> African Americans commit a disproportionately large amount of violent crimes. It seems reasonable to expect that they also commit a larger amount of misdemeanors and minor infractions.
There is no obvious causal reason to link violent offenses and non-violent offenses. In fact, in my experience, I would expect an inverse causal relationship. I know quite a few ... people ... who would pick your pocket, steal from your house, etc. but would never actually physically assault somebody.
Your statement might be true, but some data is required.
>The unfortunate truth is that black people are more likely to commit violent crime in the US.
It doesn't make much sense to cite the proportion of black people convicted of a crime by US law enforcement as evidence refuting the claim that the US law enforcement's interaction with people changes according to their race. The proportion of black people convicted of [category] crimes could be high for many reasons, including actually higher incidence of such crimes among blacks, racial prejudices at various points along the legal path of alleged criminals, and any combination of those or other factors.
> It seems unlikely that the connection between fines and large African American populations—a connection that cannot be explained by poverty—is the result of African Americans across the United States committing more finable offenses.
I'm not sure why that seems unlikely. African Americans commit a disproportionately large amount of violent crimes. It seems reasonable to expect that they also commit a larger amount of misdemeanors and minor infractions. It would be far more surprising if they had a higher propensity to break the law, but only when the violation is serious and the penalty heavy.
>African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime,
Out of curiosity, I understand that you're simply citing statistics from a source but I'd like to know if you think this reflects reality? If so, what reason would you suggest creates this?
> because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws.
Not correct. Blacks don't disproportionally break laws. The problem is that non-violent crimes in America are disproportionally enforced. Several Thousand, probably close to a million cases of illegal white collar crime go unenforced every year. Stuff like insider trading, corruption, fraud, laundering, etc. Crimes that white people are more likely to break simply are not regularly enforced. Non-violent crimes like drug possession in Black urban areas are highly enforced, while whites in suburb areas use drugs at the same rate, are not enforced. There is a bias in the enforcement laws
> Being black is correlated with being poor and being poor is correlated with being a criminal and various other bad behaviors.
Not a great example; the direct correlation between being black and being a criminal is much, much larger than the indirect correlation from being black to being a criminal through being poor.
Which is to say, if blacks were criminal at the rate predicted by their poverty rate, they would be much, much less criminal than they actually are.
What can you point to that statistically justifies that "Black people have a bigger tendency for violent behavior than white people"?
Showing crime statistics isn't enough. You need to show that given all the details about a person being the same, a Black person is more likely to act violently than an identical white person. You basically need to correct for all the societal reasons that result in people committing violent crime.
> In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks.
This is untrue. From my prior research, virtually every analysis concludes the opposite - that income alone cannot explain the difference in crime rate between black and white Americans. Most studies show income as 30-60% of that regression, which is huge, but when comparing similar income brackets, African Americans have a higher crime rate than whites in almost all of them under $100k. To cover the full difference, it's necessary to bring in other factors (in particular, the rate of single parent households). Please cite a source for the claim you have made or retract it.
> It appears blacks committed 52.2% of homicides from 1976 through 2005 while representing 12.3% of the population .
We can take this further: It should not be compared against the total population, but segmented by traits known to be associated with violent crime, like poverty. But even then, since violence is itself cultural, I'd expect certain area's to be more unsafe than others, despite similar levels of poverty. So we'd need to look at blacks and non-blacks in those specific areas and compare those specific traits. I'm _sure_ someone has done this study, does anyone have enough familiarity with this area to provide some high quality references?
> black people commit more serious crimes than white people.
Convicted? Yes. Arrested? Sure. Commit? I don't know, maybe, but I bet if you factored in economic status there'd be a lot of evening out; i.e. poor people commit more serious crimes, black people are disproportionately poor, therefore more black people commit more serious crimes.
> In 2022, those who are male, younger people and those who are Black accounted for considerably larger shares of perceived offenders in violent incidents than their respective shares of the U.S. population. Men, for instance, accounted for 79% of perceived offenders in violent incidents, compared with 49% of the nation’s 12-and-older population that year. Black Americans accounted for 25% of perceived offenders in violent incidents, about twice their share of the 12-and-older population (12%).
Extremely misleading paragraph. It implies that Black Americans are maligned for being criminals more than their true share of the population; but the arrest data shows that blacks are 27% of all those arrested, and more than 50% of those arrested for murder. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
> we have to ask whether black victims tend to be proportionately more violent or threatening than white victims ... another hard statistic to gather.
A closely related statistic has been gathered, on violent crime perpetrators. By the police and FBI, as well as through victim surveys, that don't involve law enforcement, so are immune from bias due to over-policing that is frequently used to justify ignoring those statistics.
That according to the FBI, black people commit 5-10x the violent felonies of white people, per capita.
They’re a uniquely violent demographic and it’s unsurprising that their arrest statistics don’t match other demographics.
The statistical differences are a result of that underlying difference in rate — rather than anything about the police. No change in police policy except ignoring violent felonies committed by blacks can fix the underlying per capita imbalance.
And no — that’s not a race thing, as shown by recent African migrants and other immigrants. It’s a cyclic poverty and crime thing… but that doesn’t change that there’s a correlation between violent felonies and race.
A correlation that gets carried forward into arrest statistics.
> However, most do pattern matching according to what they’ve been trained as "indicators of criminality", and most of those patterns have their basis in systemic racism that have no connection to real criminality.
Somewhat going off topic here but I'm curious: do you think in the USA African Americans have the same real rate of serious criminality (such as murder, not speeding) as other groups once you adjust for poverty?
"It doesn't make much sense to cite the proportion of black people convicted of a crime by US law enforcement as evidence refuting the claim that the US law enforcement's interaction with people changes according to their race. "
It actually does.
The rate of violent crime among African Americans is massively disproportionate. There's no way any kind of racial bias on the part of police could account for it.
A major study done in the late 2000's actually showed that while African Americans did receive more punishment for similar crimes - once 'criminal history' was taken into consideration, the difference evaporated.
Given that there is a massive difference in 'recorded convictions' (which is arguably biased because of 'racist cops') and numerous attempts to study the prevalence of racism in the system - it's pretty safe to assume that there's no way on earth that 'racist cops' are why there is why African Americans are about 700% more likely to commit violent crimes than others.
It's a sad situation, surely, but it's important to keep the facts in check.
About 50% of violent crime in America is committed by African American men, though they are only about 7% of the population (about 13% including women). This is quite radically high and it's not even explained by poverty.
The sheer size of the discrepancy between ethnic groups is unsettling.
> African Americans are significantly more likely to be involved in all crimes - according to arrest and conviction data.
And according to studies in criminal behavior, African Americans are not any more likely to be committing crimes than other races. They're just more likely to be arrested by police and convicted for behavior than other races. If you don't believe me, you can look into marijuana use and possession arrests between the different races.
There is no obvious causal reason to link violent offenses and non-violent offenses. In fact, in my experience, I would expect an inverse causal relationship. I know quite a few ... people ... who would pick your pocket, steal from your house, etc. but would never actually physically assault somebody.
Your statement might be true, but some data is required.
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