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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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We can look at a plain “percent population imprisoned for homicide” rate to loosely determine whether the cohort does indeed contain more violent members (versus, contains violent members who are much more violent). But remember that the chance of a black American getting away with a violent crime is actually much higher than that of a white American, contrary to popular belief. That’s because the cities with the lowest homicide clearance rates are also the cities where a supermajority of homicides are committed by black americans. (If 60% of cleared homicides are black perpetrator, and the city has a homicide clearance rate of 50%, and the uncleared homicides are mostly gang-related, then we can be sure that true (cleared + uncleared) homicide rate is >50% black perpetrator, and we can estimate it would be considerably more). Note that the FBI data on homicides is perfectly fine (pre-change 2021 changes) because while not every town reports their homicides, every high population area does, and the towns that don’t usually just don’t have homicides. My town of 10,000 hasn’t had a homicide since the 80s.

What changed in 2021?