4 ms·

Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we ge

Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones this sort of thing? Blacks have ~4x the murder rate of the combined white / hispanic population, and IIRC something like 6-8x the murder rate of the disaggregated white population, depending on how exactly you segment hispanics. It ends up being approximately half of all murders. Note that this tends to be a geographically concentrated population, often next to an incredibly low-murder urban(e) white area, so you end up with cities like Chicago where the goal is to keep the anarchy from spilling over into your tax base. It's not delusional to think that dealing with facts like this is a major area of concern for law enforcement and local political leadership, especially when people are so quick to denounce any contemplation of reality as racist. I guess if you wanted to put on your PC goggles and studiously avoid any discussion of race, you could do the intellectually dishonest thing and talk about things like "the population of South Chicago", but being intellectually dishonest doesn't seem to have gotten us very far. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

badsock 10y ago
OK, so let's say people agree with you all the sudden. Now that you've framed it as a race thing, what sort of policy are you going to implement based on what you decide? If you're going to take any kind of punitive action against people based on their race, that's not a "offending the PC police" thing, that's a human rights violation. If it's not punitive, then that's affirmative action, which you already have and has been discussed to death. What's the point of framing the discussion around race, given that the result of going down that avenue isn't useful, and that the discussion itself is going to be bitterly divisive?
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  You're misunderstanding me. I am saying that the raw statistics indicate that dealing with crime in serious way requires imposing not-crime on the black population. That is just a point of fact, and Eric Holder's subordinates at least agree with me. Mechanisms to do this run into exactly the sorts of problems you mention (all of the plausible solutions appear to be either "racist" or empirically ineffective). There are discarded social technologies from <1970 that evidently succeeded in reducing both the black crime rate, and probably also the extent to which black crime affected whites & was thus basically ignorable. Examining those technologies in depth & figuring out what if anything is useful sort of exceeds the bounds of a tiny comment box. But let's please get accurate diagnoses first of the decision calculus facing, say, Rahm Emanuel as he decides what policies to implement, and why he doesn't seem to be able to crack the problem. Giuliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York, but he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks, avoid effective criticism due to his protection of large swathes of the media community, import replacement populations to drive out his more troublesome constituents, finance it via a boom in his city's FIRE economy, etc. It's not clear that that would work in, say, Detroit, or that those policies were in retrospect conformal with contemporary ethics.
  - panic 10y ago
    Men commit more crimes than women. Do you think we should eliminate freedom of movement for men? "Import replacement populations" of women to drive them out? The reasons people commit crimes are complex. Visible attributes like skin color or gender do not cause people to commit crime, and using statistics to argue this is incorrect and racist.
    - h4nkoslo 10y ago
      For whatever reason you're refusing to engage with the existence of black crime as a problem, and deflecting to whether I secretly believe in particular causal mechanisms or am arguing for heresy. In fact I've been clear in not advocating for particular causes. I've also been clear in not advocating an Emperor Giuliani solution. It rather reinforces my point that there is unlikely to be a good solution to the problem when the response to pointing out very simple and agreed-upon statistics about black crime, and that any solution would presumably disproportionately affect blacks - is to point and shout "racist". That's what I'm saying. A solution to vastly disproportionate black crime would probably be, ipso facto, racist. Incidentally, I agree with you that men commit essentially all violence, to say nothing of violent crime. There's pretty much societal consensus that measures disproportionately targeting male crime are A-OK, eg, the fact that young men are far more likely to be stopped by the police than young women, or disparities in sentencing between male and female crime, or the use of sex-offender registries, etc. In fact management of large groups of men has been a concern for literally millennia. For instance, maintaining order in militaries, or in prisons, or managing boomtowns. "Import women" has been a solution (promoting female immigration to boomtowns, or brothels and baggage trains in <1900 militaries), as has been the imposition of hierarchies with recursive responsibility for enforcing order (militaries in general & prisons) or sequestering violence from the population at large (prisons & to some extent militaries). We've actually gotten pretty good at it through the use of social technologies we haven't thrown away.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - abvdasker 10y ago
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
I have some questions for you: - Can you guarantee that there is no better (i.e., stronger correlated) predictor for murder rate than skin color? - How far behind in strength of correlation is the next-best predictor, and what is it?
SolaceQuantum 10y ago
My confusion with this logic and the reason I'm suspicious about this is that this logic seems to be only applied to black people whenever I come across it, black people being a miniority population in the United States. I never see it applied to whites, who as far as I know have a track record of committing mass murders and school shootings or males who as far as I know have a track record of sexual assaults and violent crime. But this logic around demographics and crime and how one needs to view demographics as simply more of a problem only seems to apply to black people. I'm not denying the logic or crying for the pc police. I just don't understand why it doesnt seem to be applied anywhere else.

badsock 10y ago

OK, so let's say people agree with you all the sudden. Now that you've framed it as a race thing, what sort of policy are you going to implement based on what you decide? If you're going to take any kind of punitive action against people based on their race, that's not a "offending the PC police" thing, that's a human rights violation. If it's not punitive, then that's affirmative action, which you already have and has been discussed to death. What's the point of framing the discussion around race, given that the result of going down that avenue isn't useful, and that the discussion itself is going to be bitterly divisive?

h4nkoslo 10y ago
You're misunderstanding me. I am saying that the raw statistics indicate that dealing with crime in serious way requires imposing not-crime on the black population. That is just a point of fact, and Eric Holder's subordinates at least agree with me. Mechanisms to do this run into exactly the sorts of problems you mention (all of the plausible solutions appear to be either "racist" or empirically ineffective). There are discarded social technologies from <1970 that evidently succeeded in reducing both the black crime rate, and probably also the extent to which black crime affected whites & was thus basically ignorable. Examining those technologies in depth & figuring out what if anything is useful sort of exceeds the bounds of a tiny comment box. But let's please get accurate diagnoses first of the decision calculus facing, say, Rahm Emanuel as he decides what policies to implement, and why he doesn't seem to be able to crack the problem. Giuliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York, but he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks, avoid effective criticism due to his protection of large swathes of the media community, import replacement populations to drive out his more troublesome constituents, finance it via a boom in his city's FIRE economy, etc. It's not clear that that would work in, say, Detroit, or that those policies were in retrospect conformal with contemporary ethics.
- panic 10y ago
  Men commit more crimes than women. Do you think we should eliminate freedom of movement for men? "Import replacement populations" of women to drive them out? The reasons people commit crimes are complex. Visible attributes like skin color or gender do not cause people to commit crime, and using statistics to argue this is incorrect and racist.
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    For whatever reason you're refusing to engage with the existence of black crime as a problem, and deflecting to whether I secretly believe in particular causal mechanisms or am arguing for heresy. In fact I've been clear in not advocating for particular causes. I've also been clear in not advocating an Emperor Giuliani solution. It rather reinforces my point that there is unlikely to be a good solution to the problem when the response to pointing out very simple and agreed-upon statistics about black crime, and that any solution would presumably disproportionately affect blacks - is to point and shout "racist". That's what I'm saying. A solution to vastly disproportionate black crime would probably be, ipso facto, racist. Incidentally, I agree with you that men commit essentially all violence, to say nothing of violent crime. There's pretty much societal consensus that measures disproportionately targeting male crime are A-OK, eg, the fact that young men are far more likely to be stopped by the police than young women, or disparities in sentencing between male and female crime, or the use of sex-offender registries, etc. In fact management of large groups of men has been a concern for literally millennia. For instance, maintaining order in militaries, or in prisons, or managing boomtowns. "Import women" has been a solution (promoting female immigration to boomtowns, or brothels and baggage trains in <1900 militaries), as has been the imposition of hierarchies with recursive responsibility for enforcing order (militaries in general & prisons) or sequestering violence from the population at large (prisons & to some extent militaries). We've actually gotten pretty good at it through the use of social technologies we haven't thrown away.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- abvdasker 10y ago

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago

I have some questions for you: - Can you guarantee that there is no better (i.e., stronger correlated) predictor for murder rate than skin color? - How far behind in strength of correlation is the next-best predictor, and what is it?

SolaceQuantum 10y ago

My confusion with this logic and the reason I'm suspicious about this is that this logic seems to be only applied to black people whenever I come across it, black people being a miniority population in the United States. I never see it applied to whites, who as far as I know have a track record of committing mass murders and school shootings or males who as far as I know have a track record of sexual assaults and violent crime. But this logic around demographics and crime and how one needs to view demographics as simply more of a problem only seems to apply to black people. I'm not denying the logic or crying for the pc police. I just don't understand why it doesnt seem to be applied anywhere else.