Toms and ignored (see Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas, for example).

Second to that is the leadership and elite of the country, that accepts this victimhood narrative out of misinformation, political correctness, and political expedience. There's no better way to get 90% of a population to vote for you than to convince them that the other side is the mortal enemy that hates them for the color of their skin and wants to keep them down.

It's much easier to sell such a narrative when the entire history of your country backs it up. When a close advisor of a previous President admits they started the war on drugs to target hippies and negroes, for example.

Oh, that same president was strongly anti-abortion except in extreme circumstances. His example of such a case when abortion was warranted? Mixed-race babies.

He also reset the fundamental strategy one of your political parties for the last few decades to appealing to racists with "the southern strategy". Which Trump, with his flirting with white supremacist groups continues to this day.

Believe what you want. Even if everything you say is true, which I seriously doubt, it doesn't change the fact that victimhood politics is the road to continued ruin.

Unfortunately it is true:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1058326...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Why shouldn't a victim acknowledge the reality of being targeted? What other groups do you expect to follow this bizarre recommendation?

Thus is a nice historical overview that ties a lot of this stuff together:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-ameri...

I don't buy that America is a substantially racist country today. I especially don't buy that racism is even in the top-ten list of problems facing black people.

History sucks. It landed my grandparents in America, having fled Cuba, with the clothes on their backs. They had built lives for themselves and had it all pulled from under them. Somehow, the Cuban-American community has done phenomenally well for itself. Definitely not by blaming the past for their lot and demanding nebulous reparations.

"In order to provide aid to recently arrived Cuban immigrants, the United States Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966. The Cuban Refugee Program provided more than $1.3 billion of direct financial assistance. They also were eligible for public assistance, Medicare, free English courses, scholarships, and low-interest college loans." says wikipedia. Seems like they were lucky to be on the right side of a political battle to me.

You realize that's all dwarfed by the welfare state that we now have for everyone, right?

It's also not the root of the Cuban-American community's success. The earliest waves of migrants were almost all from the middle and upper class. They did correspondingly well in their new home. Wealth is not really a number in your bank account, it's the knowledge and virtues that guide of the process of producing value.

If you took everyone in America's money away and started over, the resulting classes would look a lot like today's. Culture is almost everything.

Blacks are convicted of committing higher rates of murder, rape, and other violent crime. Considering that nearly 40% of homicides go unsolved, it's entirely possible that the actual rate is much different.

Really?

Given that the vast majority of violence is white-on-white or black-on-black, are you seriously suggesting that the police are spending _more_ of their time and resources investigating murders of blacks than of whites?

The vast majority of the unsolved murders are inner-city, where often the police don't care who kills whom. The vast majority of the murders in the suburbs, in otherwise peaceful neighborhoods, get tons of police attention.

So no, I think it is is exceedingly unlikely that the actual homicide rate skews more white than the statistics show.

Perhaps I didn't get across what I was trying to say. My point was that legally, it's going to be easier for the courts to convict a poor person with a public defender on murder/non-neglient manslaughter charges than a rich person with an expensive lawyer.

What would be interesting to see is the rate at which charged persons of certain socioeconomic tiers successfully defended their case, or were able to plead down to a lesser charge if they were originally charged with homicide.

There are almost twice as many white people living in poverty in the USA than black people. Why would we assume that white people who commit murder will be rich and can afford an expensive lawyer, while the black people who commit murder will be poor?

It's true that more black people live in poverty than white people per capita, but it's also true that crime is not evenly distributed across all people per capita, and has a connection with poverty level. My point is that there are more white people living in poverty, and they commit crimes at lower rates per capita and also total than black people.

I don't have data for all of these arguments handy, but here's one resource on poverty levels by race and region: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceeth...

Also note that controlling for poverty does not eliminate the effect where blacks commit more crime than whites:

http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...

> > As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis

We could speculate that lots of things might be true, but if we're going to approach this topic scientifically, we should analyze data that we have, and not simply posit hypothetical after hypothetical. E.g. speculation like: "maybe all the unsolved murders are committed by whites"or "maybe white defendants are getting off when blacks aren't" -- a fine train of thought to explore and validate with data, but it's just speculation unless/until there are data and evidence to back it up.

Whoa whoa, it's not that police don't care who kills somebody. That's way off. Problem is in many cities, snitches don't just get stitches, they get killed along with whoever might be living with them. ASK homicide detectives or better yet watch one of the hundreds of episodes of 'The First 48' and you'll see that investigators get very little help in these tight knit urban communities.

And to carry forward your good point -- black people are committing more murders, but also being killed by murderers more often, as well as growing up in neighborhoods where murders happen and losing family members -- etc. Communities with more criminals have more victims as well. To pretend like it's not the case is to turn your back on the large number of victims, who deserve better regardless of the race of the perpetrator.

you've got it wrong. Investigators do so much work to help these families. No cop wants a murderer to walk, that's why they get into the job in the first place. If you haven't talked to police before, especially investigation units, you need to recognize your assumptions are wrong.

You're deep in conspiracy-theory territory. No one seriously disputes that the actual black violent crime rate is much much higher than the white violent crime rate. This is accepted fact. Unfortunately, this kind of conspiratorial fact-free thinking has been embraced by movements like BLM and their supporters.

To expect equal outcomes is absurd. The black and white communities in the US have very different histories and cultures. Their economic conditions are also wildly different. The different crime rates and outcomes are completely consistent with this.

And yes, for some crimes, blacks probably get caught at a higher rate. Black neighborhoods tend to be high-crime areas, so they tend to have greater police presence. This is totally rational policing. Liberty City in Miami needs a strong police presence to protect the inhabitants. The super ritzy and quiet parts of Coral Gables don't. Guess where you're more likely to get picked up for a low level stuff like speeding, smoking weed, or loitering? And who's more likely to get caught? The white guy selling drugs to his buddies at school or from home, or the black guy selling drugs on the corner? Different communities, different dynamics, different outcomes.

Thank god we have a system that it's really hard to convict innocent people. You know, a unanimous vote of a jury of your peers is required to convict and all.

I genuinely thought this comment was sarcasm, until I read your other comments.

This is only true in the case of murder. Other violent crime is much closer.