Do you think we can improve the damage we've done through policing?
I agree! I infer you think it has some causal connection with murder rates. I think that's probably true, but that the relationship is weak. Black people in the U.S., while poorer than average compared to the rest of the U.S. population, are some of the richest people in the world in terms of their actual material consumption. There are lots of poorer (and much poorer) populations out there who do not display similar murder rates. I take that as evidence that not being on the same footing economically is probably not a primary driver of the high murder rate among Black Americans.
>Do you think we can improve the damage we've done through policing?
Yes! Step one is stop causing new damage. I think the easiest way to accomplish this is to end the War on Drugs once and for all. It's the lowest-hanging fruit--a watermelon-sized apple really. We're starting to go down this path as a nation, and it's imperative we keep going down that path. There will be negative effects, but I think the positive effects will greatly outweigh them.
If you want to try to paint a picture of the modal murder in the U.S., it's "Young brown man argues with other young brown man about something silly, things escalate, someone pulls out a cheap pistol and shoots the other guy"
Gang murders, while profitable fodder for mass media, are a clear minority.
0: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Problem is that you have lots of poor immigrants that immigrated here from former communist countries, or latin america, or Laos/Cambodia, with no money and no savings whatsover. Some came as starving refugees, and are still poorer than the average.
Yet, they don't end up doing crime at the same rate as some other poor people.
Being poor seems like a copout and doesn't address the issue.
First of all, most police stops and arrests aren't for murder, but for various petty crimes (particularly drugs and traffic violations) that are certainly unevenly enforced, even controlling for other factors (see e.g. see e.g. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...), so citing murder statistics here to seems a little irrelevant, as they are such a small fraction of police stops. It is also probably not an effective means of catching murderers (instead turning communities against the police, perhaps contributing to the pathetic murder clearance rates achieved by police). As you probably know, many have argued that there is both overpolicing of petty crimes and underpolicing of violent crimes in minority communities ( see, e.g. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8411733/black-community-polici...).
But, sticking to murder rates, these statistics also ignore a lot of dynamics. At least in urban areas (I don't have much familiarity with rural areas), most murders aren't individuals acting independently to commit murder. Instead, a large fraction of murders are gang-related (either directly, or collaterally), suggesting that to large extent, differential gang prevalence might be a dominant factor in the difference in murder rates.
Why are gangs prevalent today in some communities and not others? 100 years ago, gangs in places like Chicago were predominantly ethnic white (think Al Capone), though those gangs have largely declined and no longer play a larger role as far as I can tell. Nowadays, 90% of gang members appear to be Black or Hispanic (https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demograph...). Gangs of course are not all the same (some are probably more violent than others), but maybe the right question to be asking is why are gangs so prevalent among urban minorities.
I don't have any special knowledge here, but I imagine that in many cases, differential policing may certainly be a direct or indirect contributor to high gang prevalence. . There of course other many other reasons (community disinvestment, inertia, the "war on drugs."), but differential policing has the potential to cause a positive feedback loop here (unfair treatment -> higher gang membership -> higher violent rates -> unfair treatment) that probably needs to be broken. Of course, historically, unfair treatment of Blacks well predates the formation of Black street gangs (according to https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/434..., Black street gangs didn't become prevalent in large urban areas until the 50's/60's).
It might be "natural" for police to treat communities with higher murder rates differently, but that does not mean that it's the smart or right thing to do.
Here is the strongest presentation of this argument that I've seen: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe...
I don't have a well-formed opinion here, but IMO it's worth considering many possible combinations of factors.
This is really good
We should be careful with what we're talking about here: stops vs. arrests vs. crimes committed vs. offenders. They're all different things. The argument I'm making is basically this: the murder statistics are the most reliable, so we'll look at those. We should expect a very strong correlation between murder rates and other violent crime, though. And this expectation of much higher rates of violent crime in general should lead us to expect much higher arrest rates among Black Americans relative to other populations all else being equal. Now, all else obviously isn't equal. But the magnitude of the difference in murder rates is absolutely enormous (and it'll about double when we're just thinking about men), so we should expect that the majority of the difference in arrest rates is driven by the same thing...whatever is causing Black Americans to murder at 7x the rate of everybody else.
As I commented elsewhere, it isn't actually true that gang-related killings are most killings.[0]
If you want to try to paint a picture of the modal murder in the U.S., it's "Young brown man argues with other young brown man about something silly, things escalate, someone pulls out a cheap pistol and shoots the other guy"
Gang murders, while profitable fodder for mass media, are a clear minority.
0: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Note that applying 50% to the number of 2019 Chicago murders already saturates the nationwide "Gangland killings" in the FBI UCR, suggesting that perhaps many of the "unknown" murders would fall into that category. It would also not surprise me if many of the "other arguments" killings are also gang-related or at least gang-associated. Of course, it doesn't help that ~half of murders go unsolved here (and in many other cities) and gang-related violence is especially unlikely to find cooperative witnesses.
That said, this is only place with a police department not known for its honesty. Other places might be different. Southern states all have above average white homicide rates, but only Louisiana seems to have an above-average Black homicide rate, at least according to https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/23/health/gun-deaths-in-men-by-s... (caveat 1: this is victims, I could not quickly find corresponding data for offenders. caveat 2: most Blacks live in the South, it's not surprising those states might drive the average.).
My gut says you're right, Chicago probably doesn't generalize well to the rest of the U.S. It could be that there are huge swaths of the country where there basically are no gangs, and so all murders are not gang-related. But still, the data you're showing makes the federal numbers seem way too low...
This [0] suggests that about 1/3 of murders in the U.S. go unsolved.
I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people:
White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3
White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2
White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8
The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe.
This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system". There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. That cop will (involuntarily) collect statistics on the world around him or her, and will act accordingly. We call it learning. You can't help but do it. I think some small proportion of this enormous difference is due to a feedback loop, i.e. people end up murdering more because they're policed more.
Insofar as you are "outraged" by this simple statement of fact, you are part of the problem--not the solution. Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye. Ignoring the obvious truth proves to me that you don't really care about actually helping people, and are really in it to impress your friends with how woke you are.
There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution.
FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...