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> You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it, but I've seen it throughout my career and I know it's true ... It's just true. ... Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately, we know that across the criminal justice system. ...

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This is a good case of how two important ideas are being conflated to the detriment of the larger lesson to be learned, I think. As far as I can tell, Prosecutor Worthy is making two arguments: (1) Black (assume PoC approx. equals black in this context) rape victims are treated differently than white ones. She bases this on the fact that 86% of unsolved victim cases are from black people (compared to ~40% of the population being black, I don't have the exact figure, took this from danielvf's comment above). (2) That economic class also plays a role in the discrepancy, although this point seems to be less important to her.

The "not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women" comment is unfortunate, not only because this uses a stereotype but also because it seems she doesn't have the data for this.

The 40% vs 86% discrepancy is staggering, but it would be interesting to verify analytically how class plays a role. I would be extremely surprised if a wealthy black person's rape kit were treated differently than a similar white person in this county. And compare that with other poor, mostly white counties across the nation.

They key, I think, here is class, rather than race. NOT that race is not important, but that can't be the 99% of teh story, as implied here. Cornel West makes this point more bluntly in his recent criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/17/ta-neh...).

I agree that this is a worthy area of inquiry. If you're interested in data, I highly encourage this type of research - and the data is probably out there to do this.

I do data analysis on news coverage, and there's data to show that we have a predilection to hear about the West (even compared to other geographically close regions):

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

As you point out, hard to determine how much of this predilection is due to economic similarity or geography versus cultural/racial/religious.

Beyond that, my gut is that we can actually derive empathy scores across countries or races based on data like this.

Just to expand, even if it does turn out to be a race-based correlation (like we controlled for class, and the discrepancy was still present), we still don't know why.

One version is that a bunch of essentially similar cases come in, then the cases for white people are prioritized over the cases for PoC, because of racism. And therefore they get solved at a disproportionate rate. That's one potential explanation, that may have some potential solutions.

There are a bunch of different potential explanations though.

Maybe white people are more likely to be raped at parties, whereas PoC live in areas with less police enforcement so they are more likely to be raped by random strangers, so the crime is harder to solve.

Maybe black people are understandably less likely to talk to the police while they investigate anything, so it's harder to get witness testimony and the like.

Maybe there was a successful awareness effort targeted at black people, so they are now more likely to report when they are raped, whereas white people only report it when the case is especially egregious and egregious cases have more physical evidence.

I'm just making all these up to demonstrate that there are all kinds of potential explanations of why there's a difference between races even if the individual investigators try just as hard on these cases and the cases are assigned without bias. In basically all these cases the answer about how to improve this situation is different, so it's worth knowing the details. I think it deserves further study.

a race-based correlation (like we controlled for class, and the discrepancy was still present)

Racism runs deep, doesn't it?

I agree with you to a point, but what I would say to you is this: even before we take outright racism into account, poverty is highly racialized (that is to say, you can guess a person's socioeconomic status with much better accuracy than chance with no other information than the person's race), and a stranger might take a black person for someone of lower socio-economic status even if he actually isn't such a person. Stories like Henry Louis Gates' arrest may get disproportionate attention (some of the uproar seemed to make an unseemly argument -- not that, in general, the police shouldn't arrest a man trying to enter his own home, but rather that a Harvard professor shouldn't be subject to that treatment), but they do illustrate this latter point.

> She bases this on the fact that 86% of unsolved victim cases are from black people

You're misrepresenting what she said - she explicitly called out class (not just race) and it you're agreeing with here. Her full quote is:

> can use Detroit as an example, 86% of our victims in these untested kits are people of color. You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it, but I've seen it throughout my career and I know it's true ... It's just true. ... Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately, we know that across the criminal justice

In America, justice is only available to those who can afford it. If you can't afford months or years of lawyer's fees and don't have the ability to take time away from your job, family and other daily obligations, you're simply out of luck.

It is not quite this dire, there are very competent public prosecutors and defenders. The problem is we accept the wealthy can obtain better and more lawyers, and effectively buy more or better justice as they define it. It's a classist system where justice is treated as a product rather than exclusively as a right.

It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow.

It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.

I'm against the idea of private run prisons, it seems like something that should be the purview of the state given the lack of legitimate competition, market fundamentals, and ethical considerations.

But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a legitimate correlation between the two as a general pattern...

This gets thrown around a lot on Reddit and elsewhere online but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...

I may be parsing it incorrectly, but I take "private prisons" less literally since I know that private prisons are the vast minority. Instead of thinking about the prison itself, consider the "prison industrial complex" in a way that you might consider the "military industrial complex." There are a lot of people who make a lot of money off our prison system, and it includes everyone from food suppliers to lawyers.

Also, private companies now house nearly half of immigrant detainees including a $1 Billion facility the Obama administration purchased to hold Central American women and children seeking asylum in the US.

Specific examples of lobbying are easy enough to google. I might suggest starting with the "Kids for Cash" scandal where two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to their facilities.

?but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

Then you aren't paying attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

>Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were convicted of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers.

"You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm#link2H... (Thucydides, book 5, Melian conference)

(tl;dr: the Athenians took Melos, killed the adult males, sold the remaining Melians as slaves, repopulated the island. Eventually they made the Venus de Milo. And so it goes.)

Justice doesn't just come in form of public defenders. I lived in Chicago and had my car improperly towed to the yards. Being a rich computer dork, I could take the time off when the yards were open to go retrieve it. It was only PoC for the entire 3 hours it took me to pay the fine and get my vehicle back, during the day, when anyone with a job would be required to pick up their vehicle.

My job says OK when I tell them I am taking the afternoon off. Most people's don't. Most people's job says, "you're fired!".

One lady lost her car because they found a worn out pot pipe under the driver's seat, while her son was driving the car. For fucks sake. They wanted 1700 to get the car back out of impound. They didn't charge anyone with a crime. But the car was gone.

I on the other hand, had the time to go give my evidence the magistrate and get my 390$ returned due to a improper impound. No working class PoC could have done what I did, on either side of that equation.

The whole time I wanted to scream my lungs out about the fucking level of utter bullshit we inflict on ourselves. I love Chicagoans, but shit, Chicago cops and Chicago justice need to get tossed in the trash.

It probably isn't true that most people would be fired for having to take a half day off to retrieve an impounded car.

Maybe not most but there certainly is an underclass that would. Even if the number is 5%-10%, it's too high.

Sounds like a culture that has embraced Stockholm syndrome. $1700 to get a car out of impound when there was no crime, and yet the people who are getting shot aren't the people who enabled and profit off such an obviously corrupt system.

While I understand the sentiment is a common one, I disagree with the premise that these things are due to race.

This is due to economic inequality, with race being used by the wealthy as a tool to pit the majority against each other, no different from how religion was used to label the pious and heathens. It's binary nonsense.

There are parts of the country where you WILL find poor white people being treated the same. I grew up in one; rich construction company owners kids get busted for growing pot, are let off the hook by the judge who throws the book at poor white kids living in the trailer park doing the same.

The trailer park kids were doing to support the family cause they couldn't find a job due prior felonies related to crimes undertaken to again feed the family.

And the judges speak to it with scary justifications like (paraphrasing a longwinded rant) "If God didn't want those kids in jail, he'd have given their family a construction company for them to manage some day."

White wives are beaten and abused daily. Cops do nothing. Wife maims husband, goes to prison.

The meme as I see it: The rich are given a pass, they are just following their manifest destiny. Poor people don't appear to have one, so fuck them.

Given what I have heard of from older relatives in rural areas, this is "in the main" correct.

My aunt, quite old, remembers a time when corporal punishment (being hit with a sturdy broomstick, or rapped across the knuckles etc.) was OK in the school she attended. It was always the poorer kids that got the corporal punishment... not the better-off ones.

And yet, somehow, black people get killed by police a lot more than poor white people.

It may be due to race, it's just not a foregone conclusion.

Are you sure? This study shows that whites are actually killed at a higher rate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a...

Read that study carefully. It may not say what you think it says. The rate for whites is higher but only when counting from a stop already being initiated. Stops are initiated on minorities at tremendously higher rates. Comparing the two outcomes is really tricky.

>The rate for whites is higher but only when counting from a stop already being initiated.

Of course. You consider people who interact with police. Some old lady obviously shouldn't be included in the data.

>Stops are initiated on minorities at tremendously higher rates.

Blacks and latinos commit crimes at higher rates than whites and asians.

It's not about people trying to hide anything. Or about one particular country. You can't shame or guilt trip people into doing the right thing. It never works. You can either pay them or reprogramming their minds. And both those routes are hard and takes generations of sustained work.

> You can't shame or guilt trip people into doing the right thing. It never works.

I don't know that I'd say that.

I'm Canadian and one of my friends ventured out to Boston and saw how racially and economically divided the place was. Like it was too apparent which neighborhoods were black and which were white...which is shocking for us since this is a side of America we never saw before

I remember learning about American history in HS very well, used to study the classics like Kill a Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning, etc. I remember them because the depiction of abuse against blacks were particularly cruel and rage inducing.

Then you read article like this and realize the apartheid never really died, it just became far more covert and systematic.

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

The biggest shock to me is the security apparatus that have worked in the background to literally exterminate the black population. Iran-Contra affair have demonized and destroyed the seemingly up and coming African American demographic with a dangerously addictive drug.

Finally, we have today. Things haven't changed, African Americans are really at the mercy of "White" America as it slowly rears its ugly head with Trump in charge.

All in all, I am observing "Neo-Apartheid", except now it's not about drugs to go after and disrupt, it's through economic exclusion, forcing people on the fringes to finally turn to criminal activities and nailing them to private prisons. Studies have shown if you incarcerate a family member, it spreads almost like an infection.

This all sounds ominous and negative but I do feel there is a very strong liberal voice for justice, and articles like this that uncover inconvenient truths seem on the rise, perhaps giving hope....but the cynic in me says the economic gap is just too wide...the communal infrastructure is broken in the ghettos that spiral into drug economies. You will see a few rising stars as "model minority"...like giving out fucking gold stars in kindergarten

I don't know I'm sickened by the systematic level in which the pigment in your skin should determine your level of economic participation, often reinforced through stereotypes that arose out of previous generations.

This quote is nonsense. As another commenter noted, the 86% of victims being people of color roughly matches the demographics of the city. As Worthy herself notes there are hundreds of thousands untested rape-kits nationwide, affecting predominantly white areas as well. You can see more stats at http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/where-backlog-exists-an....

The fact that the backlog has grown so large in Detroit (in relation to other areas) is a consequence of the city being bankrupt. The period of time that the backlog ballooned happened when the city was run by black mayors (note: I'm not saying that as attribution). Also the police department is predominantly made up of blacks, roughly reflecting the demographics of the city. To portray this as a conspiracy against black women is absurd.

> As another commenter noted, the 86% of victims being people of color roughly matches the demographics of the city.

Not at the time the kits were collected, it doesn't.

I'm not sure why consistency with city demographics should matter. Shouldn't it be aligned with the racial demographics of the typical victim?

In Chicago, for instance, 75% of homicide victims are black despite only representing 32% of the population. If a discrepancy that large can exist in homicide data, I'm sure a similar one can be seen for rape in Detroit.

You're right, which is further evidence of the lack of a conspiracy. If we assume that most rapes occur disproportionally in poorer neighborhoods, then 86% of Detroit rapes from 1984-2009 happening to poorer black women sounds quite probable.

but that could be evidence of a different "conspiracy", not about testing rape kits but about policing black neighborhoods-- maybe not enough policing, or maybe policing of a sort that simply doesn't have any good effect on violent crime.

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