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Those statistics are probably "correct," but missing lots of context. First of all, most police stops and arrests aren't for murder, but for various petty crim

by cozzyd 6y ago

Those statistics are probably "correct," but missing lots of context. First of all, most police stops and arrests aren't for murder, but for various petty crimes (particularly drugs and traffic violations) that are certainly unevenly enforced, even controlling for other factors (see e.g. see e.g. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2391&context=faculty_scholarship https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...), so citing murder statistics here to seems a little irrelevant, as they are such a small fraction of police stops. It is also probably not an effective means of catching murderers (instead turning communities against the police, perhaps contributing to the pathetic murder clearance rates achieved by police). As you probably know, many have argued that there is both overpolicing of petty crimes and underpolicing of violent crimes in minority communities ( see, e.g. https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8411733/black-community-policing-crime https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8411733/black-community-polici...). But, sticking to murder rates, these statistics also ignore a lot of dynamics. At least in urban areas (I don't have much familiarity with rural areas), most murders aren't individuals acting independently to commit murder. Instead, a large fraction of murders are gang-related (either directly, or collaterally), suggesting that to large extent, differential gang prevalence might be a dominant factor in the difference in murder rates. Why are gangs prevalent today in some communities and not others? 100 years ago, gangs in places like Chicago were predominantly ethnic white (think Al Capone), though those gangs have largely declined and no longer play a larger role as far as I can tell. Nowadays, 90% of gang members appear to be Black or Hispanic (https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demographics https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/demograph...). Gangs of course are not all the same (some are probably more violent than others), but maybe the right question to be asking is why are gangs so prevalent among urban minorities. I don't have any special knowledge here, but I imagine that in many cases, differential policing may certainly be a direct or indirect contributor to high gang prevalence. . There of course other many other reasons (community disinvestment, inertia, the "war on drugs."), but differential policing has the potential to cause a positive feedback loop here (unfair treatment -> higher gang membership -> higher violent rates -> unfair treatment) that probably needs to be broken. Of course, historically, unfair treatment of Blacks well predates the formation of Black street gangs (according to https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/43455_1.pdf https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/434..., Black street gangs didn't become prevalent in large urban areas until the 50's/60's). It might be "natural" for police to treat communities with higher murder rates differently, but that does not mean that it's the smart or right thing to do.

NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
I appreciate your thoughtful comment! We should be careful with what we're talking about here: stops vs. arrests vs. crimes committed vs. offenders. They're all different things. The argument I'm making is basically this: the murder statistics are the most reliable, so we'll look at those. We should expect a very strong correlation between murder rates and other violent crime, though. And this expectation of much higher rates of violent crime in general should lead us to expect much higher arrest rates among Black Americans relative to other populations all else being equal. Now, all else obviously isn't equal. But the magnitude of the difference in murder rates is absolutely enormous (and it'll about double when we're just thinking about men), so we should expect that the majority of the difference in arrest rates is driven by the same thing...whatever is causing Black Americans to murder at 7x the rate of everybody else. As I commented elsewhere, it isn't actually true that gang-related killings are most killings.[0] If you want to try to paint a picture of the modal murder in the U.S., it's "Young brown man argues with other young brown man about something silly, things escalate, someone pulls out a cheap pistol and shoots the other guy" Gang murders, while profitable fodder for mass media, are a clear minority. 0: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-13.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
- cozzyd 6y ago
  Perhaps this doesn't generalize outside my city (Chicago), and perhaps data from the CPD is not to be trusted, but here the police claim that ~50% of murders are "gang-related" and 80% are "gang-associated" (i.e. either the suspect or victim is believed to be involved with gangs). The number of suspected gang members is not so high that you would expect 80% of murders to be "gang-associated" by chance (though it's not clear which way the causality goes, it seems highly plausible that people in gangs are more generally violent, but perhaps generally violent people also always join gains). There are also second order effects--more violence around you probably makes you feel more like violence is an acceptable solution?. Note that applying 50% to the number of 2019 Chicago murders already saturates the nationwide "Gangland killings" in the FBI UCR, suggesting that perhaps many of the "unknown" murders would fall into that category. It would also not surprise me if many of the "other arguments" killings are also gang-related or at least gang-associated. Of course, it doesn't help that ~half of murders go unsolved here (and in many other cities) and gang-related violence is especially unlikely to find cooperative witnesses. That said, this is only place with a police department not known for its honesty. Other places might be different. Southern states all have above average white homicide rates, but only Louisiana seems to have an above-average Black homicide rate, at least according to https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/23/health/gun-deaths-in-men-by-state-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/23/health/gun-deaths-in-men-by-s... (caveat 1: this is victims, I could not quickly find corresponding data for offenders. caveat 2: most Blacks live in the South, it's not surprising those states might drive the average.).

by cozzyd 6y ago

NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago

I appreciate your thoughtful comment! We should be careful with what we're talking about here: stops vs. arrests vs. crimes committed vs. offenders. They're all different things. The argument I'm making is basically this: the murder statistics are the most reliable, so we'll look at those. We should expect a very strong correlation between murder rates and other violent crime, though. And this expectation of much higher rates of violent crime in general should lead us to expect much higher arrest rates among Black Americans relative to other populations all else being equal. Now, all else obviously isn't equal. But the magnitude of the difference in murder rates is absolutely enormous (and it'll about double when we're just thinking about men), so we should expect that the majority of the difference in arrest rates is driven by the same thing...whatever is causing Black Americans to murder at 7x the rate of everybody else. As I commented elsewhere, it isn't actually true that gang-related killings are most killings.[0] If you want to try to paint a picture of the modal murder in the U.S., it's "Young brown man argues with other young brown man about something silly, things escalate, someone pulls out a cheap pistol and shoots the other guy" Gang murders, while profitable fodder for mass media, are a clear minority. 0: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-13.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

cozzyd 6y ago
Perhaps this doesn't generalize outside my city (Chicago), and perhaps data from the CPD is not to be trusted, but here the police claim that ~50% of murders are "gang-related" and 80% are "gang-associated" (i.e. either the suspect or victim is believed to be involved with gangs). The number of suspected gang members is not so high that you would expect 80% of murders to be "gang-associated" by chance (though it's not clear which way the causality goes, it seems highly plausible that people in gangs are more generally violent, but perhaps generally violent people also always join gains). There are also second order effects--more violence around you probably makes you feel more like violence is an acceptable solution?. Note that applying 50% to the number of 2019 Chicago murders already saturates the nationwide "Gangland killings" in the FBI UCR, suggesting that perhaps many of the "unknown" murders would fall into that category. It would also not surprise me if many of the "other arguments" killings are also gang-related or at least gang-associated. Of course, it doesn't help that ~half of murders go unsolved here (and in many other cities) and gang-related violence is especially unlikely to find cooperative witnesses. That said, this is only place with a police department not known for its honesty. Other places might be different. Southern states all have above average white homicide rates, but only Louisiana seems to have an above-average Black homicide rate, at least according to https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/23/health/gun-deaths-in-men-by-state-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/23/health/gun-deaths-in-men-by-s... (caveat 1: this is victims, I could not quickly find corresponding data for offenders. caveat 2: most Blacks live in the South, it's not surprising those states might drive the average.).