I am a bit unconfident about it…
Here, to give a basis of the argument I need to debunk, here’s an article from right-libertarian think tank Reason.com to respond to:
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/24/race-and-violent-crime/
Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were 12.5% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were 60.4%. It thus appears from this data that the black per capita violent crime rate is roughly 2.3 to 2.8 times the rate for the country as a whole, while the white per capita violent crime rate is roughly 0.7 to 0.9 times the rate for the country as a whole.
Note: keep in mind he’s extrapolating a certain part of the U.S, New York, to the rest of America’s national crime statistics
Something in the vein of a masterpost like Naomi’s research and rhetoric masterdoc
Easily understandable and accessible, yet with a great amount of statistics put upon it
From my reddit deboonking days I did a write up about this. First they waver on which crime stats they’re using, so you have to pin them down on that. Then you must realize they’re conflating two different stats. One they’re giving you population demographics, then they throw crime stats right after it. Yes, they are 12.5% of the population. However they do not commit 50% of the crime. Which crime? Sometimes they say violent crime sometimes they say all crime. Plus it’s not all 12.5% of the country committing crime. It’s a fraction of percentage of black people committing crime. ie if you pass a black person on the street at night they are not statistically more likely to rob you. They bypass this part in the math. They jump from 12.5% to 50% of the crime without bridging it with how much of that 12.5% is committing the crime.
By the time you get there you see that yes, more crime per capita is committed, but it’s mostly because of drugs. The war on drugs has been demonstrably racist and no shit there are more people of color being arrested for drugs than white people. This is the part of the argument they hope you never get too because they framed two unrelated stats as if they were related and get everyone arguing about that.
You can even use the very crime stats they cite, go to the source and do the numbers yourself. It doesn’t require complicated stats, just back-of-the-napkin math to quickly see how the statement is deceiving. Especially once you nail them on specifics.
Edit: also when they suddenly stop using percentages and talking “2.3 to 2.8 times” shit, you know something is up. Another math trick. 2.3 times 0 is 0. So what are we multiplying 2.3 times? Well it’s a tiny percentage of course, fractions of a percent. They switch to the other numbers because they know the first set is small.
Alright, so let me re-do this with actual numbers:
I use table 43 of the FBI 2019 crime report, because it’s the most recent on their site. I use table 43 because it gives a breakdown by race and it’s about arrests, not convictions. I figure arrests are always going to be higher than conviction rates so it’s hard to argue I’m cherry picking the smaller number.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-43
Total arrests for white people: 4,729,290 Total arrests for black people: 1,815,144 Total arrests period: 6,816,975
https://data.census.gov/table/DECENNIALDHC2020.P8?g=010XX00US
According to the census, for 2020 (closest I could find), there were a total of 331,449,281 people on the us. Of that, 41,104,200 were black (non-hispanic as pointed out in the Reason article), and 204,277,273 were white (non-hispanic). That’s 12.4% for black, 61.6% for white.
Now we combine them. 2.32% of whites were arrested for all crimes. 4.42% of black people were arrested. This is where you get the “2.3 x per capita” thing from. Yes, it’s almost double. But it’s still a low proportion of the overall black community. What these stats say is “taking a crumb and doubling it still leaves you hungry.” They want to focus on that difference to explain their racism but that difference can be explained away by a racist system. Of course racist cops are going to disproportionately arrested black people. That’s not even something in dispute.
You can refine the census data further, because babies don’t get arrested (yet). So it’s not the full 331M of the US population we have to worry about. It won’t change the outcome very much.
Now to get the 30% number you just divide the total arrests for black people by the total amount of arrests. 26.6%. So it’s not even 50% of the crime. But this stat is useless because alone, it doesn’t say anything about how many people are being arrested for crime. 4.42% of black people are committing 26.6% of the crime. 2.32% of white people are committing 69.4% of the crime.
There isn’t exactly a reason why the proportion to total population and proportion of arrests should be the same. I think people assume it should be because if there are 0% blue people, then 0% of blue people commit crime. If there are 100% blue people, then 100% of blue people commit crime. But that’s exactly why it’s misleading to dwell on mashing these stats together without examining the amount of the populations. If 100% of blue people commit 100% of the crime, then what? You need to know how much crime is happening. It could be 100% of 0.001% or 100% of 100%.
You can then break it down further into violent crime vs property crimes. Guess what? Most of that 4% are being arrested for drugs and property crime! Again, this is something easily explained by racism and poverty.
They try to debunk “black crime isn’t a problem” with stats that end up proving that we just live in a racist police state that arrests way too many people for shit. You can also see a youth bias.
I’ve easily noticed that they use extrapolate from the general population, and the recorded crime rates (a la FBI) to come to this racist yet misleading conclusion (ignoring confirmation racial biases of FBI, unknown racial data of 29.3%, and all that
However, if I may ask, do you have any other resources or masterposts I could use, in regards to other related yet distinct modern racist myths which are not necessarily related to this?
Note: I have seen 27.4% in 2018 and 33.9% in 2019 overall of the crime rates done by Afro-Americans, in relation to the 69.0% and 62.5% done by Whites, which could be twisted to say that Afros do 2-3 times the crime rate, as the Reason article once noted… could you explain that… (at least it shows that Black people don’t do 50% of violent crime here)
I would explain it by first going over the failure of the drug war and how it was created specifically to target racial minorities as well as youth movements in general. It comes back down to anti-communism, they needed a way to grab these activist groups that were mostly minorities and youth when they weren’t protesting. Drugs were a great excuse to do that. Now you can enter their homes, arrest them, jail them, put leverage on them to flip because you smell weed. Of course then there is the importing of drugs to also disrupt these communities but that’s a rabbit hole for this discussion. This is why you see so many drug arrests for all ethnic groups and for younger people and for poorer people. In fact, that’s most of the crime, given by the very stats they use. A small portion of crime both generally and specifically is violent. But even then violent crimes such as gun violence can also be explained in a way that doesn’t rely on skull measurements and eugenics. Poor people start illegal businesses and violence is used to enforce illegal property ownership, just like it is in legitimate, legal business. Gang violence and drug dealer shootouts make sense in that light. They’re not animal-minded thugs, they’re people trying to protect their own sources of income and material security. Drugs have been turned into an exploitative black market precisely so people destroy themselves without state intervention.
We could also talk about the history of criminal enforcement, the origins of police, the institutionalization of crime, the self defenses capitalism creates when faced with a group of people who don’t want to participate in capitalism. Because it’s all relevant.
It’s a bit like asking to explain why sunlight is white but only using equations. I can give you an equation for fusing hydrogen and the energy it gives off, and another equation for taking that energy and turning into a wavelength. But it doesn’t really do any good without the conceptual stuff. You need to know how stars form and some chemistry and other physics to really understand. Knowing the numbers alone isn’t enough. The social science equivalent of that is history. If we just focus purely on stats, there’s enough room for everyone to write their own narrative. So you gotta bring some narrative to the argument.
I guess that’s what Masses, Rebels, et Elites was about
Well, amen… I guess I caught in the numbers that I forgot that the real life narrative is what’s needed to be controlled and fought for constantly, whether by the fascists that spread those myths or the social scientists that analyze them…