But does this really explain a massively disproportionate homicide rate among certain groups in the US? Sure for lesser or non-crimes like drugs there can be massively unfair, racist enforcement and penalties. For rape, sure, certain groups will get away with it. But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?

As far as Norway and "blah blah homogenous society" do they not also show a heavy bias in crimes committed by the "non homogenous" population there?

There's a scale from accident, via involuntary manslaugher to murder. There may well be bias in judging what to prosecute.

Also, laws such "three strikes you are out" may lead to more murders. If, say, you're a burglar with two strikes, and a house owner wakes up and recognizes you, hitting him hard out of fear for that third strike becomes more likely. Similarly, racial bias by the police may make people so wary of "he said, she said" situations that they will 'snap' and kill someone instead (IMO, many people convicted for murder aren't cold-blooded killers, but mentally not the most stable persons who have been dealt a socially unfavorable card in life)

I guess I was just objecting to the idea that "racism" is the cause for these statistical imbalances, especially since you see the same kind of thing happening in Europe which would seem, at least on the surface, to have less racism issues, no? But perhaps I'm wrong since a lot of good people think the opposite, but it's hard to tell since it's so politicized and sensitive, just like anything about race.

A reasonable reader might suspect that you reached, for whatever reason, the conclusion that capital punishment couldn't be racist (perhaps because, as you've stated in other comments on HN, you feel the term "racism" is used too often), and are now intent on working your way backwards from that conclusion.

I think you should take a beat and reconsider how you're approaching the topic. It's an odd experience discussing this with you and watching you do little dances after each response to reorient yourself towards your preferred conclusion.

Edited extensively from the one-liner I originally wrote, sorry.

Do you have any suggestions on straight, fact-based reading on the subject, sources that aren't trying to appear sensitive? It's hard - even admitting races and may have differences upsets people.

On Norway, I'm just saying they don't have the same levels of racism baggage as the US regarding "Africans" (quotes cause it seems weird that many of them have families in the US longer than mine, but I would get no qualifiers as an American) yet still Norway sees overrepresentation.

You wrote:

For rape, sure, certain groups will get away with it. But for homicide? Are murders being selectively investigated?

The answer is, "yes, of course."

Slightly edited.

Edit: So I searched a bit, and, in NYC, it's said this is due to reduced budgets for homicide in certain areas that are predominately minority. For this to impact the stats (the raw numbers being that blacks, as a group in the US, commit 4-5x homicide by population, and similarly bad numbers looking at interracial crime) it'd have to be a massively disproportionate amount of non-blacks going into these neighbourhoods and killing them. From the "flavour" text in the articles I read, the victims families are lamenting that cops don't care because "it's just blacks men killing other black men".

But wow am I astounded how low the solved rate is, that's crazy. Though I would suspect most homicides are at least reported, whereas many lesser crimes (like drug possession) might not be. It's totally plausible that the real drug possession rate among whites is actually orders of magnitude higher than reported, less so for homicide.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond and correct me.

Your analysis here is based on another fallacy, which is that there's a direct connection between the crime of homicide and capital punishment. In fact, no: only a subset of murders, aggravated by circumstances mostly not present in gang shootings, attract death sentences. Further, some presumably large fraction of the black/black murders you're considering occur in jurisdictions that are statistically (or, as in the case of Chicago, legally) unlikely to apply capital punishment.

To reach a conclusion that there aren't racial disparities in capital punishment, you have to de-confound the homicide statistics to eliminate murders that are effectively or statistically ineligible for the death penalty, and then make comparisons.

Whoah, don't tarnish everyone else with the fucked-up brush of the US system.

> Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., regularly close prisons

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inma...

No justice system is perfect, but let's avoid the black/white scandanavia/ROW thing. The scandanavians do well, yes, but they're not the only ones that use rehabilitation.

> the fact is that common wealth countries like to kill and enslave people to punish them

Where do you see slavery or capital punishment in modern commonwealth countries? We're not in the 19th century anymore. I assume you actually meant Dominion countries and not commonwealth countries, but even so, which modern commonwealth countries have capital punishment? More importantly, how do you see it as a characteristic of a commonwealth country in general.

The Nordics are the exception when it comes to focus on rehabilitation. Not to say they are right, or wrong, just that at this point in history they are the exception.

They are models, but they are also facing completely different dynamics than pretty much every other country. Wealthy and secure and:

* Denmark - 5.7 million people, 80% of whom are Danish

* Norway - 5.1 million people, in 1992 95% were native

* Sweden - 10 million, the largest non-Swedish ethnic group being the Finns at 150k

You can drive an hour's radius through many big US metros and cover more people than those countries and within that radius find swaths of hundreds of thousands of people of various ethnic groups. These population numbers really pale compared to anything in East Asia though even if they are homogeneous (don't discount how much that helps social dynamics).

The demographics are shifting in Nordic countries but they a really are extreme outliers worthy of praise and recognition that they are outliers.

edit to include reply:

You are talking about demographics. How can it be irrelevant?

The US is in the situation it is in because an entire demographic was transplanted here against their will due to slavery. Nordic countries do not have this situation (good!) so the potential remedies are different.

The only way to solve problems is to effectively diagnose them. You might not like that the US isn't a country of 5 million people with 80% native population which makes policy a lot easier, but that's reality. We can't make things better unless we recognize that and figure out the proper solution within this setting and not some other.

It's not racist to recognize that and it's wrong to call someone a racist because they are searching for solutions.

It is a massive self-reinforcing feedback loop. If we had even an ounce of the empathy and rational approach to public safety that the Nordic countries had, we wouldn't be having this discussion and that feedback loop would have been broken a century ago.

That said, this is not endemic to western cultures. The same attitude is prevalent in LatAm, Africa, South Asia, etc.

It would be helpful if people didn't perpetuate the myth that it springs from race (though race can exacerbate the issue). It was a problem in Britain before they became empire.

It's an issue in China, India, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, Japan, Korea, etc. many places far-removed from western culture.