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A 30-year-old pregnant nurse attempted to steal a GPS-tracked rental bike from a young black man right outside her workplace, and when a group of onlookers surrounded her and started filming she had the audacity to start acting strangely, call for help, and briefly cry. Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.
If there's a report of a robbery between a 30+ year old, employed pregnant female and a teenaged male, everyone's priors should be that the male was robbing the female no matter what the report is. I'd guess that women in those categories have physically stolen things from teenaged males has to be out numbered many orders of magnitude the number of times the opposite has occured.
Using DOJ estimated national crime rates men aged 17 average 250-400 arrests for robbery per 100,000 persons per year, women over 30 average 12-14 robbery arrests per 100,000 persons per year. And that's all women, if you applied filters for employment status, pregnancy status, and victium demographics those rates would drop like a rock.
You don't even have to know the difference in racial crime rates to know this story shouldn't have passed the smell test.
If you left race entirely out of it, there is zero doubt that it is MORE plausible for a gang of teens to randomly confront a female nurse to pressure her into giving up a rental bike (which I gather don't cost much to rent) than the reverse.
Because the story that some random pregnant nurse decided to intentionally confront a gang of teenagers to steal one of their bikes is utterly absurd on it's face. Not impossible, but in the world we live in, 99/100 times you bet the other way.
Bringing race into it doesn't update one's priors that much, but it definitely updates them in the same direction.
The alternative view is not that was trying to steal the bike, but that she saw the one eBike on the rack and grabbed it even though it had already been reserved. This is at least plausible -- perhaps you'd bet against it a priori, but it's not crazy sauce. But it's not what happened.
Let's give these guys the benefit of the doubt. As a man, I'd have put my hands up, told her that I'd cancel my reservation and the bike was hers. End of story, no confrontation. We'll talk, explain things, and if there's a chance for me to give ground (and not lose out on $1200 from an unreturned bike, I'm not that trusting) I'm taking it.
Not anymore, no. The benefit of the doubt has been weaponized and only ever runs in one direction. Reading about this case led me to discovering the new paradigm for purse snatching. The thief approaches the victim and says, "give me back my bag!" On the surface, this looks like it could plausibly be a legitimate case of someone picking up the wrong bag. That's what it's for, to induce in normal people just enough momentary confusion for the thief to take off with the bag. Four "teens" hanging around the bike rental deserve absolutely zero benefit of the doubt.
I'm saying that in the most charitable interpretation of the situation, these teenagers still handled the situation poorly. And it only gets worse from there.
That's an interesting point. I guess I'm arguing that the most charitable interpretation of the situation is so improbable that it's not even worth entertaining. But as a rhetorical device, I can see the value in your approach.
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