A Study That Bolsters the Lead-Crime Hypothesis
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...
I've hypothesized for a while now that the Black Lives Matter movement might be distracting us from what might be the true cause of the problems they seek to address. Blaming the problem on "racist" cops by default instead of performing a root cause analysis is leading us to overlook the likelihood that poorer communities, that are often predominantly black, are more likely to be exposed to lead.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/13/black-children-at-r...
This doesn't mean the cops aren't racist and that lead isn't a problem.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
So it probably tilts things towards people committing more brazen crimes which lead to higher arrest rates, but also more crime and violence in general.
The "all-else-being-equal" studies tend to focus on the primary source of lead: Leaded fuel. As many housing projects were built next to highways, people living there were exposed to significantly higher levels of atmospheric lead than in other more remote parts. When lead was banned from fuel, crime rates dropped, and you can see this play out in similar neighborhoods in different states where the phasing out happened at different times.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/7-toxic-assaults-communi...
http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/envjust/ch2.htm
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2012/unequal...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-poor-neigh...
The problem that I think grandparent is highlighting is: BLM activism only seems receptive to hearing/addressing certain facets of the problem, facets that fit within a certain narrative. Aspects of the problem and possible solutions that lie outside this narrative are ignored, discredited, or (worst of all) actively attacked as racist perpetuation of the oppression.
Lead poisoning and intervention doesn't get enough attention. When the black community suffers lead poisoning at 1.6x the rate of the general population and there is solid evidence showing a link between lead poisoning and violent crime and poor impulse control, it seems to me like lead needs more attention than it gets from those that purport to value black lives.
Men commit more violence than women. No one will argue against these statistics. Black men commit more violence than men of other races. Few if any acknowledge these statistics. I see no reason why there is anything inherent about being black that would lead to this (nature), so it's important to come up with hypotheses that could explain this through nurture. The two I can come up with are lead poisoning and the lack of male role models. The latter gets some attention. The former gets none. When you see studies like this one posted today, where the results are so strong, it makes you wonder why this doesn't get more attention if we really care about addressing all factors that contribute to black men experiencing police violence.
A racist interpretation would be say that black men are more violent because they are black. That is not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that their race has nothing to do with the higher incidence of violence crime committed. I'm saying the exposure to lead might be contributing. Black people, especially black men are being victims twice. First, they are more likely to be victims of lead poisoning. Second, they are more likely to be victims of racial profiling, which itself might be amplified by the increased likelihood of violence caused by lead poisoning.
The idea that BLM is just a distraction because your "root cause analysis" points to lead poisoning is laughably offensive. I don't think most BLM supporters would assert that "'racist' cops" are the "root cause" of America's mistreatment of black people, rather they're the most visible expression of a system that devalues black lives, because they kill dozens of black people with impunity every month. Lead pipes are just another, less visible, expression of the same system, just like the still segregated school systems, the gerrymandered voting districts, and the 400 years of history that led to the present.
Anecdotal, but every single supporter I've engaged with to date until this comment, n>100.
My point is that lead does not get nearly the attention it deserves.
The Google search results for "lead poisoning site:blacklivesmatter.com" returns exactly one result, which is a statement on Flint, Michigan, that makes no mention of the relationship between violent crime and lead poisoning.
Since BLM focuses on a wide array of social, political, and economic, and environmental issues (including interplay between issues in the various domains) involved in the social dismissal of the value of black lives, and not "racist cops by default" (indeed, the motivating event for BLM's formation wasn't even a law-enforcement killing), I think your complaint is misdirected and should instead be directed at whatever media channels you consume that give you this distorted view of BLM.
In these debates, I usually point to this table of FBI statistics, which shows a significantly higher level of crime committed by both men (all races) and black men in particular on a per capita basis as an explanation for the disproportionate number of men and in particular black men shot by cops.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Cops are more aggressive with black people but don't actually kill them at a greater rate relative to the number of violent crimes committed. Here is Roland G. Fryer's research showing this: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
I'm not discounting that black lives matter. I'm supportive of it. My point is that if we really care about fixing the problems that result in increased mortality in that demographic, we should instead be focusing on likely root causes such as lead poisoning. Lead should be getting so much more attention in the BLM debate, but it does not. Why?
A movement genuinely pushing for reasonable police reform and replacing lead pipes (for all people of all colors) would be much better received. But the problem is the movement is self-evidently not about actually solving problems. It's about pushing racial narratives. I suspect responses to your comment will further affirm this.
The movement has always, from day one, been about social issues (with equal accountability foremost among those issues.)
Assuring that killers of blacks, law enforcement or otherwise, are held to account until and unless there is clear evidence of justification is central, however, to that.
> A movement genuinely pushing for reasonable police reform and replacing lead pipes (for all people of all colors) would be much better received.
Movements along both those lines exist and have for longer than BLM, and have beeb generally ignored (conversely, attention driven by BLM has been successful at driving general police reforms.) Those others are not much better received, no matter how many times concern trolls trot out the line that if only BLM wasn't about Black Lives it would somehow magically be better at advancing it's interests and incidentally better at other things, to.
Typically in these cases the victim wasn't threatening the police officer's life in any way. Walter Scott was shot while running away. Freddie Gray was already safely in police custody. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes, not attacking anyone. Tamir Rice was a 12 year old playing with a toy gun.
https://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2017/02/18...
The guy in Portland who murdered two people and injured a third a week or two back was taken into custody peacefully despite being armed with a large knife or a machete, I forget which right now. Dylann Roof murdered 8 or 9 people in a church last year but he was apprehended without incident when the police showed up. Conversely, some months ago in Florida a black caregiver who was trying to get an autistic mental patient out of a busy street and back to the assisted living facility lay down on the ground with his hands in the air when he saw a police car appear, preparing to explain the situation to the officer. The cop got out of his car shot him in the leg anyway. When he asked the officer why he had shot him, the officer replied 'I don't know.'
These are anecdotal examples rather than statistical proof, but you're divorced from reality if you don't think police treat suspects very very differently based on skin color. I'm afraid that I think it is you who are delusional.
Hanlon's razor states that you shouldn't ascribed to malice what can better be explained by ignorance/incompetence/etc.
When even those officers belonging to the demographic experiencing the bias are guilty of being biased that suggests that Hanlon's razor is applicable and that the root cause of the police bias might be something else. Looking at the statistics for violent crime by race, shows why this bias and predisposition to being more aggressive with a certain might be explainable psychologically. It's human nature to form preconceptions based on experience.
Now that said, Hanlon's razor should also be applied in favor of the demographic responsible for violent crimes at rates several times higher than they exist in society. I have no reason to believe that anything about being black leads black men to be responsible for more crime then men of a different race, yet the statistics show this is the case. With this in mind, can we find some potential causes that might result in this. The two hypotheses that I think are reasonable to explore are lead poisoning and the lack of male role models due to incarceration. These are two causes that can impact one another. Higher lead levels could lead to greater violence that leads to greater arrests of black males which reduces male role models, and so forth.
When there is such a stark effect of lead poisoning on violence committed later in life, it's important that we give this serious consideration as one of the factors that might be really hurting the black community and its reasonable to infer the potential for causality of lead poisoning leading to violence that leads to bias against the lead poisoned group as being more violent.
It's fucking ridiculous that we can't have a reasonable academic discussion of this hypothesis without it and those considering it being branded as racist. It is anything but. No one here has suggested that a persons race is the cause of being more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. The hypothesis being proposed is that their race merely correlates and that lead poisoning may be a significant cause and that lead poisoning could have impacted anyone from any race, but it impacts black people more for unfortunate historical reasons. No one is trying to blame black people or men. We're merely trying to have an honest discussion of unfortunate environmental factor (lead poisoning) that maybe should be getting a lot more attention than it does in the discussion of why the racial bias against black people, especially black men exist. I wish that the problem of racial bias be solved as much as anyone else. The difference is that I'm not going to shut out any possible explanation just because its inconvenient to the politicized narrative being furthered by a group that violates Hanlon's Razor.
Please don't be offended by this, but perhaps your communication skills are at fault. While it may be tiring for you, people who are dealing with a lot of really difficult problems often need to vent some frustration and anger, both as stress relief and to qualify you (or not) as a sincere ally who won't fade when progress is difficult.
If you're in too much of a hurry to sell your solution, notwithstanding your good intentions, your interlocutors are likely to be a bit skeptical because they've heard many such presentations before only to be disappointed by the lack of follow-through.
Being right is not always as important as being receptive when you're trying to establish new structural relationships under difficult conditions, whatever those happen to be. I hope this can make your future communications more rewarding, even though it may require a greater initial investment of time and patience.
Whose responsibility is it? If someone is debating an issue I would hope they are familiar with and understand the underlying statistics relevant to their claims. If they claim conclusion X based on statistics Y but omit (intentionally or out of ignorance) that conclusion P is also plausible based on statistics Q, it is the responsibility of anyone aware of statistics Q to inform those claiming conclusion X that X isn't the only plausible conclusion one can arrive at because statistics Q exists that suggests conclusion P.
Are you seriously suggesting that someone aware of a different dataset that supports a different conclusion only bring attention to that dataset if those claiming the original conclusion are interested? That's preposterous.
https://byrslf.co/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-yo...
Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, voicing skepticism of the strength of Fryer's conclusion:
http://rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2016/07/police-use-of-force-n...
Dan Hirschman, Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University, strongly criticizing the methodology and data set Fryer used:
https://scatter.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/yes-there-is-racial...
A peer-reviewed article in a reputable journal using a different methodology whose results contradict Fryer's:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227943/
Abstract:
Objectives. To update previous examinations of racial/ethnic disparities in the use of lethal force by US police.
Methods. I examined online national vital statistics data for deaths assigned an underlying cause of “legal intervention” (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, external-cause-of-injury codes Y35.0–Y35.7, excluding Y35.5 [legal execution]) for the 5-year period 2010 to 2014.
Results. Death certificates identified 2285 legal intervention deaths (1.5 per million population per year) from 2010 to 2014. Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals.
Conclusions. Substantial racial/ethnic disparities in legal intervention deaths remain an ongoing problem in the United States.
---
It's not hard to find more of the literature that is more credible and contradicts this paper.
To be honest, I don't think you're carrying this discussion in good faith. Who knows? Maybe you've even duped yourself. Maybe don't take the word of an economist doing sketchy and loose research outside of his field of expertise. Being able to wield statistics isn't a scientific superpower. Sociological research isn't a bayesian cookbook recipe.
> Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals.
If this is the argument you're making, than I'm not disputing this fact at all. I'm not arguing that the mortality rate for black individuals is equal to white individuals. It's not.
I'm arguing that the mortality rate relative to the frequency of violent crime is more proportional. Look at these statistics for violent crimes:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
From what I've read they seem focused on targeting institutional racism - and police reform is just one component of that. Their approach is far broader and I am pretty sure they've made linkages with the "environmental justice" movement which is very much focused on problems like the effects of lead contamination.
Speaking in general does not help anybody. I, for one, would not know where to look if you simply state "institutional racism", without giving me an example of what it actually means.
It's rude to demand that people drop what they're discussing in order to give you foundational knowledge you can so easily pick you for yourself.
It's also kind of a bummer that BLM started with the "white cops killing black kids" narrative, then when the data showed that black cops are much more likely to shoot a black kid than are white cops, they transitioned to "cops are disproportionately killing black kids", then that was disproven and their issue became the more nebulous "systemic inequalities in policing", but not before a lot of criminal veneration (Michael Brown) and hand waving about how rioting may or may not be justified.
The moral of the story is they may have had a valid point, but they've totally discredited themselves and probably made policing less effective for the most vulnerable communities.
Was that disproven? The studies that I've read have shown disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among African American men, especially in the unarmed case when adjusted for population. [1]
The unarmed case is the one I pay attention to the most as I think that it (mostly?) filters out cases where shootings were justified.
I'd like to keep an open mind so I welcome any reading that has disproven the disproportionate argument.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
Have you adjusted for crime rates?
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
These statistics don't involve a trial or conviction. It's based entirely on the police report when the crime was reported and only includes the race of the offender when that information is known.
"Perusal of Table 4 reveals that suspects were an average age of 36, with whites somewhat older than blacks. Thirty-nine percent of the suspects were involved in a violent crime, 17% in a property crime, and 5% in a drug crime. Hispanics were less likely to be involved in a violent crime, while blacks were more likely to be involved in a property crime than whites or Hispanics. Blacks are least likely to be armed."
One anecdote about the weed thing, since that comes up so often--I live in Chicago and apart from festivals, I never see white people strolling around downtown smoking weed, but I do see this probably once a month, and the user is consistently black. The white people I know who use marijuana do so at home and out of public view. This is just an anecdote, but cultural differences in usage could better explain the arrest discrepancy than police racism. At least I would like to discontinue the trend of assuming that every gap is necessarily and automatically attributable to discrimination.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256079484_No_eviden...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/08/the-b...
Studies have also shown that disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among men when adjusted for population (50% of the population are men but 96% of those shot by police are men).
Violent crime rates are the more useful base rate than the general population. This is the best study I've seen to date that attempts to take into account rates of violent crime: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
An armed person can be shot and it can still be unjustified. The presence of a gun does not mean there was any danger or even the appearance of danger.
An unarmed person can give the appearance of having a weapon or may pose a clear threat regardless and such a killing could be justified.
I think mostly paying attention to the unarmed case allows the armed case to mask any potential problems, while also includes the implicit assumption that unarmed cases are mostly unjustified will exaggerate the appearance of problems.
Other studies have found no bias in police shootings, including this one by black Harvard economist who set out with the assumption that police disproportionately killed Blacks: https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...
There have been a few others as well. I should also clarify that my use of "disproven" is too strong. I should have said "the bulk of the evidence supports a contradictory conclusion" or some such.
This is because black cops work in cities and areas with higher proportions of black people.
For a variety of reasons, the black community feels this pain disproportionately.
I wouldn't write off BLM as having such a simple message; you clearly did not grasp it. "Black lives matter" means just that; not "pigs are racist".
You might like to consider how public spending for lead abatement correlates with demographics. Flint, MI is an obvious starting point for your inquiry.
I'm very supportive of BLM, which is not the same thing as an endorsement of every single thing everyone in a BLM shirt or at a BLM event has ever said. Just like any networked attempt to disrupt the status quo, there will be a certain number of missteps, mistakes, pivots, and so on. The fact that BLM is a social rather than technological undertaking doesn't make it so different from any other kind of startup.
That conviction rates in some disadvantaged communities are so much higher has also been linked to disproportional levels of policing in those communities.
A potentially contributing factor does not invalidate legitimate civil rights concerns in another area.
While lead may be implicated in the situation(s) that caused BLM to arise, it's not anything anybody can do anything about more than activism in terms of Flint, et al. That said, do you know who Nayyirah Shariff is?
Out of curiosity, what exactly is your goal in pursuing your line of logic, of needing "BLM" to "acknowledge" lead's role? What outcome would you like to see?
edit: seems some of them are getting lead poisoning from their shooting range http://projects.seattletimes.com/2014/loaded-with-lead/
There's probably no way of ever teasing out all the different factors, but when you read accounts of what daily life was like in, say 18th century London, and a.) violence was quite common-place, and b.) virtually everyone kept themselves inebriated enough to fail a breathalyzer at all times. Probably b.) contributed a good deal to a.), but if everybody is also suffering from low-level chronic lead poisoning...
It makes me think what people 50-100 years will think about our diets. They put sugar in everything!
My take having read about this theory for about ten years now it looks like the preponderance of the evidence says that lead exposure is at least as significant as the above. Meaning it's not just this study, it's all the other ones as well. With the lead thoery you have the following.
1. A known mechanism. Lead cause brain damage with poor impulse control. 2. Dose response correlation between lead exposure and violent crime.
Thing that freaks me out is what did exposure to lead and resulting poor impulse control do to politics in the US.
Somehow society is stuck between the information age and the stupid age.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lead-in-aviation-...
Yes, laziness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, malice, etc, are all possibly valid answers to "Why?". But accepting such answers without scrutiny when another answer may be closer to the truth is a bad habit, IMO. If you were to come into a legacy codebase at work and assume that the previous authors incompetent idiots, you'd probably be less productive than if you assumed that the previous authors had problems to solve and chose the best option available to them given the constraints at the time. Keeping in mind past and current goals, and past and current constraints is probably going to get you further than, "This is bad! Change it!"
"Current aircraft engines feature valve gear components which are designed for compatibility with the leaded ASTM D910 fuels. In such fuels, the lead acts as a lubricant, coating the contact areas between the valve, guide, and seat. The use of unleaded auto fuels with engines designed for leaded fuels can result in excessive exhaust valve seat wear due to the lack of lead. The result can be remarkable, with cylinder performance deteriorating to unacceptable levels in under 10 hours."
https://web.archive.org/web/20120413123438/http://www.tcmlin...
Also lead is an anti-knock agent so it is used to get to the very high octane ratings in Avgas.
And it seems the problem may be solved soon!
"By May 2012, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA Unleaded Avgas Transition rulemaking committee) had put together a plan in conjunction with industry to replace leaded avgas with an unleaded alternative within 11 years. Given the progress already made on 100SF and G100UL, the replacement time might be shorter than that 2023 estimate."
So still not great, but a bit of googling shows that leaded avgas is less than 2% of total civilian aviation fuel in the U.S.: https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecas...
Plus, obvious results don't make the news https://www.xkcd.com/882/
"Two primary channels emerge through which intervention affects antisocial behavior and cognitive outcomes. First, intervention may dramatically reduce the amount of continued childhood exposure to the dangerous neurotoxin by directly reducing exposure risks within the home environment. Second, long-term benefits may occur through improvements in early-life health unrelated to any changes in lead exposure. [11] ...
[11] The elevated BLL intervention package includes treatments previously demonstrated to impact later-life outcomes such as: visits from health workers; increased medical care; nutritional assessments and dietary modifications; and referral to the Special Supplemental, Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Prior research documents long-term benefits from programs similar to each of these elements ..."
Why didn't they control for the other intervention treatments? One where they reduce BLL + other treatments, and one where they didn't reduce BLL but still gave the other treatments?
The data is from a program that aimed to mitigate problems from high lead. The program's primary aim wasn't to allow papers to be published about their research goal many years later. You make the best use that you can of the data that you've got. And don't insist on the perfect data that you don't have.
But even if this had been designed as a pure research program, the design that you suggest would never be approved on ethical grounds. We accumulated enough data many years ago on the negative impact of lead that we cannot in good conscience withhold treatment for the sake of collecting better data. Review the history of the Tuskegee Study for an example of why such ethical guidelines were put in place.
This is a good question, but keep in mind it's not a randomized control trial, they are using some clever techniques to look backwards on data from an existing program.
They could expand the study and compare to other children who had health workers in the home for unrelated reasons. But those unrelated reasons could themselves affect 'antisocial behavior and cognitive outcomes'
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lead-california-exclus...
And yes, crime rates are significantly lower adjusting for population, though that's not always conveyed accurately by those in authority and the news media.
Historically, the great great great painter Caravaggio was quite violent/irritable and died sadly so so young (30 something) and many theories are that he was quite irritable/violent because of lead poisoning (he was prolific, working all the time with lead points).
You can still get this from a few specialty suppliers and it's reasonably safe to use as long as you wear gloves paint slowly enough that you don't get it all over your skin. Ingested lead is much more dangerous than skin contact, and of course the process of grinding the treated strips of lead into powder was a respiratory and gastric disaster - although people were not completely clueless and apprentices in art studios would often cover their lower face with a wet cloth.
All cases with two BLL tests exceeding the alert threshold (10 ug/dL) trigger eligibility for an intervention which includes the following actions: education for caregivers (which includes nutritional advice and information about reducing exposure in the home); a voluntary home environment investigation; and a referral to lead remediation services. A more intensive intervention can be triggered by tests over 15 ug/dL or 20 ug/dL. In addition to educating caregivers and providing a referral to remediation services, the intensive intervention typically includes: a mandatory home environment investigation; nutritional assessment; medical evaluation; developmental assessment; and a referral to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
I haven't read the source paper yet, but the way this is phrased makes me skeptical of the strength of these findings. Having worked briefly on a lead remediation project for a city government who has been in the news recently for lead, I can tell you that this is a really tough question and the confounding factors are huge. The political consequences mean that folks have incentive to seriously overstate (or understate) the importance and validity of a study like this.
Crime rates seem to drop with 20 year lag after TEL phaseout in gasoline starts. Different countries banned TEL at different times and it's very hard to deny connection.
"The elevated BLL intervention package includes treatments previously demonstrated to impact later-life outcomes such as: visits from health workers; increased medical care; nutritional assessments and dietary modifications; and referral to the Special Supplemental, Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Prior research documents long-term benefits from programs similar to each of these elements ..."
Neurological and Behavioral Consequences of Childhood Lead Exposure https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689677/
>The underlying common pathway for all of these associations might be lead's adverse effects on executive functioning [19–21], resulting in poor impulse control.
Low impulse control in general seems to be one of the is the strongest predictors of criminal behaviour, whatever the cause.
sources:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0093854806292299
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2000....
Look at people with Down-Syndrome, they are extremely thoughtful and nice. Least likely to commit a violent act or partake in criminal activity.
I'm reminded of the story about how an IQ researcher spotted the telltale signs of fetal alchohol syndrome before it was named, but had put it down to the bad genes of the native tribes he was studying. It seems when you'd decided that something in inherited, it's very easy to overlook environmental causes, even when they have very noticeable impacts.
Lead lowers IQ (and has other negative impacts). Fetal alchohol syndrome lowers IQ (and has other negative impacts). Adding Iodine to salt apparently raised average IQ by 15 points in areas where the natural diet was low in it.
Many things are apparently very inheritable, like height, yet in certain generations almost everyone is taller than their parents due to environmental factors. This isn't exactly rocket science.
My point was that in history, the people accused of being genetically inferior (the jews, the irish, the italians, native americans, africans, chinese etc.) have generally been outgroups that have been unfairly targeted by pseudo-science, not that IQ does not have a hereditary component.