I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It | Hacker News Reader

I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It

wsj.com

Is the study not poorly framed? It attempted to see if police killings by race were explained by differences in violent crime. However, violent crime rates are reported by law enforcement. If black people are policed harder, they'll have greater rates of crime simply because they are caught more. Studies have found that white and black people commit crimes at the same rate, black people are simply caught more and punished more harshly.

That's why for such studies, the crime rate is assessed by victim surveys (free of police bias) and the difficult-to-fudge homicide rate. The results remain consistent.

Edit: For an example of a victim survey, see https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf Table 12. That's violent crime, but I believe not including homicide, as it's based on surveyed victim responses. Note that the data is collected independent of whether the crime was reported to police (https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245#Methodolog...)

A subset of the studies you mention have in particular looked at illegal drug usage. Why are black people arrested at higher rates than white people if their rates of illegal drug use are the same? Surely it must be discrimination?

Not so fast. That's the conclusion often drawn, but at least one recent study has shown that Marijuana purchasing behavior differs significantly between blacks and whites.

From the study abstract: "Using trivariate probit regression with demographic, drug use, and drug market covariates, analyses reveal that African Americans are nearly twice as likely to buy outdoors (0.31 versus 0.14), three times more likely to buy from a stranger (0.30 versus 0.09), and significantly more likely to buy away from their homes (0.61 versus 0.48). These results provide an additional explanation for the differential in arrest rates between African Americans and Whites."

Study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7178364_Racial_diff...

Yeah, no, it's discrimination. Having a connection so you don't need to be buying on corners is a privilege.

I don't expect the authors of that paper from 2005 in a journal nobody's ever heard of to be aware of it, but I was buying weed on the weekly back then and I'm here to tell you that paper doesn't say what you say it says. That it and you both think it does is unsurprising, but it also doesn't make either any less wrong.

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