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.

More likely to be convicted of a crime. That's a subtle but very important distinction.

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.

I'd like to add a third possible reason for your consideration. Since "criminality" i.e. guilt of committing a crime is determined after a process engaging the law enforcement and justice systems, we have to examine whether there are inherent biases in those systems that result in skewed statistics. For instance, do police officers selectively target blacks for monitoring and investigation? Are blacks discriminated against in the courtroom as a result of procedure or human nature?

> This is why homicide rates are useful. For most cases, it is pretty obvious a crime of some sort occurred.

Tldr; homicide conviction rates are subject to other artifacts and can't support either side very well without additional data.

Law enforcement is discretionary not just in deciding what counts as a crime but in who they decide to investigate and other tactics employed. Not that this hugely affects any relative statistics, but the murder false imprisonment rate is estimated at 4-11%, and false imprisonment (as far as we can tell from subsequent DNA exhoneration and whatnot -- this might not be representative of all murders) disproportionately affects black people. Not that this necessarily says anything about broad crime racial statistics, but it could throw any direct comparisons off.

More importantly though, 30-40% of murders go unsolved, and it's probably not reasonable to assume that distribution to reflect the distribution of successfully convicted murders (if for no other reason than the race<->income correlation). That's such a huge monkey wrench in any comparative statistics that murder conviction rates without any additional information don't strongly support either side of things.

That's true for drug use crimes and to a lesser extend drug selling crimes, which make up way too many of the crimes prosecuted. Similarly for other crimes where police have a large amount of discretion to decide whether or not to arrest someone.

However there are also big differences in crime rates by race for murder. It's very hard to dismiss this as the result of how murder is policed. Police generally have much less discretion in how to deal with murder.

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.

Given the existing biases is the systems involved, black people are more likely to be identified by the existing biased system as having committed a crime, because they are more likely to be investigated if suspected (or even without a reasonable basis I of suspicion) of having committed a crime, more likely to be prosecuted given the same degree of evidence, more likely to be convicted given the same degree of evidence, and (as a result of all that) more likely to have a criminal history which subjects them to additional law enforcement scrutiny and systematic bias on top of that more directly due to race.

The degree, if any, to which black people are more likely to actually commit crimes is difficult to tease out since all statistics on this area are affected, directly and indirectly, by these systematic biases.

(On top of that, there's the bias from the fact that things have been made crimes, or more sever crimes, specifically, in whole or in part, because black people were, at the time, more likely to do them.)

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.

If you accept the possibility that police killings may be skewed by racism, why are you simply assuming that arrests (and therefore trials and convictions) are not?

We know that's not the case. Violent crimes have victims. Whatever the explanation is, blacks in the US commit more violent crimes than whites by a factor of four. We're not playing in the margin of error here.

Yes, and blacks are 13% of the population but 38% of the murderers (to use your & the OP's numbers). The point is that in two random encounters with two random people (one black, one white), the black person is more likely to be a murderer than the white person. That's not racist: it's just a fact.

As an example, I'll use the 2013 FBI crime statistics (https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...) and 2015 U.S. Census data (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/) — yes, there will be some inaccuracy due to using different years' data, but the 2015 crime data isn't yet available by race that I could find. In 2015, 77.1% of the U.S. population — 247,813,910 people — were white; 3,799 whites were arrested for murder in 2013, for an arrested-murderer rate of 1:65,200. In 2015, 13.3% of the U.S. population — 42,748,703 people — were black; 4,379 blacks were arrested for murder in 2013, for an arrested-murderer rate of 1:9,760.

Assuming the correctness of those numbers, and assuming that black and whites are fairly arrested for murder, any random black person one encounters is 6.68 times as likely to be a murderer as a white person.

Now, there are no doubt some very powerful arguments that blacks and whites are not equally treated when it comes to murder arrests, but even if only half of all blacks arrested for murder are guilty and as many white murderers are never arrested for murder as are, the multiplier would still be 1.67, and honestly those assumptions are a stretch.

Given the previous assumption of fairness, police killing blacks 3.49 times as often as whites would indicate that they are actually almost twice as cautious of killing blacks (or twice as quick to kill whites) as the actual random-encounter risk would predict: 6.68/3.49 = 1.91.

Yes. And rape statics come from people getting rapped. I'm going to assume you are talking about convictions here, as arrests and convictions are different.

> And there is also plenty of data out there showing that black men get arrested more often than white men for the same crimes

Ok? Then add that as another data set to your model. You will also need to add in crime relative to the population. Ethnicity of that area. et cetera. You can't just make this statement, say it affects your conclusion without adding in everything else.

This fact doesn't change the initial statement that "Black men are more likely to be criminals than white men." It exposes issues in the society we live in, not the data that is being reflected. Any data scientist worth his salt would be able to take this into account.

White Population of the US is 62%. Black Population in the US is 12.6%. White arrests in the US were 70%, Black arrests were 27%. Whites are over represented by 8%. Blacks by 14.4%. Asians are under represented by 4%. FYI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State... https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

> and get longer sentences for the same crimes than white men.

This is irreverent to your point. Ignoring.

> Now imagine building an AI (or actuarial table) based on that data. It would necessarily identify black men as "more likely to be a criminal" simply based on the fact that they are black.

A Machine Learning model, not AI (as AI is incorrectly used everywhere), would come to that conclusion- yes. The problem with your argument is that you want to bring your bias into a system that needs to be based on facts. Do black men get shafted? Yes. But approaching the problem at the end of the pipeline doesn't solve anything.

Going back to the initial discussion point on insurance rates. Men are more likely to die behind the wheel. Ok. We don't fix the problem by saying the data is bias, wrong, whatever. We fix it the source. You're entire argument boils down to "I'm not comfortable with what the data is telling me and I want the data to say something else." Which is emotional- I get that.

> So now you've magnified the bias in the data.

You've built a system that reflects the realities of the world around you. There was an article somewhere about a robbery on a BART train. The police wouldn't release the ethnicity of the suspects for some stupid reason about not wanting to feed into stereotypes. That does nothing to fix the problem, it just tries to cover it up. But, your reaction is the right one you just are not focusing it correctly. Instead of asking why our models look like this, and trying to manipulate them to make you feel better you need to ask why the data is happening the way it is.

My point is this. The conclusion of "Black men are more likely to be criminals than white men" should make you want to fix the reason why, not try and manipulate the data or system that produces that result. If you have a Machine Learning Model that draws that conclusion, you have two options:

1. Fix the source of the data. Isolate why Blacks in the US are over represented in the criminal population by 15%, and solve that.

2. Add in other data sources to further refine your model.

The fix is not run around screaming bias, as that's an incorrect characterization of the situation and actively hurts your cause.

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.

All of these are considered crimes in all jurisdictions I know of in the USA: theft/burglary/robbery, violence or threat thereof, and reckless endangerment. If you commit one of those acts, you have definitionally committed a crime, even if you are not convicted in a court of law.

> dismisses the overwhelmingly higher rates of arrests for non whites as not being a systemic racism issue

I encourage you to re-read what I wrote, because that isn't what I said.

My post raises a question of causality. There are several common proposals for why arrest rates for blacks are disproportionately high:

1. Police are racist, so they arrest black people at higher rates than other people, regardless of criminality.

2. Criminal law is written specifically to target black people.

3. Black people, due to systemic racism elsewhere in society, end up committing more acts-that-are-legally-defined-as-crimes, and this eventually leads to a greater number of arrests.

4. Actual racist ideology, which is generally vile and I will not repeat it here.

The reality is probably a combination of explanations 1-3, and there is surely mutual causality among them.

Any serious attempt to understand the problem must attempt to disentangle these explanations from each other.

> assumes that white people commit fewer crimes with no data to back it up

I said that we specifically don't have good data, but it's not safe to assume that all demographics commit crimes at the same rate. See above.

> Sorry but that is gaslighting and victim blaming. Tell the parent of a black teenager to not be overly fixated on police reform.

This is a bad faith misrepresentation of what I wrote.

If anything, the media getting stuff kinda-wrong but still raising awareness is a net positive.

Also it should be obvious that police reform is necessary, and obviously people will care the most about the issues that affect them personally.

Moreover, nothing ever seems to get done without single-minded people focusing intently on a single problem. We need people working on all aspects of the racism issue, including racism in policing and law.

But you simply cannot look at the arrest numbers and assume that the discrepancy is definitely and entirely because of police racism. It would be fallacious to do so, and if you intend to put forth policy based on data then you should try to avoid logical fallacies in the process.

Wow, why is that so high?

Of course. You consider people who interact with police. Some old lady obviously shouldn't be included in the data.

>Stops are initiated on minorities at tremendously higher rates.

Blacks and latinos commit crimes at higher rates than whites and asians.

We don't know this because the figures cited are biased towards successful convictions. If white folks are able to afford better, more competent lawyers, you can expect them to mount successful defenses. I've never, ever, seen anyone post the 13/50 stat without acknowledging this fact in their comments or replies. And I've seen it a lot.

[citation needed]

It is true that a black man is more likely to be prosecuted for murder but that’s a wholly different statistic.