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Here's a little bit of incomplete thinking about the classic "13/53" number, which is a ballpark figure (varying year to year) that represents the fact that black people are overrepresented by a factor of about 5x in crime. I see a lot of people tend to interpret this number as "black people are 5x more likely to commit crimes", but that might not actually be the case.
Concretely, there's two ways this stat could come about:
a. There are 5x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 1x the rate of white criminals.
b. There are 1x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 5x the rate of white criminals.
There is of course a continuum between them, but I think it's useful to focus on the two endpoints because the endpoints have totally different policy responses and also suggest totally different causes.
For example, the policy response to (a) is that we need more police to catch a lot more black criminals. The policy response to (b) is that we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes.
They also suggest different causes. Scenario (a) suggests something (HBD, special kinds of poverty not reflected in census stats) causes blacks to have a higher criminal propensity, whereas (b) suggests police might just be extra lenient towards black criminals thereby giving them more time on the street in which they commit more crimes.
Interestingly, while the theory of police abandonment will get you cancelled today, it was very much the theory pushed by black community leaders in the 90's. It was one of the things leading to "3 strikes" laws (long prison sentences for the 3'rd crime in order to get rid of the very worst criminals).
I have recently discovered some weak evidence in favor of theory (b) while going down an internet rabbithole on a totally different topic. Specifically, look at the first graph in this analysis:
https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis/blob/master/Compas%20Analysis.ipynb
The "decile score" of the x-axis is a reasonably predictive index of a convicted criminal committing new crimes. The dominant features in the model generating the index are things like "# of previous crimes", "was the current crime violent", etc. As can be seen from the graph, white criminals are overrepresented on the left tail (little repeat crime risk) of the graph, whereas black criminals are spread evenly. Of course, this evidence is very weak - it's only about criminals up for parole in a certain region of Florida.
Does anyone know of more data on this?
Option c: blacks are 5x as much "overpoliced" or white criminals are 1/5 as likely to be caught and convicted.
I took a college class that claimed that black drug users were much more likely to purchase and use drugs in public, where the cops eventually catch them. White drug users buy and use illegal drugs in private residences. White and black Americans have comparable drug use rates, but the black ones are caught more.
This obviously doesn't explain differing homicide rates. And take stuff a college class asserted with a big grain of salt. But to some degree maybe white people are better criminals and cops don't typically crack down on upstanding whites.
Is this based on self-reports, or actual research?
This is exactly why OP with homicide rates, and not drug convictions. In fact, it is Black murder victims that have lower clearance rate, which combined with the fact that most crime is intraracial, implies that, if anything, it is Black people who are likely to get away with murder.
What would you expect other than self reporting? These are illegal acts done (by sensible people) in private. Other than asking people or performing random drug testing we aren't going to get use rates.
I mean, given that blacks have both higher rates of mental illness and lower average iq, we can expect far fewer of them to be sensible people(hence, public drug use).
Low effort, highly inflammatory, no argumentation or evidence. Don't post like this, please.
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This does nothing to address TIRM's point. It's just a low-effort swipe at black people.
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