If cars are being broken into on a specific block at a rate higher than average for a precinct are you suggesting that it is 'bias' to focus resources onto that block?
Or are you referring to places where formerly charged/convicted persons live/hang out? Here I'd agree, punishment should end at the end of the sentence/fine and people deserve the benefit of the doubt/presumption of non-recidivism.
I'd also posit that many problematic areas are areas of a specific race and caution that a policy of under-policing these areas to avoid appearing racist will be disastrous to public safety and order.
Yes, I absolutely think the police should not discriminate against crime-heavy neighborhoods by policing them less than they deserve/need. To police them less is the discriminatory thing to do, as they need it more than safer neighborhoods.
Of course, the entire discussion we're having is invalid if we work with the premise that more policing = more convictions, by virtue of the crime being everywhere (across boundaries in whatever criteria you wish, e.g. race) regardless, and convictions being a simple byproduct of policing and not of said underlying factor like race, obesity, education, socioeconomic status, or hair-color.
My point of contention isn't whether or not we should police high crime neighborhoods more or less, it's whether we should condone the (less-common) explicit or (more-common) implicit police policy of using race as a proxy for the other variables that I mentioned previously. You've danced around my question: is race a valid "indicator" of "problem areas" in your model?
There is already evidence of bias with arrests for other crimes.
Marijuana possession accounts for 46% of all drug arrests. In terms of marijuana use, 14% of blacks and 12% of whites have used marijuana in the last year, yet blacks are 373% more likely to be arrested for possession. In some areas of the U.S., like Cook, IL, the bias gets as high as 720%. [1]
If police are racially biased with arrests for one set of criminal behavior, isn't it likely there is some bias towards other types of behavior too? Like in stopping cars?
Of course you cannot say or do anything of value without generalization.
However: there's a big difference between stopping a certain type of car after a robbery and stopping certain kinds of cars every day, without any specific reason, until you can charge a black youth with cannabis possession.
A white person hasn't ever been stopped in a "routine" traffic stop and a black youth has been stopped 4 times in the last month and then searched because a cop claimed he "smelled marijuana" -- that is a bias problem.
Yes but that's not about race, that's about how we deal with crime as a society. These things aren't being unfairly applied to minority communities and that's the point. The system would be working the same way for a non-minority community, and it does, where the economic situation is similar.
That's why the racial angle is a waste of everyone's time and energy. It's not the relevant issue. The more relevant issue is how we deal with crime prevention. Currently, we go with a punishment approach rather than a truly rehabilitative one. This also has a lot to do with economics, and lobbying and private prisons and so on. It's much more complicated than 'everybody's racist'.
While some of those may be "inconvenient truths", punishment based on race is, strictly speaking, illegal in the US. Proxies for race (such as where they live) aren't much better.
Another part of the problem is the historical over-policing of minorities (particularly blacks and hispanics) in the US and the lower economic class. It's easy to view them as more likely to be recidivists until you realize that the neighborhoods they're going back to have more than normal police presence and they're more likely to be picked up for "nuisance" crimes like jaywalking, public drunkenness, and loitering. This will skew the numbers substantially in these sorts of models when the police are (largely) not applying the same standards to white people or those from higher economic classes (or whose neighborhoods are less tolerant of such behavior so it's not seen as often to begin with).
Racist policing and racist sentencing seem like they could easily make up for the proportion.
Most white people don't get charged when they are caught commiting a crime, and the ones that do get light sentences that can keep them out of the correctional system
I'm not going to get into a debate if you're going to appeal to the “actual crime rate” vs the “racially biased arrest rate”. There's not enough data to know, and too many interacting variables. It's enough for me to accept that blacks represent a disproportional amount of inmates and that black neighborhoods are frequently stuck in poverty cycles. I think the solution actually has nothing to do with correcting variables for race or anything of the sort; rather, help people—regardless of race—out of poverty and the statistics will level out. I'm extremely skeptical that arrest “bias” is skin color related.
Also, citation needed for “studies have found that arrests are racially biased”. That is entirely too hard to measure. Well, it's not that I doubt such studies exist, I simply doubt they're valid in any way, and there are probably other studies with the opposite conclusion.
> Crime stats aren't collected in a scientific vacuum. They reflect the previous strategies the police used to fight crimes.
It may also just reflect reality. Let's say you have a group of people that commit a specific kind of crime significantly more often than another group, i.e. white male investment bankers are more likely to commit tax fraud than female black nurses. Any reasonable policy fighting this kind of crime would have to look biased against white men when it comes to enforcing tax fraud. I think that no one would reasonably call such enforcement policies bad or racist.
But when black men are significantly more likely to be prosecuted for violent crime, suddenly it's a racist policy and must be the racist polices fault, because that's the only acceptable answer.
Is it fair to demand that whites and blacks be pulled over at the same rate, when whites and blacks do not commit crimes at the same rate? For example, African Americans make up 12.6% of the US population, but commit:
- 52.6% of all murders [0]
- 29.1% of all rapes [0]
- 54.5% of all robberies [0]
In fact, when it comes to almost every single violent crime category, blacks commit them at a rate that's at least twice that of whites. [0]
So statistically speaking, being black is a stronger indicator of being a criminal than being white. Similarly, being male (white or black) is a stronger indicator of being a criminal than being a female. Even more so if you're a male in your 20s.
If your intention is to reduce crime, and you have the choice between pulling over a 55 year old white lady to see if she's got any outstanding warrants, or a 20 year old black male, are you really going to pick the older white woman?
Or how about if you're a young female driving to a convenience store at 11PM. As you pull into the otherwise empty parking lot, you see a group of people in hoodies standing outside of the store. Are you more likely to keep on driving if you notice the people are all white males in their 20s, or if they all turn out to be white females in their 20s? Is it wrong to be more comfortable walking into the store if they're females? Why or why not?
> Policing in America is racist. So anything that takes arrests into account (prior arrests, recidivism, etc.) will be in error as well.
Quite possibly - and if that were the case, it's certainly something to be addressed. As a non-American, I can't really comment.
But the paper doesn't really deal with that. It's saying that society should tolerate higher rates of recidivism amongst one racial group in the name of fairness.
I do understand the authors' thesis - I'm just saying that "fair" is a very subjective concept. I don't think many people will agree with the authors' definition.
I could have been a bit more clear in my summary. The article cites statistics that claim a higher rate of police stops of Black and Hispanic people are unfounded than those of white people. If true, this is evidence of police targeting practices that are disproportionate with actual underlying criminal activity rates.
Taking a step back to look at the historical context... The brutal wake of slavery and ingrained systemic racism are primary contributors to heightened criminal activity we see in some predominantly black neighborhoods. Black people didn’t collectively choose to live in worse conditions with high crime rates... After unlocking their literal chains, a savagely racist society pushed them in that direction.
Statisticians will be the best of all the disciplines at teasing out that sort of bias. If the police are going to be racially biased they don't need statisticians to help them. The addition of statisticians is only going to increase the number of people who are uncertain about the model. There are two broad paths here:
(1) Statisticians predict where crimes are likely to happen for the police using data.
(2) Police predict where the crimes are likely to happen using highly biased guesswork.
The statisticians are being irresponsible pushing the police towards (2). Option (1) can be de-biased, can be debated, its effects can be assessed and its parameters can be tweaked over time.
This is a choice between two options and the people signing on to this letter are arguing for the worse one. They link a bunch of news articles, but the academic complaint seems to be that the model says "assume crimes happen in high crime areas". That isn't a very scary model, and if anyone has an alternative they should be pushing it towards the police, not holding it back.
>Areas with more police vehicle images included wealthy commercial zones and low-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Latino residents.
Does this really surprise anyone?
Lower income areas have more crime. I don't understand why race is a factor here.
Or are you referring to places where formerly charged/convicted persons live/hang out? Here I'd agree, punishment should end at the end of the sentence/fine and people deserve the benefit of the doubt/presumption of non-recidivism.
I'd also posit that many problematic areas are areas of a specific race and caution that a policy of under-policing these areas to avoid appearing racist will be disastrous to public safety and order.
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