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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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An AI facial recognition model trawled through 1.5 million mugshots and determined that the Hispanic crime rate is underestimated by 30%

We scraped 5.5 million criminal records and 1.5 million mugshots from 39 states. 29% of Hispanics are being misclassified as White in official Department of Corrections databases.

We trained a multinomial logistic regression on 18 features: DeepFace racial probabilities from mugshots; Census name demographics; First and last name racial statistics; 92.76% accuracy distinguishing Black, White and Hispanic. 29% of predicted Hispanics were officially classified as White.

Even at 95-100% model confidence, 22.4% of predicted Hispanics were still assigned White. Median confidence for these cases? 91.7%. Hispanic criminal record rates increase 20-31% [in our model]

The Hispanic crime rate has been discussed in the context of the immigration debate. I recall that the relatively insignificant difference between the White and Hispanic rate has been used as an argument in favor of migration from Hispanic countries. The math changes if the Hispanic crime rate is 30% higher than previously believed, and the White rate ~6% lower than believed.

Additionally, the analysis above needs to be supplemented with an analysis of the crime clearance rate. Not every crime is solved, meaning that not every crime is logged. If the Hispanic clearance rate is lower than the White clearance rate, due to myriad factors like documentation issues and hesitancy to work with police, then this must be factored into the crime rate too. Indeed, there is a substantial 19% difference of clearance between murders where the victim is Hispanic and murders where the victim is White, with more “Hispanic victim” murders going unsolved. What to do with this information is a little bit tricky. Most homicides are within-race and gang homicides are especially likely to go unsolved. So it’s reasonable to assume that nearly all of the 19% difference in homicide clearance are homicides committed by an Hispanic offender (we can only tell the race of the victim here). This is somewhat complicated by the possibility that unsolved white victim homicides may be more likely to have an Hispanic offender than the solved homicide rate, but figuring that out is annoying.

Putting this all together: the Hispanic crime rate is likely 50% higher than expressed in the official and common crime data. This weakens the argument that Hispanic migration would be a net economic positive, given the high cost of crime via secondary / tertiary effects.

It would be interesting to find out what proportion of these murders were committed by first-generation migrants.

After the last few high profile violent crimes committed in the UK, there has been a curious rush to publicize that the offender was a second or third generation immigrant, usually a British citizen. This is apparently motivated from a desire to push back against anti-migrant sentiment: "See! He grew up in the UK. He wasn't an immigrant! You can't hold this terrible event against immigrants". It's one of those cases when the mainstream left demonstrates a complete failure to comprehend what their opposition actually believes and why.

It would be kind of like someone trying to publicize an instance of police brutality as proof of how bad black communities are: "Look! This is how brutal you have to deal with these people! This proves how irredeemably uncivilized they are". Of course, there are no doubt some people who actually do think like this, but even they would never try to use this argument against a left-winger because they understand how it would be interpreted in practically the opposite way.

Yeah. I'm similarly baffled when I see people mentioning that the perpetrator of latest mass stabbing incident was a British (or in one case, Irish) citizen (by which they mean someone who secured citizenship during his lifetime), like they're laying down a trump card.

So you mean our processes for immigration and naturalisation are so lacking that they can completely fail to identify and weed out a deranged knife-wielding lunatic? Way to tell on yourself.

If they're second or third generation, the immigration/naturalization process can't have weeded them out (at least not directly).

No, it's not the same thing. But it's the same kind of weird deflection. What makes you think the most effective means of combatting anti-immigration sentiment is to point out that the perpetrator of a horrific violent crime was a legal immigrant? That's even worse than if it was committed by a refugee or asylum seeker!