I guess it's a question of personal interpretation - but to me those two numbers aren't different enough to quibble over. Also, given that this is about bail, not convictions, it's at least arguable (right?) that the proportional arrest numbers are more relevant than the proportional incarceration numbers.
In any case: it's clearly a minority, yet a sizable one.
Normally one would make an apples to apples comparison of the average of arrested people in both populations, instead of trying to include the people who weren't arrested for reasons I'm not at all clear on.
Yep, the data was counting arrests, not individuals.
You raise some great points, but in the context of the discussion I don't see how any of the comments represent a failure of mathematical, verbal, and philosophical understanding.
Yes, but there are vasts swaths of the country were arrest rates are much much higher than 10 out of 2000 people (not that they would all tell you anyway).
I understand living in a bubble.... but you are not at least aware of the vast scale of these areas? If not, you should drive around more in my opinion.
> 2% of the total population arrested each year sounds like a lot!
It's probably mostly people getting arrested multiple times.
But yeah, there's a lot of arrests where police in other countries would have just ID'd people and sent them on their way. Arrests are simply the default operating procedure in the US, which is likely related to the fact that the lack of reliable national ID makes it harder to identify people on the spot.
I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.
Not really - as the article says, the cops are discouraged and it's not like there's a bounty per arrest. Overstating the numbers is a waste of time not accomplishing anything if true.
Maybe I'm not looking at the right number[0] (there is a 59.3% lower on the page which appears to be a more specific response: "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino") but it looks like 59.1% of arrests are against 75.8% of the population. Inversely, 40.9% of arrests are against 24.2% of the population.
Yes, except this is trivial to normalize for - just track arrests per cop. I feel like I constantly see criticisms like this, that use extremely naive metrics as straw men to argue against the idea of measuring things. It's extremely misguided (I know you're just explaining what he meant and not necessarily promulgating that idea yourself).
I shall largely ignore your feigned obtuseness (despite claiming not to know what things could possibly mean, you do seem to get the gist quite well) and get to the relevant section. As an aside, I note that I'll do my best to eradicate any trace of vagueness which the rhetorically inclined like yourself enjoy seizing upon—but that's most usually an unattainable goal.
> Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me.
Forgive me for not showing my work. Contrary to your claims that I offered zero data points, I did mention that there are over three quarters of a million law enforcement officers in the US. That would require a randomly selected sample in the several hundreds to determine with any degree of accuracy the character of the population.
You will likely counter that you're not arguing about the character of the population, in fact, you just wrote:
> I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement.
I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then. The ones that started with, "You assume that the police care if you are guilty or not. They don't." and continue on for several more sentences that speak to the character of the population as a whole, notably including an alleged desire to convict anyone regardless of guilt and strongarm confessions.
My point with the above is that if that were an informed opinion based upon data the holder would need to see a sampling of several hundred randomly selected officer/citizen interactions and see the majority of them end in a disregard for the rule of law, courtesy, etc. To my knowledge, that doesn't exist. Partially for difficulties I mentioned originally: nonuniformity of the population, selection bias in accounts, etc.
I shall perform an additional back of the envelope calculation. The Uniform Crime Report for 2010 shows over 13 million arrests that year. Even considering the total number of arrests appears to be declining year over year lately, I can assume relatively safely that in recent years (8-15 roughly) there have been over 100 million arrests. That is a large number of interactions between police and the citizenry.
While I don't have a number for convictions, I will assume it is also rather large. Wikipedia lists over 7 million people under correctional supervision, so that's at least a floor. Do I claim that the false conviction rate is 280/7 million? No, but still (and especially considering that 7 million is likely to be an exceptionally low estimate) my intuition tells me that a random sampling of convictions would find the vast majority to be not wrongfully convicted through law enforcement malevolence.
Your fear and anger toward the general population of law enforcement are not supported by the data. Note that that does not discredit the emotions themselves—they're worthwhile and valid. I even feel them in cases of police abuse, such as Troy Davis and, for instance, the unwarranted pepper spraying of the UC Davis students. I would only caution you against letting those emotions override your reason and thereby jumping to conclusions that the data does not support.
> If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy.
There's nothing wrong with the opinion that the burden of proof should fall on someone other than one's self. However, I might add that in practice the burden falls on the contrarian. And when one's opinion is against one of the established pillars of society—for better or worse, with no judgment implied—that person is nearly by definition the contrarian.
A description of it (http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm) describes the arrived at number of wrongful convictions to be around 0.5%. More that half of those were caused by eyewitness misidentifications, leaving less than half to be caused by police malfeasance. The authors indicate that this is probably low, but: even doubled or tripled or quintupled, it seems that the data indicates the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime.
I just skimmed the article and found no (re-?)definition of 'arrest'. If it's 40% for the general population and the arrest rate is a function of economic class, the rate for the lower class would have to account for the significantly smaller rate that I perceive in my middle-class peer group.
Either that or my peers are statistical outliers. I don't think there's any other form of selection going on that would prevent them from being a representative sample of their economic class, though.
The article possibly indicated a loose definition of 'arrest' here, though:
> ...arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.
For my definitions of 'arrest' and 'custody', being arrested implies being taken into custody.
“Probably” indicates a likelihood, not a statement about one particular instance. You’re discussing one particular instance. Statistically, very many people arrested for things that I do not believe should be a crime, such as marijuana possession, and that is to what I am referring.
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