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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%
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.
I feel like the politics around crime statistics and race are at once both fascinating and exhausting / dispiriting.
On the one hand, I've come across angry black activists and civilians (in public discourse) insisting that cops are racists, white people are committing exactly the same crimes that black people do, and cops don't care because those white people are white. And, I mean, I do kind of get it, to a point. I absolutely do know white suburban people who, say, sold some weed to their friends in high school and there wasn't a police dragnet around trying to catch those people. There likely is a certain amount of that. The more that cops are around, the more that they're likely to notice you doing stuff and getting the state involved.
But on the other hand, whenever I've tried to look into the topic of mass incarceration (I'm thinking especially here of Jill Leovy's great book "Ghettoside"), one thing that comes up constantly when talking about the kind of Hatfield-McCoy retaliatory violence in many black communities is that, historically, black communities have been massively underpoliced. Like, after the collapse of slavery and during Reconstruction, lots and lots of white people looked at the truly insane amount crime and violence in black communities, shrugged, said "that's just how black people are, it will never change, they are literally outlaws by nature, and it is not the role of the police or the state to do anything about that". And so in that sense, the police really were mostly there to try to preserve decent, civilized white communities (and thus also notably disregarded poor, dysfunctional white communities too). But the consequence of that fact was, as a practical matter, crime rates in black communities were actually much, much, much higher than whatever ended up getting reported by police statistics. And the argument in her book (covering LA around 2000, I think) is that actual black people in those communities certainly did recognize the massive amount of criminality occurring in their communities, they knew the police wouldn't help (or couldn't be trusted to be useful if they showed up anyway), and so frequently vigilante behavior seemed like a sensible response.
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the underlying flaw in these debates is that what progressives want from a police force (assuming they want a police force at all) is fundamentally incoherent.
Either the police can adopt an aggressive, proactive and hands-on approach to policing African-American (and Hispanic, to a lesser extent) communities, which means more COCs (criminals of colour) getting shot and/or being sent to prison; or they can adopt a hands-off, laissez-faire approach, which means more people of colour getting victimised by the criminals in their communities. There's pretty much no way for police officers to cut down on the rate of violent crime in a community without arresting the perpetrators, and there's no way for police officers to be more hands-off without a huge spike in crime victimisation.
I'd like to believe there's some hypothetical point on the thermostat that would keep the majority of progressive activists happy most of the time, but it's hard to envision what this might look like. American progressives have been complaining about over- and under-policing in black American communities for as long as I've been alive, and indeed many decades prior.
The progressive Schrodinger’s level of policing make sense if progressives don’t understand, pretend not to understand, or choose to ignore that blacks are disproportionate sources of crime—especially violent crime—including against other blacks. Thus, the two goals of arresting fewer blacks and arresting more people who commit crime against blacks can be simultaneously pursued.
Not that mainstream law-and-order conservatives are too much better on this front. They concede that Black Lives Matter More when they sputter that blacks have always been the primary victims of underpolicing, that Democrats R the Real Racists (DR3).
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The ideal progressive policing is that:
Right, so ultimately all they really want is a maximally redistributive (read: socialist) state, in which the police force will wither away and become unnecessary. (Even if they rarely so in so many words, acutely aware that will look at them like they have two heads.) Kind of makes me wonder why they even bother criticising the police when their only actual beef is with capitalism.
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