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Please don't assume my reaction, I'm not outraged by anyone posting an internet comment. I would be interested to see how the statistics look if you control fo

Please don't assume my reaction, I'm not outraged by anyone posting an internet comment. I would be interested to see how the statistics look if you control for income or zip code. My assumption would be that in a given "bad neighborhood", there is no racial discrepancy in murderers, even if there is overall for the country. So I would not expect an officer walking a beat to be able to use race for any proactive purpose. Obviously this is a big assumption that would take substantial work and data to prove, but that is what I meant by my "given". It's the same as saying that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit white collar crime - statistics show White people do it more often just because they have more opportunity.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I apologize, I pasted something I'd written before and didn't edit enough. There was no reason to assume you were outraged and it was clearly my mistake. I agree that the data you outline would be useful to look at. I'm sure someone has done some analysis to arrive at an approximation. My guess is that it doesn't change much, though there will be neighborhoods where basically everyone you encounter is of the same race so race isn't informative (if the "cop walking the beat" example is the animating one). If I'm understanding you correctly, the basic thought is that economic circumstances might explain the difference in murder rates. They do not (i.e., there is a lot of evidence to suggest it is not causal), though obviously there is correlation. There are many chronically poor (or poorer-than-average, since no one in the U.S. is actually poor) populations that do not show significantly elevated rates of violent crimes.