4 ms·

An explanation that fits the data better Only if you ignore the overwhelming racial bias in enforcement.

• rayiner 8y ago
  How did racial bias in enforcement cause violent crime rates to skyrocket starting in the 1960s when the drug war was initiated in the 1980s?
  • ynniv 8y ago
    GP said that the motivation was racial, you said that the motivation was law and order. You can determine motivation better from future actions than from past context, and the actions showed a bias towards incarcerating minorities. If the intent was to prevent crime by reducing drug use, we should have seen similarly tough enforcement among white drug use, which we did not. You are falling into the common post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      OP said that "criminality was the effect of the War on Drugs, not its cause." Maybe I am not understanding his point, but I took that to mean that crime was caused by the drug war, which cannot be reconciled with the data.
      • ynniv 8y ago
        Ah, it was ambiguous (to me) what "The last point is unsupportable" referred to.
      • zachrose 8y ago
        I meant that if you were to declare a similar War on Jaywalking, you'd see jaywalking rates skyrocket.
• bitcoinisqueen 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure from recent research that black neighborhoods are under policed relative to white neighborhoods from some recent work I did. We looked at a lot of research and came to conclusion that the "racial profiling boogeyman" is actually a convenient cultural myth to perpetuate "oppression stereotypes". Don't take my word for it, but it is worth looking into. Since you made a claim and did not substantiate and just took at as given.