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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.
Studies based on the National Crime Victimization Survey show a close match between the racial demographics of criminals as reported by those claiming to have been victimized and the racial demographics of those arrested for those crimes. The 13/53 figure is specifically based on murder and is thus technically not covered since murder victims cannot be surveyed, but violent crimes in general are included and show a similar but somewhat lesser disparity. (Generally the racial disparity is larger the more violent and severe the crime is, so murder has a larger disparity than violent crime in general, which has a larger disparity than crime in general. So while the crime victimization survey also doesn't cover crimes without victims, those have a smaller disparity to begin with, and white criminals with victims answering the National Crime Victimization Survey don't seem to be getting away with it more.)
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