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I think this only addresses half of what's wrong with Newark PD. Newark still spends about a third of it's city budget on police, at the expense of essential s

by elil17 6y ago

I think this only addresses half of what's wrong with Newark PD. Newark still spends about a third of it's city budget on police, at the expense of essential services like infrastructure and education. Newark PD still arrests Black people at a much much higher rate than white people. The disparity of arrest rates is even greater when it comes to drug possession.

bananabiscuit 6y ago
Check the demographics, white people make up only about one third of the population in Newark.
- elil17 6y ago
  Arresting at a hire rate means in comparison to the demographics of the city. In 2020, 50% of Newark residents were Black but 80% of arrests were of Black people. 80% of victims of police use of force were Black. A third of the city is white but only 4% of police use of force victims are white. [1] [1]: https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/07/newark-must-do-more-to-stop-racial-disparities-in-policing-opinion.html https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/07/newark-must-do-more-to-st...
  - param 6y ago
    And do we know why this disparity exists?
    - bananabiscuit 6y ago
      I’d assume it’s some combination of the cops being racist, or actual differences in crime rates among demographics. I see no reason to conclude it has to be one or the other, not sure if there’s any actual way to determine how much each cause contributes though.
      - erikerikson 6y ago
        One might add inherited circumstances that are predictive of outcomes.
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        ...cops being racist... This is vague and leads to confusion. We shouldn't imagine we can learn anything simply by judging the characters of individual officers. If our laws and police practices are racist, the beliefs and actions of the officers themselves won't matter. Of course, there are racist officers, just as there are racist judges, legislators, grocers, veterinarians, etc. I doubt that Newark has a high concentration of racist police officers relative to the rest of the nation, however.
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        This distinction is critically important and is almost never even mentioned in popular media discussions of police racism. Yes, policing and criminal justice in America fucking sucks (especially if you have dark skin) and needs major reform no matter what. But I don't want to start seeing ghosts where none exist, and chasing after them instead of focusing on other problems. Edit: I explained this better in a different comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925138
      - bbulkow 6y ago
        A disparity that high is unlikely to be rate of crime. It is hard to study rate of crime, obvious reasons, but when you slice drug use by race, blacks use more, when you investigate drug contraband found per traffic stop, the is not a high racial bias. I tend to believe the crime rates aren't effected much by race, it seems really unlikely a difference that high is race.
  - bananabiscuit 6y ago
    I see. My mistake.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    The problem with all this data is that it doesn't inform us of who is actually committing crimes. If we are overly fixated on racism by the police and confuse correlation with causation, we might entirely miss other structural/systemic factors that might be leading (or forcing) black people to criminal behavior more often than white people. I am aware of some research that tries to estimate propensity to actually commit crimes using victim surveys instead of police data, but I see so many conflicting results from different academic fields that I don't feel like I can form an opinion. All I know is that measuring disparities in arrests is not enough and cannot possibly be enough to distinguish police racism specifically from other racial disparities.
    - stadium 6y ago
      The police don't get to decide who committed a crime, the judicial system does. Yours is the same argument that George Floyd deserved what he got because he was a criminal. Being arrested or frisked by police does not a criminal make. Conviction does. It's a duck.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        It seems oddly philosophical to suggest that a crime hasn't been committed until its would-be committor has been convicted... Regardless of what you want to call it in the time between the event later deemed criminal, and the sentencing, surely you see that that's what GP was referring to? That there may be differences in demography of 'who is involved in these events'.
        stadium 6y ago
        It's not philosophical, it's the law. And GP dismisses the overwhelmingly higher rates of arrests for non whites as not being a systemic racism issue and assumes that white people commit fewer crimes with no data to back it up. > If we are overly fixated Sorry but that is gaslighting and victim blaming. Tell the parent of a black teenager to not be overly fixated on police reform.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    How closely do the arrest numbers match poverty numbers?
  - OJFord 6y ago
    It doesn't mean anything without specifying the denominator, they could've meant per unit time, population, or crime. Now that you've specified though, the only remaining wiggle room is 'who is actually committing the crimes'. 80% arrests being black people is 'fine' if 80% of 'arrestable crime'[^] is committed by the black population; it just points to something other than policing needing improvement. Education perhaps, or welfare. [^] by this I just mean that not all convicted crime involves an arrest, and maybe there are demographic differences in the types of crimes committed
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Won't there always be racial disparities in policing outside of the police's control if different socio-economic classes commit crimes at different rates, and different races are differently distributed among the socio-economic classes?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
  - commentingbadly 6y ago
    Is there a Goodwin's Law for citing FBI statistics yet? Why doesn't the FBI calculate this by income? And just so you know, probably about 50% of people that read you citing the FBI statistics will think you are a hardcore racist. I'm not calling you a racist, but I'm letting you know how hard everyone rolls their eyes when you post something like this. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/despite-being-only-13-percent-of-the-population https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/despite-being-only-13-percent...
js2 6y ago
I was surprised to learn that overall, the U.S. spends about 0.8% of GDP on policing, which places it in about the middle of OECD countries. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-different-democracies https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen... Budget seems like the least of our problems in fixing U.S. policing, though I recognize in some cities it may be more of a problem than others. The biggest problem seems to be the huge amount of resistance from police to any change at all. I'm watching this closely: https://cornellsun.com/2021/04/02/mayor-svante-myricks-09-police-overhaul-proposal-explained/ https://cornellsun.com/2021/04/02/mayor-svante-myricks-09-po...
- mathewsanders 6y ago
  That surprises me as well! Particularly if it includes departments like ICE and FBI within that definition of policing. I tried to search for the original source to see if I could find how they are calculating theses costs but didn’t have any luck. I mention this because NYPD budget is often referenced as $6 billion, but that’s only operating costs, and the actual amount is closer to $11 billion (including fringe benefits like overtime and funding the NYPD pension). With a 2020 GPD of $20,936 billion Then 0.8% of that is $167 billion If we assume that policing costs are more closely tied to population rather than GDP we’d expect that NYPD costs to be about 2.5% of national amount. That’s approximately $4.2 billion. But NYPD costs are $11 billion, which is 6.5% of estimated national policing costs (for 2.5% of the population). Admittedly, I can imagine that there are reasons why a big city area might have higher than average costs, but 6.5% makes me feel that the 0.8% of GDP might be either underestimating how much US spends as part of GDP, or calculating national costs using different methods for different countries.
  - jccooper 6y ago
    New York is a huge outlier in terms of police department size.
- bluthru 6y ago
  >which places it in about the middle of OECD countries This means we're not spending enough on policing because the US's crime is above OECD average.
helloworld11 6y ago
>Newark PD still arrests Black people at a much much higher rate than white people. And if it's the case that people in the city's black community are committing arrestable offenses (however stupid some definitions of what is an offense for which you can be arrested and charged with for are), then what should the department do? Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing just because it's bad PR? It's apparently not popular to mention and undoubtedly there are many social victimization factors at work contributing to it, but young men in the black community really do commit more violent crime and crime of many other types than do many young men in a number of other ethnic communities.
- elil17 6y ago
  > Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing Yes. No one’s ordered police to focus on anyone one kind of crime. Police in America have total discretion to choose which laws they enforce and which they don’t. In Arizona you can get six months in jail for spitting in a public park, but you don’t see Arizona cops trying to arrest everyone for that. It’s a federal crime to let your dog bark in a National Park but the park police don’t really care. Similarly, there’s nothing forcing cops to focus on marijuana possession.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Is there a reason to believe these drug possession arrests were primarily for marijuana? New Jersey passed a law in mid 2020 to decriminalize it starting January, so I’d be surprised if it were a big police focus in the interval.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    focus on marijuana possession NJ recently legalized weed, so pretty soon those arrests won't be an issue.
    - srswtf123 6y ago
      Except see Chicago, where its also legal, and arresting black people for marijuana related crimes continues unabated. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-marijuana-legalization-parallel-worlds-20210415-4hydfuinvje27mtctklm7dq4r4-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-marijuana-le...
loeg 6y ago
> Newark still spends about a third of it's city budget on police, at the expense of essential services like infrastructure and education. How does that compare with other metros? My impression is that police and schools are some of the most expensive services cities provide, and both consume a significant chunk of most cities' budgets.
NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
This sentiment about arrest rates really needs to go. I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people: White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3 White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2 White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8 The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe. This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system". There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. That cop will (involuntarily) collect statistics on the world around him or her, and will act accordingly. We call it learning. You can't help but do it. I think some small proportion of this enormous difference is due to a feedback loop, i.e. people end up murdering more because they're policed more. Insofar as you are "outraged" by this simple statement of fact, you are part of the problem--not the solution. Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye. Ignoring the obvious truth proves to me that you don't really care about actually helping people, and are really in it to impress your friends with how woke you are. There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution. FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-estimates-detailed.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I'm sure I'll get downvoted but isn't it possible that BOTH the real crime rate is higher in more poverty stricken areas AND that cops are more likely to arrest blacks in general? Does it always have to be one or the other, rather than both?

by elil17 6y ago

bananabiscuit 6y ago

Check the demographics, white people make up only about one third of the population in Newark.

elil17 6y ago
Arresting at a hire rate means in comparison to the demographics of the city. In 2020, 50% of Newark residents were Black but 80% of arrests were of Black people. 80% of victims of police use of force were Black. A third of the city is white but only 4% of police use of force victims are white. [1] [1]: https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/07/newark-must-do-more-to-stop-racial-disparities-in-policing-opinion.html https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/07/newark-must-do-more-to-st...
- param 6y ago
  And do we know why this disparity exists?
  - bananabiscuit 6y ago
    I’d assume it’s some combination of the cops being racist, or actual differences in crime rates among demographics. I see no reason to conclude it has to be one or the other, not sure if there’s any actual way to determine how much each cause contributes though.
    - erikerikson 6y ago
      One might add inherited circumstances that are predictive of outcomes.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      ...cops being racist... This is vague and leads to confusion. We shouldn't imagine we can learn anything simply by judging the characters of individual officers. If our laws and police practices are racist, the beliefs and actions of the officers themselves won't matter. Of course, there are racist officers, just as there are racist judges, legislators, grocers, veterinarians, etc. I doubt that Newark has a high concentration of racist police officers relative to the rest of the nation, however.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      This distinction is critically important and is almost never even mentioned in popular media discussions of police racism. Yes, policing and criminal justice in America fucking sucks (especially if you have dark skin) and needs major reform no matter what. But I don't want to start seeing ghosts where none exist, and chasing after them instead of focusing on other problems. Edit: I explained this better in a different comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925138
    - bbulkow 6y ago
      A disparity that high is unlikely to be rate of crime. It is hard to study rate of crime, obvious reasons, but when you slice drug use by race, blacks use more, when you investigate drug contraband found per traffic stop, the is not a high racial bias. I tend to believe the crime rates aren't effected much by race, it seems really unlikely a difference that high is race.
- bananabiscuit 6y ago
  I see. My mistake.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  The problem with all this data is that it doesn't inform us of who is actually committing crimes. If we are overly fixated on racism by the police and confuse correlation with causation, we might entirely miss other structural/systemic factors that might be leading (or forcing) black people to criminal behavior more often than white people. I am aware of some research that tries to estimate propensity to actually commit crimes using victim surveys instead of police data, but I see so many conflicting results from different academic fields that I don't feel like I can form an opinion. All I know is that measuring disparities in arrests is not enough and cannot possibly be enough to distinguish police racism specifically from other racial disparities.
  - stadium 6y ago
    The police don't get to decide who committed a crime, the judicial system does. Yours is the same argument that George Floyd deserved what he got because he was a criminal. Being arrested or frisked by police does not a criminal make. Conviction does. It's a duck.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      It seems oddly philosophical to suggest that a crime hasn't been committed until its would-be committor has been convicted... Regardless of what you want to call it in the time between the event later deemed criminal, and the sentencing, surely you see that that's what GP was referring to? That there may be differences in demography of 'who is involved in these events'.
      - stadium 6y ago
        It's not philosophical, it's the law. And GP dismisses the overwhelmingly higher rates of arrests for non whites as not being a systemic racism issue and assumes that white people commit fewer crimes with no data to back it up. > If we are overly fixated Sorry but that is gaslighting and victim blaming. Tell the parent of a black teenager to not be overly fixated on police reform.
- burlesona 6y ago
  How closely do the arrest numbers match poverty numbers?
- OJFord 6y ago
  It doesn't mean anything without specifying the denominator, they could've meant per unit time, population, or crime. Now that you've specified though, the only remaining wiggle room is 'who is actually committing the crimes'. 80% arrests being black people is 'fine' if 80% of 'arrestable crime'[^] is committed by the black population; it just points to something other than policing needing improvement. Education perhaps, or welfare. [^] by this I just mean that not all convicted crime involves an arrest, and maybe there are demographic differences in the types of crimes committed
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Won't there always be racial disparities in policing outside of the police's control if different socio-economic classes commit crimes at different rates, and different races are differently distributed among the socio-economic classes?
imwillofficial 6y ago
Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
- commentingbadly 6y ago
  Is there a Goodwin's Law for citing FBI statistics yet? Why doesn't the FBI calculate this by income? And just so you know, probably about 50% of people that read you citing the FBI statistics will think you are a hardcore racist. I'm not calling you a racist, but I'm letting you know how hard everyone rolls their eyes when you post something like this. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/despite-being-only-13-percent-of-the-population https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/despite-being-only-13-percent...

js2 6y ago

I was surprised to learn that overall, the U.S. spends about 0.8% of GDP on policing, which places it in about the middle of OECD countries. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-different-democracies https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen... Budget seems like the least of our problems in fixing U.S. policing, though I recognize in some cities it may be more of a problem than others. The biggest problem seems to be the huge amount of resistance from police to any change at all. I'm watching this closely: https://cornellsun.com/2021/04/02/mayor-svante-myricks-09-police-overhaul-proposal-explained/ https://cornellsun.com/2021/04/02/mayor-svante-myricks-09-po...

mathewsanders 6y ago
That surprises me as well! Particularly if it includes departments like ICE and FBI within that definition of policing. I tried to search for the original source to see if I could find how they are calculating theses costs but didn’t have any luck. I mention this because NYPD budget is often referenced as $6 billion, but that’s only operating costs, and the actual amount is closer to $11 billion (including fringe benefits like overtime and funding the NYPD pension). With a 2020 GPD of $20,936 billion Then 0.8% of that is $167 billion If we assume that policing costs are more closely tied to population rather than GDP we’d expect that NYPD costs to be about 2.5% of national amount. That’s approximately $4.2 billion. But NYPD costs are $11 billion, which is 6.5% of estimated national policing costs (for 2.5% of the population). Admittedly, I can imagine that there are reasons why a big city area might have higher than average costs, but 6.5% makes me feel that the 0.8% of GDP might be either underestimating how much US spends as part of GDP, or calculating national costs using different methods for different countries.
- jccooper 6y ago
  New York is a huge outlier in terms of police department size.
bluthru 6y ago
>which places it in about the middle of OECD countries This means we're not spending enough on policing because the US's crime is above OECD average.

helloworld11 6y ago

>Newark PD still arrests Black people at a much much higher rate than white people. And if it's the case that people in the city's black community are committing arrestable offenses (however stupid some definitions of what is an offense for which you can be arrested and charged with for are), then what should the department do? Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing just because it's bad PR? It's apparently not popular to mention and undoubtedly there are many social victimization factors at work contributing to it, but young men in the black community really do commit more violent crime and crime of many other types than do many young men in a number of other ethnic communities.

elil17 6y ago
> Not arrest people for doing things it's been ordered to arrest people for doing Yes. No one’s ordered police to focus on anyone one kind of crime. Police in America have total discretion to choose which laws they enforce and which they don’t. In Arizona you can get six months in jail for spitting in a public park, but you don’t see Arizona cops trying to arrest everyone for that. It’s a federal crime to let your dog bark in a National Park but the park police don’t really care. Similarly, there’s nothing forcing cops to focus on marijuana possession.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Is there a reason to believe these drug possession arrests were primarily for marijuana? New Jersey passed a law in mid 2020 to decriminalize it starting January, so I’d be surprised if it were a big police focus in the interval.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  focus on marijuana possession NJ recently legalized weed, so pretty soon those arrests won't be an issue.
  - srswtf123 6y ago
    Except see Chicago, where its also legal, and arresting black people for marijuana related crimes continues unabated. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-marijuana-legalization-parallel-worlds-20210415-4hydfuinvje27mtctklm7dq4r4-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-marijuana-le...

loeg 6y ago

> Newark still spends about a third of it's city budget on police, at the expense of essential services like infrastructure and education. How does that compare with other metros? My impression is that police and schools are some of the most expensive services cities provide, and both consume a significant chunk of most cities' budgets.

NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago

This sentiment about arrest rates really needs to go. I've done a deep dive into the numbers. Murder rate data from the FBI has a large "unknown" category, so I'll handle that in a few ways for simplicity. Focusing on murders rather than other violent crime is the best thing to do because, while there may be a lot of ambiguity about what constitutes "assault", how often it's reported, etc., there really isn't much ambiguity about murder. We don't lose track of bodies very often. Here's the murder rate in the U.S. broken down by race. All numbers are murderers (offenders) per 100,000 people: White (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 1.8 Black (simple, ignoring "Unknown"): 13.3 White (assuming all "Unknown" are White): 3.7 Black (assuming all "Unknown" are Black): 23.2 White (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 2.6 Black (splitting up "Unknown" by existing proportion of total): 18.8 The difference is stark. Using the 2.6 vs. 18.8 numbers, probably closest to the truth, Black people in the U.S. are about seven times more likely to murder in a given year than are white people. The number becomes even more stark if you compare Black to non-Black (because Asians are less likely to murder than Whites), and yet more stark if you just look at men (women murder at something like 1/8 the rate of men, so having them in the system dilutes all differences). If you remove Black Americans from the system, U.S. murder rates look like much of Western Europe. This is a hard thing but it is a true thing. Most of the differences in how police treat Black vs. White people in the U.S. are driven by this phenomenon, not racism on the part of cops or "the system". There is an argument to be made about a legacy of slavery or systemic racism, and maybe it's important to do that, but those arguments are completely irrelevant to the cop who's walking a beat in a bad neighborhood--White or Black. That cop will (involuntarily) collect statistics on the world around him or her, and will act accordingly. We call it learning. You can't help but do it. I think some small proportion of this enormous difference is due to a feedback loop, i.e. people end up murdering more because they're policed more. Insofar as you are "outraged" by this simple statement of fact, you are part of the problem--not the solution. Real solutions to the real problems of murder and differential policing in the U.S. require people who are brave enough to look the problem right in the eye. Ignoring the obvious truth proves to me that you don't really care about actually helping people, and are really in it to impress your friends with how woke you are. There's a lot of work to be done, please be part of the solution. FBI UCR murder offender data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Census data: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-estimates-detailed.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2020/population-e...

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I'm sure I'll get downvoted but isn't it possible that BOTH the real crime rate is higher in more poverty stricken areas AND that cops are more likely to arrest blacks in general? Does it always have to be one or the other, rather than both?