Jebus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 12:41 pm
That's a lot to read through. The topic interests me and I am willing to take the time as long as you can ensure me of the following:
The stats are fairly recent.
How is “recent” defined? Many of these studies were published anywhere from 2013 to 2018 while the homicide reports, crime stats, and police reports examined span from the 1970s to 2019.
Jebus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 12:41 pm
The stats are not cherry picked from certain cities but rather give a nationwide overview.
National data on this is conspicuously limited and outdated. Most of these “recent” studies your demanding are explicitly geographically-limited, so researchers are forced to collect data at the city or county level to fill in the gaps. County level data may or may not be nationally representative (I don’t claim they are) but several of these smaller studies appear to support the same trend that racial disparities plague the criminal justice system in many U.S. cities, and that the explanations for these disparities cannot be reduced to race-specific crime rates
Jebus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 12:41 pm
The stats do not simply compare arrests and/or conviction rates to overall population size.
Some of these studies
do simply compare arrests/and or conviction rates to their local population size, and I think this important for several reasons:
- 1. It demonstrates that huge percentages of blacks, latinos, and other minorities have been racially profiled (stopped/frisked, pulled over, and generally harassed) per capita more than whites for certain crimes. i.e., racial profiling exists.
2. It demonstrates that despite the prevalence of many of these practices, they rarely yield any evidence of a crime. For example, stop and frisk data from 2008 show that roughly 3% of cases produced evidence of a crime; the individual carried either a weapon or form of contraband. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/ar ... sk/278065/
Jebus, even if I grant that arrest and conviction rates are in perfect proportion to race-based crime rates, policies like stop-and-frisk would still be largely ineffective at reducing crime. What’s more, this leaves a large innocent 97% of people a part of a group “statistically more likely” to commit a particular crime, justifiably angry. These kind of practices do little more than increase tensions between the police and the communities they’re sworn to protect.
Jebus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 12:41 pm
I've seen a lot of this lately and it's a bit like saying people in their twenties are treated unfairly since they have higher arrest and conviction rates compared to their overall national percentage, while people in their eighties are privileged since they are arrested and convicted at a lower rate than their national average.
The question of contention here is whether police practices/polices are mere responses to race-specific crime rates. If there is strong evidence of this, then the disparities in rates of arrests, convictions, and shootings would be defensible. Unfortunately, some of the more recent comprehensive looks haven’t found much evidence of this.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... 854#sec011
It is sometimes suggested that in urban areas with more black residents and higher levels of inequality, individuals may be more likely to commit violent crime, and thus the racial bias in police shooting may be explainable as a proximate response by police to areas of high violence and crime (community violence theory [14, 15, 23, 35]). In other words, if the environment is such that race and crime covary, police shooting ratios may show signs of racial bias, even if it is crime, not race, that is the causal driver of police shootings. In the models fit in this study, however, there is no evidence of an association between black-specific crime rates (neither in assault-related arrests nor in weapons-related arrests) and racial bias in police shootings, irrespective of whether or not other controls were included in the model. As such, the results of this study provide no empirical support for the idea that racial bias in police shootings (in the time period, 2011–2014, described in this study) is driven by race-specific crime rates (at least as measured by the proxies of assault- and weapons-related arrest rates in 2012).
https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law- ... -stops-are
Margo L. Frasier, an expert with more than 40 years of law enforcement and criminal justice experience, including as the police monitor of Austin, Texas, and as the sheriff of Travis County, Texas, analyzed records of more than 716,000 pedestrian and traffic stops conducted between 2010 and 2017. She found that more than 350,000 — almost half of those records — fail to show that Milwaukee police had reasonable suspicion of criminal activity or a traffic or vehicle equipment violation prior to conducting such stops, as required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Frasier also found that Milwaukee police are not required to document frisks — also known as “pat downs” — and therefore fail to collect information about the reasons police officers conduct them. She explains in her report that this prevents police supervisors and the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, which oversees the city’s police department, from ensuring that officers only frisk people when they have objective reasonable suspicion that a person is armed and dangerous, as the Fourth Amendment requires.
So if Milwaukee police stops aren’t based on objective reasonable suspicion, what are they based on?
A report by David Abrams, an expert in law, economics, and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and The Wharton School, makes clear that Milwaukee police stop racial and ethnic minorities at higher rates than whites, and that factors other than race and ethnicity do not explain those differences.
Abrams found that Black and Latino people are more likely than white people to be subject to traffic stops across Milwaukee, including in areas in which the residential population is predominantly white. He discovered that even after controlling for non-racial factors — including crime rates — traffic and pedestrian stop rates in Milwaukee are both more than six times higher for Black people than for white people. He also found that Milwaukee’s rate of drug or weapon discovery from searches during traffic stops is extremely low — occurring in less than 1 percent of such stops — and that Black people are far more likely to be subjected to such searches. (That analysis also controlled for explanations other than race and ethnicity.) Abrams’ analysis shows that searches of Black and Latino drivers are more than 20 percent less likely to lead to the discovery of drugs than searches of white drivers — again, even after controlling for factors other than race and ethnicity.
I would be open to change my mind if there were some way to support that 1: select racial groups are more likely to commit certain crimes (with all other variables controlled for) and that police practices are mere responses to the race-specific crime rates.
