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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?
I think so too. I made a couple of posts a while back arguing that this may be misleading due to:
The black-white IQ gap could mean that whites are less likely to get caught. It's reasonable to assume smarter criminals will take precautions to avoid being caught. Also, taking plea deals to dismiss a serious charge for a lesser one. It's likely that smarter criminals will avail themselves of more legal options.
Smarter criminals are likely to engage in crimes which have a lot of victims and a smaller per-incidence risk of arrest, such as fraud. The crime stats only look at arrests, not the # of victims per crime. A single fraudster can have hundreds of victims, for substantial sums of money, versus a black who robs a store and is arrested afterwards, yet these are counted as a single entry in the crime stats. .
If you just look at homicides, excluding serial killers, then blacks are way overrepresented.
There's a lot of reasons crimes like murder go unsolved, and criminals being particularly clever isn't really one of them. Distrust of the cops and "snitches get stitches" mentalities in urban black communities really cuts down on the ability of police to investigate crimes, and the ability of DAs to secure evidence and testimony to convict the murderers even if they are identified. The existence of a large black market in handguns (which are used in an increasing numbers of murders over time) makes solving cases harder in several ways also. It's easier to solve a crime where one person is standing over the other with a bloody knife than it is to identify all parties in a shootout. Also, we've seen a decrease in the number of cops in particularly-crappy and crime-ridden neighborhoods recently, which increases case loads, thus decreasing clearance output.
And on, and on.
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