Race doesn't matter if "low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents" is simply stating that all low income neighborhoods have higher proportions of Black and Latino residents. Although it's kind of relevant if all downstream bias in arrests etc, say, goes away when you control for income.
But I read it as "of all low income neighborhoods, ones with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents had more police vehicle images". In which case, the question is:
Why would similar-income neighborhoods (which you theorize should have similar crime levels regardless of race) be policed differently based on the race of the population?
“We report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates. First, if New York City residents of different races face different levels of police deployments, that disparate impact is itself important; it can also bias algorithms trained on downstream policing data irrespective of the true causal mechanism. Second, controlling for other factors in policing data can be difficult to interpret, introducing concerns about omitted variable bias and model misspecification which make it difficult to identify which factor is truly the “cause” of higher police deployments. For the sake of transparency and simplicity, therefore, we report results by stratifying each variable separately, noting that these disparities are themselves important but that multiple causal mechanisms may underlie them.”
Police aren’t co-creators of crime, they’re co-creators of crime statistics. Crimes that go unreported, with no arrest made, are invisible to crime statistics. When the police arrest someone and charge them with a crime, it counts as both an arrest and a reported crime.
So even if crime were uniformly distributed across the city, if police spent the majority of their time in one neighbourhood they’d make more arrests there and so it follows that the statistics would show higher crime in that neighbourhood.
I stand by my claim. Crimes are social facts. They exist within a reality supported by whichever laws those with the monopoly of violence believe in. Crimes exist within the symbol register of thought. I'll ask you a question in return, why did you choose your ontology of crime among all those that could possibly exist?
We know very well that police injure and kill people—disproportionately people of color—at a much higher rate than the general population.
We also know that they (technically legally, but c'mon, it's theft) steal large amounts of money and other property from people through civil asset forfeiture.
"Crime" has multiple elements: the law, the act, the observation, and the prosecution.
We disproportionately outlaw things that poor people do. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") We disproportionately observe poor people, as shown by this article. We disproportionately convict poor people, who can't afford bail or good legal representation.
Yet people always want to jump to that other element. The disproportionate crime rates can't be due to all those other things, it must be due to them committing more crimes.
The only thing we can say for sure is that poor people commit different crimes. They use different drugs and in different settings; they are more likely to commit theft than embezzlement; they are more likely to cause property damage than violate building codes. The rest is made murky by an unfair legal system and a societal tendency to treat crimes of poverty as individual in nature and crimes of wealth as systemic failures.
https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wea...
> By age 22, lifetime rates of addiction to drugs or alcohol were 11 to 16 percent among women from affluent families, which is similar to the national norms; the rates were 19 to 27 percent among men from affluent families, twice the national norms, according to the study.
> But a more troubling trend emerged by age 26: Lifetime rates of addiction to drugs or alcohol were 19 to 24 percent among women from wealthier upbringings and 23 to 40 percent among men from those families. These rates were three times higher than the national average for women, and two times higher in men.
This does't match up with drug arrest rates.
And yet, you won’t see cops arresting a manager at a store for stealing from their workers.
[1](https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-bide...)
You're comparing apples to oranges.
Yet we treat it as a report-only crime, to be prosecuted after the fact rather than prevented by policing. It seems like that's mostly a matter of police priorities.
> We note that we report racial and socioeconomic disparities without attempting to control for other covariates for two reasons. First, if New York City residents of different races face different levels of police deployments, that disparate impact is itself important; it can also bias algorithms trained on downstream policing data irrespective of the true causal mechanism. Second, controlling for other factors in policing data can be difficult to interpret, introducing concerns about omitted variable bias and model misspecification which make it difficult to identify which factor is truly the “cause” of higher police deployments. For the sake of transparency and simplicity, therefore, we report results by stratifying each variable separately, noting that these disparities are themselves important but that multiple causal mechanisms may underlie them.
the residential neighborhood with a quarter mil average income and a literal private garden has the most visible police presence in the city
The evidence I have seen is that more aggressive policing fundamentally fails at changing systemic poverty that is the root of the issue, and the funding that is funnelled into it would be better put into things like drug programmes to rehabilitate people, social programmes to help people keep in education/work, funding for safe and legal opportunities for kids, support for education and public facilities so people get opportunity to improve their situations generationally, etc...
Race is a factor becuase slavery and post-slavery racism have created a huge wealth gap, and redlining pushed black people into these areas. Yes, of course crime is more prevelant in these areas, but that doesn't mean race isn't a factor. It doesn't have to be police officers thinking "I'm going to be racist today" for it to unfairly hurt people based on race.
I'm struggling to find the data right now, but I believe the source was Phillip Atiba Goff. The tl;dr is that Black people are treated violently by police at a rate of several times that of white people, even once you control for socioeconomic status.
https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/black-driv...
> First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day — around 7 p.m. — when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.
> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables — the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.
I found several studies by Phillip Atiba Goff that did NOT control for SES. (Easy to find a statistically significant result when you ignore confounding variables!) But none that did.
[1] https://sci-hub.ee/10.1177/1948550616633505 [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawso... [3] https://sci-hub.ee/10.1007/s10940-020-09471-9
[1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/report-black-people-7-5-ti...
[2] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
The discussion section of the paper also speaks to higher police presence being correlated with areas that are being gentrified.
Does this really surprise anyone?
Lower income areas have more crime. I don't understand why race is a factor here.