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
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.