Because of time will have leave a that for now.
Also [0] is only able to explain half of the crime gap through "structural characteristics". Of course this article would be considered extremely racist by many people in this thread (not you) since it assumes the crime gap reflects actual higher rates of criminal behavior, and not just bias in the justice system.
[0] http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~roos/Courses/grstat502/phillipss...
Whoa, that's way out of line.
> Take a chill pill and try to find sources when you want to make assertions.
That's not ok either.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. Please follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But for high-profile things i.e. the things that should be priority for a justice system, things like rape and murder, it is the simple, uncomfortable fact that blacks outpace all other races by a wide margin.
If you think that demonstrating that blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than whites somehow disproves the above facts and somehow proves that whites commit more rapes and murders than blacks but are not caught/incarcerated, then for that to be the case, given the amount of rapes and murders that blacks commit, there would have to be a huge number unsolved rape and murder cases.
Are there a huge number of unsolved rape and murder cases? No there aren't, the number of unsolved cases is probably not even 15% of the solved and prosecuted cases.
Maybe you should develop a simple command of the facts before you literally compare someone to a mass-murderer in your grammar naziism.
I want to believe this was intentionally meant to be hilarious.
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please comment civilly or not at all.
That isn't really a function of skin colour though. Black people don't commit more murders because they're black - they commit more murders because they live in under-resourced, under-educated, poor communities that have been created by decades of racism by employers and authorities.
A white person and a black person are equally likely to commit a murder given the same set of circumstances, but the way society works means black people are more likely to face those situations.
Implying that blackness is a causal factor is both entirely wrong and hugely racist.
Race(genetic relatedness within certain bounds) isn't purely skin colour, race is a whole host genetic expressions that develop over time in response to selection factors in an environment. Skin colour being one of the more visible of these genetic expressions.
Black people don't commit more murders because they're black - they commit more murders because they live in under-resourced, under-educated, poor communities
That's a hypothesis. You're free to go about proving or evidencing your position in whatever way you see fit then presenting your data to our peers for evaluation.
The unfortunate fact is that blacks have elevated levels of criminality compared to other races across all socio-economic categories.
A white person and a black person are equally likely to commit a murder given the same set of circumstances
Again, this is a hypothesis and you are free to try and establish a base of evidence to support it(although good science simply evaluates hypotheses against impartially collected evidence). A couple things off the top of my head you may be interested in as you evaluate this hypothesis.
I believe there have been studies looking into racial variability among things like impulse control, and what is known as "future time horizon." I can't seem to find any of them at the moment.
Another thing to consider, there are a number of very poor white areas in the US, I think some of the poorest counties in the US are mostly white. I'm also pretty sure the crime rates in those areas are not as high as comparable black areas. Feel free to double check that.
Implying that blackness is a causal factor is both entirely wrong and
I don't know how you got that implication from my previous comment which simply stated the fact that the crime rate among blacks is much higher than among whites and other races.
hugely racist.
If you want to discuss these matters productively it's really best to avoid jumping to words such as "racist" that, when not clearly describing obscene behavior, are just used in attempt to discredit other people.
>That's a hypothesis. You're free to go about proving or evidencing your position.
Here in Switzerland black Swiss do not commit more murders than other "races". Surely you won't argue the alpine winds changed their genome with respect to black Americans now would you?
[citation needed]
Actually, that seems like the type of thing for which somewhat decent statistics should be readily available, do you know where one might look this up?
In fact, poverty alone does not explain the crime rate gap. You can call this view "hugely racist" but I don't see how you can rule out a whole set of other causes a priori. And I'm not mainly referring to genetics, but rather other sociological causes as are discussed in[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
Do you think "affluenza"[1] was a worthy defence and justified not holding the person in Texas who killed people while drunk driving accountable?
Also, how does your assertion that poverty among blacks is the main if not sole cause of their elevated murder rates square with the fact that the murder rates among impoverished whites is not comparable?
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[0]It is also unfortunate and misguided to place responsibility and thus responsibility to solve the problem solely on outside groups. What outside group or society should we blame for the relatively materially impoverished state of some Australian Aborigine, Papua New Guinean, Sub-Saharan African, and American Indian groups that was discovered upon their first contact with other groups? Some people just live in different ways, owing in part to the selection pressure of the environments they evolved in over many years, there's no reason to blame anyone for that.
The fact that some of these difference in crime rates can be explained by factors such as poverty, doesn't change the fact that on encountering a Black person, a White person is in more danger than encountering a White person.
How is stating the truth racist? I think you are the one who needs to "take a chill pill".
EDIT: You need to scroll down in the wiki article to get rates for specific crimes. E.g. from the Homocide section: the offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites.
EDIT 2: And regarding capitalization, see http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173974/are-white-... It's not just murderers who capitalize Black and White.
His concern seems to be that your stated source focuses on "offending" which implicitly infers that they are caught and charged by law enforcement.
Your assertion was about "commit[ing] crimes" while your fact is about "offending" or charged or convicted with crimes.
Class segregation isn't the same thing as racism.
It seems clear to me given the evidence presented, that bias in the justice system does not account for the gap when it comes to serious crimes. Given this, in my opinion "Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites" is a fair claim. I actually should have said 8x, I misremembered the article.
One interesting thing to me is that within parts of academia, it is not controversial to claim that Black people commit more crimes. Such academics seek the causes of this difference in various sociological explanations. You can see the discussion in the rest of the wiki article. But outside of academia a very different story is told. I believe that academics think that ordinary people cannot be trusted not to draw "racist" conclusions from the statistics about crime. Therefore liberal academics do nothing to dispel the myth amongst mainstream liberals, that Black crime rates are mainly due to bias in the justice system.
My original post was fair and correct, because all the available evidence makes it very clear that the rate at which Black people commit crimes is much higher than for White people.
I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.