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Worth noting that police typically "randomly" drug search black people/drivers at a much higher rate than white people, even though white people are just as likely, or more likely to have drugs on them.

It's then easy for (ignorant) people to point at those numbers and say look, 80% of the time when police search someone for drugs and find them, it's a black person, so obviously black people are more likely to have drugs on them so we should search them more.

It's like a higher-level version of being arrested for resisting arrest (by asking "what are you arresting me for?")

I'm curious on what evidence you base the statement "white people are more likely to have drugs on them than black people." When controlling for socioeconomic status I would expect no difference by race, and honestly when controlling for socioeconomic status I would only expect which drugs were found to change, and not necessarily the rate at which they were found.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/polic...

> For years, police records have shown that black drivers tend to be less likely than white drivers to turn up with guns or drugs when searched at traffic stops. At the same time, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be subjected to these searches, according to a 2013 federal survey.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traff...

> Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

> Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.

That's still not the same thing, though. If, among the 1% of African Americans pulled over, 10% have drugs, while among the 0.5% of White Americans pulled over 20% have drugs, it doesn't actually say much about the overall rates of drug ownership. Maybe police are really bad at figuring out which African Americans are carrying drugs, and the overall rate in that population is 10% - while the police manage to pull over everyone else carrying drugs, leading to a population rate of 0.1%. (Or you can flip this around too)

The point is that you're measuring after a selection effect, and measurements after a selection effect are worthless. Imagine comparing income between racial groups, but only surveying people buying sports cars - it's just not useful.

Most of these stops are in high crime areas, which also have high rates of poverty. It would make sense that blacks are stopped more than whites since blacks, as a percentage of population, tend to be poorer than whites.

> Worth noting that police typically "randomly" drug search black people/drivers at a much higher rate than white people, even though white people are just as likely, or more likely to have drugs on them.

White people are more likely to have drugs when searched for drugs because police are less likely to search white people for drugs for reasons other than having real reason to think that they have drugs.

They may also be more likely to have drugs because they are less likely to be searched out of the blue, but the difference simply due to blacks being subject to more harassment searches is probably the bigger factor.

> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate', because law enforcement is discretionary and also/therefore racist

This is why homicide rates are useful. For most cases, it is pretty obvious a crime of some sort occurred.

Okay, but you can't extrapolate homicide rate to find the rate of e.g. drug use.

This is a complicated issue with many interwoven contributing factors. There's no one magic figure you can point to that explains or disproves everything.

It doesn't disprove anything, but it puts the onus back on those who claim that the police are racist, that we live in a racist ethnostate, and that we've improved very little with respect to institutional racism since the antebellum period.

> it puts the onus back on those who claim that the police are racist, that we live in a racist ethnostate, and that we've improved very little with respect to institutional racism since the antebellum period.

No, it doesn't.

You're mistaken.

> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate', because law enforcement is discretionary and also/therefore racist

> This is why homicide rates are useful. For most cases, it is pretty obvious a crime of some sort occurred.

Tldr; homicide conviction rates are subject to other artifacts and can't support either side very well without additional data.

Law enforcement is discretionary not just in deciding what counts as a crime but in who they decide to investigate and other tactics employed. Not that this hugely affects any relative statistics, but the murder false imprisonment rate is estimated at 4-11%, and false imprisonment (as far as we can tell from subsequent DNA exhoneration and whatnot -- this might not be representative of all murders) disproportionately affects black people. Not that this necessarily says anything about broad crime racial statistics, but it could throw any direct comparisons off.

More importantly though, 30-40% of murders go unsolved, and it's probably not reasonable to assume that distribution to reflect the distribution of successfully convicted murders (if for no other reason than the race<->income correlation). That's such a huge monkey wrench in any comparative statistics that murder conviction rates without any additional information don't strongly support either side of things.

Criminologists consider homicides to be reliable because it's difficult for police to ignore homicides. Moreover, these data also gel with victimization surveys--victims also report disproportionate black offenders, especially in violent crimes. Further, this violent crime rate disparity exists even when controlling for SES (socioeconomic status) differences between the races (contra your "race<->income correlation" remark). There's probably some error, but all sources suggest that crime rates are considerably higher among blacks than whites. Note again that virtually no one is arguing that blacks are inherently criminal, but that these disparities are a vestige of centuries of severe institutional racism--it would be shocking if no disparities remained only 60 years after the formal end of Jim Crow.

> these data also gel with victimization surveys

> this violent crime rate disparity exists even when controlling for SES

That's exactly the kind of additional data I was asking for. I just didn't think murder conviction rates by themselves were sufficient evidence to support the claims they were being thrown against.

> Criminologists consider homicides to be reliable because it's difficult for police to ignore homicides.

That side-steps my point a bit doesn't it (in hindsight I should have been more clear)? Being difficult to ignore makes homicides generally reliable for some kinds of comparisons (e.g. comparing violent crime between countries), but that reliability doesn't transfer well. E.g., when a plausible suspect is thrown in jail the spotlight is removed from everyone involved. I gave specific examples where despite a high reliability in overall murder rates, piggybacking on that reliability to lend credibility to the racial distribution of conviction rates isn't justified (without additional information). The rest of your comment notwithstanding (I did appreciate it and do generally agree with you), rebutting by reaffirming points I already agree with and pulling in criminologists as experts in the vaguest way possible isn't satisfactory.

> Note again that virtually no one is arguing that blacks are inherently criminal, but that these disparities are a vestige of centuries of severe institutional racism--it would be shocking if no disparities remained only 60 years after the formal end of Jim Crow.

No argument here. I tend to agree with the claim, but the evidence (based on murder conviction rates) was suspect.

Yeah, it sounds like I was reading too far into your point. I think we agree.

> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate',

First of all, it was only an example for how "systemic" can be used as a weasel word. That said, the higher crime rate for black Americans is well-documented--it shows up not only in law enforcement reporting but also in victim reports (note that the majority of victims who report a black offender are themselves black), media reports, and homicide statistics (these are regarded as highly reliable because it's frequently easy to tell that a crime has occurred).

> Criminalizing blackness and then calling 'blacks' criminals was literally and explicitly part of the plan.

As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, we can (and criminologists go to great lengths to) control for this by taking into account non-law-enforcement sources, especially sources who are least likely to be racially biased.

> Being honest, precise, and consistent in your terminology isn't too helpful if you choose to ignore american history.

History isn't ignored in the claim, "Racial disparities in police killings largely reflect disparate crime rates which are likely the effect of centuries of slavery and institutional racism". This is the moderate position. But again, this was all an example to illustrate how "systemic" is used as a weasel word; I'm not trying to veer off-topic into a race debate (although I'm perfectly happy to talk about it when it's on-topic).

> 'Systemic' racism is the appropriate term because it must be understood as a whole for the parts to make sense.

It's may be an appropriate term, but it's ambiguous and weasels regularly take advantage of that ambiguity. This undermines its utility.

> Your misunderstanding kinda illustrates this. Cause really the remedy for police killings and for high "crime rates" among "blacks" are in fact the same, and relate to the manner and amount of policing.

Big [citation needed] that current police practices principally drive crime rate disparities and not the prior centuries of institutional racism and slavery. No doubt that current practices play a role, but that they are a primary driver beggars belief. Note that 80% of blacks don't want less policing (only better policing): https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r....

I want to believe you're coming to this in good faith, but in your last paragraph you mention "institutional racism", which is the same thing as systemic racism-- institution == system. This is not confusing because that is what it always means. 'Institutional' racism doesn't mean, like, racism at a university or something. You seem to be muddying the waters unnecessarily (intentionally?). Forgive my paranoia in these troubled times but could you be a paid shill come to waste our energy?

This is the problem; depending on who you talk to, "systemic racism" has a different definition. Kendi defines "systemic racism" as "anything that causes disparate outcomes between racial groups". People who make the claim that racial disparities in rates of police killings probably mean to imply that police exhibit racial prejudice in their killings, but given that disparate crime rates seems to explain the disparity in police killings, they can claim that they're technically correct in that centuries of racial oppression have created a system (presumably a cultural system) in which blacks are more likely to commit crimes (assume this is true for sake of argument; this has been litigated thoroughly elsewhere) and thus more likely to suffer police violence. They're technically correct, but it doesn't support arguments or conclusions that police are racially prejudiced (e.g., "more anti-bias training for police", "calling the cops on a black person is a death sentence", etc). It's important to be clear and accurate on this point because these two very different implications suggest very different remedies, and black lives hang in the balance.

> Forgive my paranoia in these troubled times but could you be a paid shill come to waste our energy?

Alas, I'm not a critical theorist.