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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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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 am not sure about the evidence of a black/white split but people generally underestimate how much crime is committed by career criminals.

Crimes of passion are rare compared to a murder committed by someone with a long criminal record. Here's a liberal-leaning site which says just that.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/19/edward-flynn/85-percent-shooting-suspects-and-victims-milwaukee/

For all homicides in 2011 -- those involving guns and those that didn’t -- 57 percent of the 72 suspects and 62 percent of the 66 homicide victims had at least six prior arrests.

How much crime does one have to commit to be arrested six separate times? Dozens or hundreds of incidents, I would imagine. By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime. Unfortunately, as this goes against the prevailing political dogma, we are unlikely to see studies that back up this claim. Anyone who put it forward would become persona non-grata in the academic community.

My prediction is that as strict sentencing laws are rolled back we will see higher violent crime rates over the next 10 years. I believe that mass incarceration can explain most of the reduction in violent crime from 1990–2015 and most of its subsequent rise.

My prediction is that as strict sentencing laws are rolled back we will see higher violent crime rates over the next 10 years. I believe that mass incarceration can explain most of the reduction in violent crime from 1990–2015 and most of its subsequent rise.

Mass incarceration, war on drugs, abortion, better surveillance and detective technology, etc. Some will argue that European countries have less crime despite more lenient conditions, but this may fail to take into account demographics and unreported or unsolved crime.

What’s the murder rate like among, say, the Afro-French, or Turks in Germany?

Ah, they're trying to obscure data. Which tells me it probably points to discrepancies between Germans and at least a few other large groups(that is, not just gypsies that everyone already knows are all criminals, or a few small ethnicities that are common in the mob).

As much as Americans kvetch about their black people, there really is no population over there that's really comparable to Gypsies.

It's an unfair over-generalisation to assume, without any other evidence (habitus, dress, accent, etc) that some individual black American person has a meaningfully higher chance of committing crime. But with Gypsies, man, it's an iron law, there's not even a question. A gypsy president, or for that matter gypsy lawyer or doctor or other middle-class type, is inconceivable.

I wonder how Gypsies would do if they were all moved onto a planet of their own, with nobody except each other to victimize.

I don't wonder; I'm quite certain they'd all be dead in a decade, or whatever is the longest possible period you can run on predatory cannibalism.