Data is submitted voluntarily - I'm curious how thorough the submitted data is and which jurisdictions opt not to report.
I imagine it's not in the interest of public officials to submit data which weakens their authority, undermines or invalidates their positions - and that opposite holds true too.
The data seems less than substantial because it's not thorough nor potentially accurate, even when collected. Perhaps there's substance in comparing data here to data elsewhere to highlight official intent.
With respect, I do not see why FBI crime statistics are considered racist. It is because it is a part of the US government?
There are many things people are mad at the US. Ukraine conflict, Israel conflict, etc. I wonder if people are flagging because it is US government adjacent.
>With respect, I do not see why FBI crime statistics are considered racist. It is because it is a part of the US government?
Because this data requires serious, responsible and honest engagement, and it's tempting to use it to confirm biases.
Allow me to make a parallelism stepping aside from controversial topics. Imagine we had graphs of discovered vulnerabilities in closed source and open source software. It wouldn't surprise me if the amount of vulnerabilities discovered in open source software was way higher than those of closed source software. At first glance this may paint a terrible picture of open source, yet, if you actually engage with the subject, you would find out that the reason as to why this happens is that those vulnerabilities are found out, while they stay hidden in closed source. Yet anyone not willing to dig in that deep could point out and claim "See? Open software is terrible!"
In the same way, you can look at crime statistics by race and claim that black people in the US are terrible. This requires ignoring socioeconomic status and a whole lot of other factors, but it's really easy to ignore those and it's really easy to just point at a graph.
The data is not the problem. The way people engage with the data might very well be, this is a complex and delicate matter and it is my hope it can be dealt with in the way it deserves.
...Not that it has to be dealt with here, really, the website is pretty damn nice.
Most people don't quote data that is easily misinterpreted though. Like sure if you did shoplifting, speeding, or something else, it may require that. But if you're quoting murders, or violent crime, that stuff is often reported, especially in nicer areas, and may even be less reported in poorer areas.
Because they demonstrate that race Y is overwhelmingly more likely to commit violent crimes against race X, while the media/government narrative is currently that race X is the biggest threat to the country.
Please stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. You've done it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I hope no one is arguing with "a person's skin color influences how much criminal energy they get born with".
With your cited explanations, it seems to be easy to generalise and say "a black person that I meet will be more criminal than the next white person that I meet", just because of the reasons you listed, except for law enforcement & the bail thing. Which also seems wrong to me.
The best way to interpret the data is to be conscious of the fact that individuals you interact with or cast judgement upon might not be dealing with nearly the same world that you deal with. That they may be more predisposed to certain negative outcomes. It is too easy to take this for granted.
I'm not black but I can list several factors that contribute to my own such predispositions, such as having drug addicted parents who were not present in my life, living with extremely abusive, cultist guardians, being homeless at 16, etc. The fact of life is that we must recognize these probabilities if we have any hope of improving our own conditions, or the conditions of others.
How disingenuous! The people trying to do something about socioeconomic factors are blocked from doing anything of significance by the same people apoplectic over aid to Ukraine.
More correctly: "sorry, we have to give billions of dollars in handouts to the wealthy instead."
Twenty plus years of losing foreign wars that were not only unnecessary but they didn't even have a clear objective (that both parties whole heartedly supported). Let me know when you get around to the socioeconomic factors, I've been waiting my entire life.
Friend, America is a warring state. We explicitly, intentionally ignore domestic issues while writing legislation that benefits the wealthy class, and then use foreign crises to distract the population from doing something about it.
What is your point? Ukraine is a line item in the US budget. We spent, what, 20 times that giving handouts to billionaires in 2020?
Let me know when we are allowed to spend money on socioeconomic factors. Literally the only thing holding us back from it are the disingenuous arguments people choose to believe. The same people lecturing about students paying back loans sure did turn a blind eye to PPP forgiveness. Why is that?
The people committing violent crimes don't have student loans. Paying them off would be a massive upward wealth transfer to the best off, highly educated professionals living in high cost of living areas.
Homie, the middle class is rapidly eroding and soon it will only be the hyper-rich and the impoverished, if we cannot make drastic changes to our socioeconomic policy. "Best off" is hardly a descriptor for the average college graduate that I know; Most everyone is struggling.
Have you ever stopped to consider how unlikely it would be that tens of thousands of years of divergent evolution, resulting in all manner of visible, tangible and quantifiable differences between the races, could somehow magically have absolutely no effect on anything beyond the superficial? That is an extraordinary claim.
Especially when we have so much data that confirms, rather than dispels, this inevitability.
It's not a tautology, it's a feedback loop. If a group has or is perceived to have a higher rate of criminality, they will be treated in ways which reinforce criminal tendencies and promote more criminal behavior. A "self-fulfilling prophecy", if you will.
That’s not a tautology: understanding the root cause of a problem is necessary to implement a beneficial response.
In this particular case, we need to intervene at the cultural, familial, etc levels rather than harassing police for responding to crime as it happens — or blaming them for treating groups disproportionately when those groups act disproportionately.
“De-policing” stems from ignorance (or intentional denial) of that root cause, and thus amounts to blaming the police/courts/etc for doing their job — stopping crime.
I never made any comments about de-policing, that is a projection on your part. I have personally witnessed extreme police racism growing up in a small town.
I have personally been illegally harassed by police and an entire corrupt court system, illegally charged with a crime I did not commit, and was refused a chance to appeal because my lawyer was worried the judge would be mad at her for not playing along. I was given the maximum possible jail sentence of 6 months on my first criminal offense for a crime I didn't commit. And this happens every day, disproportionately to particular demographics. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I didn’t say you did — I gave an example of how what I said is not a tautology by showing how that concept relates to policy decisions, eg de-policing versus other interventions.
Accusing me of not knowing what I’m talking about, based on your personal trauma and your stereotypes about me, isn’t a good faith reply.
If you keep posting flamewar comments and personal attacks, we will ban you. You've been doing it a lot lately, and we've already warned you more than once.
These comments in particular were well over the line at which we ban an account:
You forgot something. Also you look foolish telling people to educate themselves on Wikipedia
(
- Discrimination by law enforcement
OR
- Childhood exposure to violence
OR
- Inability to post bail
OR
- Socioeconomic factors
OR
- Housing segregation
OR
- Sociocultural factors
I look foolish for telling people to begin their research on a common, well-established public encyclopedia?
Do you seriously not understand that each of these issues lead to bad personal choices? Your comment does not seem to be made in good faith, and this is the sort of mentality that we as a society need to eradicate.
Let's assume good intent here. Whether you realize it or not, you've basically derived the 1350 racist symbol [1].
But I want you to think about something in case this wasn't an intentionally racist statement: if the black population is overrepresented in crime statistics ask yourself why. The answer will fall into one of two buckets:
1. Intrinsic factors. This includes "culture", which is just a very thin veneer on racism. Believing any of these is just racism whether you realize it or not; or
2. Extrinsic factors: this is something in the environment, something external to the people involved. A big one here is socioeconomic status (ie poverty). The link between poverty and crime and has been known for thousands of years. Aristotle wrote "Poverty is the parent of crime".
I imagine it's not in the interest of public officials to submit data which weakens their authority, undermines or invalidates their positions - and that opposite holds true too.
The data seems less than substantial because it's not thorough nor potentially accurate, even when collected. Perhaps there's substance in comparing data here to data elsewhere to highlight official intent.
It's neat they have a public-facing API.