Comment by cb18 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cb18 | Hacker News Reader

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Despite popular belief, simple possession laws ARE upheld in Canada, but the people charged are disproportionately minorities and poor/homeless people.

It's quite likely that those are compound charges, meaning possession is not the only charge, i.e. they are arrested for something else, then found to be in possession.

So they are charged disproportionately because they commit crimes disproportionately,[0] and some of them happen to have a bag in their pocket while doing so.

[0]Aboriginal and black Canadians are grossly overrepresented in Canada’s correctional institutions

http://www.academia.edu/5110524/Race_Crime_and_Criminal_Just...

This paper is itself biased against Ockham's Razor, they hit on some truth here, We cannot discount, however, the probability that increased rates of offending among certain racialized groups contributes to their overrepresentation in correctional statistics. but then spend the whole paper trying to hand wave it away.

Not sure about Canada, but the whole story usually is that people with lower social class/backgrounds commit crimes more often, and that aboriginals/black people/foreigners/... etc are overrepresented in that group. Once you control for social status, there is no difference between white or non-white populations.

Can I get a link to something that confirms this? I'd like to be able to use this point in conversation.

In the US there are groups of poor whites and poor blacks, the crime rates are not the same, they exhibit stark differences.

What if you account for rural/urban populations? Population density always has an effect on crime rate

I'm sure somebody's tried it. But the differences are so large that no amount of statistical trickery is going to be able to make them go away.

http://www.infowars.com/black-crime-facts-that-the-white-lib...

One must also consider that it isn't the density per se, but the populations. For example, you could compare two equally dense areas but made up of different population groups. You would find a difference.

isn't infowars a crackpot site?

It's not a site I frequent, I think it may have a bit of that brand image, but not like ufo bigfoot or whatever crackpot levels.

That article is just a simple and clear telling of sourced facts that came up when I was searching for some facts.

What crackpot level is wearing an alien lizard mask while ranting about Obamacare?

level 9

Yes.

Everyone's entitled to their own crackpots, but not their own facts.

What is often missed in these statistics is that 90% of the homicides committed by black citizens are committed against black citizens, so it's not surprising that blacks are overrepresented in homicide statistics since they are overrepresented in poor income neighborhoods where all the problems inherent to poverty exacerbate the cycle of violence.

So poor blacks kill each other in huge numbers, and poor whites don't. What's your point exactly?

Also, maybe you missed the black on white numbers which are off the charts compared to the inverse.

> So poor blacks kill each other in huge numbers, and poor whites don't. What's your point exactly?

90% of black murder victims are killed by black perpetrators, 84% of white murder victims are killed by white perpetrators, so I'm not sure why you suggested that poor white people don't kill each other. My point is that the higher black on black homicide rate is what we'd expect to see for a population that is disproportionately concentrated into densely populated low income regions, which will push up their representation in overall homicide stats.

> Also, maybe you missed the black on white numbers which are off the charts compared to the inverse

What exactly does off the charts mean?

13.6% of white murders are committed by black people, 7.6% of black murders are committed by white people, so yes, blacks murder whites at a higher rate, that is clear, but what is your point?

Controlling for poverty does not remove the effect where blacks commit more crime than whites.

> As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis

http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...

More white people than black live in poverty, yet blacks commit crime at far higher rates. For statistics see FBI and DOJ crime data:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/...

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

This topic could use more good science and research.

> More white people than black live in poverty, yet blacks commit crime at far higher rates. For statistics see FBI and DOJ crime data:

1 in 10 whites live in poverty compared to 1 in 4 blacks so it's not true that more whites live in poverty (unless you're talking about absolute numbers, which doesn't tell us anything meaningful in a comparison to the black crime rate).

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...

> Discrimination appears to be indirect, stemming from the amplification of initial disadvantages over time, along with the social construction of "moral panics" and associated political responses. The "drug war" of the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated the disproportionate representation of blacks in state and federal prisons

> Blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, suffer much higher rates of robbery and homicide victimization than do whites. Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black males and females. These differences result in part from social forces that ecologically concentrate race with poverty and other social dislocations.

I agree that the topic could use more good science and research.

The problem here is knowing what really is the cause and what is the effect.

It is well known that, in the United States, drug usage between all races tends to trend roughly the same. However, the arrest rate for blacks is much, much higher. See these charts for marijuana.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...

One possible explanation, of course, is indeed that blacks are more likely to be arrested while committing another serious crime. Hence the gap.

An alternate explanation reverses the argument: blacks may be more prone to commit serious crimes because they are more likely to be arrested for trivial crimes like marijuana usage. Prison does have social consequences after all (eg, people are less willing to hire someone with an arrest record; prison can establish contacts with underground economies that are more likely to utilize violence to settle disputes; prison can tear apart families; etc. -- http://www.economist.com/node/708550 ) and since America is not keen on reintegrating criminals into society (a very high rate of recidivism compared to most countries -- http://www.salve.edu/sites/default/files/filesfield/document... and http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-... ), it is very possible that early arrests for modest crimes lead to later arrests for worse crimes later.

A little "politically incorrect" related video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm_Vv3Q24uQ

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