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Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

"An unbiased sample would be clustered around the dotted line: a beat whose population is about 40% Black would have about 40% of its police stops be of Blacks".

Is this the case? In terms of murders I think it was something like 30 - 1 in terms of per capita likelihood of a suspect being black vs asian for example. Adding in gender / age it got even worse - ie, very few asian women gunning down folks on the street.

I couldn't find good stats on this based on a quick look, but it might be worth it to evaluate if there are different rates of murder by race / age / gender when doing these types of articles -> I wouldn't be surprised if their WAS racial bias, but it would be helpful to have a bit more context perhaps.

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> In terms of murders I think it was something like 30 - 1 in terms of per capita likelihood of a suspect being black vs asian for example.

Suspect perhaps, but not convicted offender. And therein lies the bias & prejudice.

This table shows Race, Sex, and Ethnicity of Victim by Race, Sex, and Ethnicity of Offender, 2019

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

One thing that stands out is that more often than not, the offender and the victim are the same race.

And overall numbers are similar between white and African American.

>And overall numbers are similar between white and African American.

Am I reading this wrong?

3,299 total murders committed by whites when they make up 76% of population, vs 2,906 by Black or AA when they make up 13.4% of population?

I'm getting the population estimates from here: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

For government statistics it should be noted that 'white' often includes hispanics and arabs.

> Am I reading this wrong?

It should be noted that table counts Hispanics as white (as does the 76% of population you cite). It has separate columns for if the offender is Hispanic.

You're not reading it wrong. That's actually a low value for the black share of murders; it's often above 50%.

The per capita rate of murder commission for blacks is about 8 times the general rate. It's true in the US, with its legacy of slavery, and also in England, with its equally bad legacy of slavery.

Or something.

EDIT: Actually, you are reading it wrong. That's 3,299 murders of whites, not 3,299 murders by whites.

The table shows 2,948 murders committed by whites ("Race of offender"), vs 3,218 murders committed by blacks.

And that's counting Hispanics as whites. Prepare to get banned :P

>And overall numbers are similar between white and African American.

But we're talking about percentages here, not absolute numbers, and African Americans are ~13% of the US population (and ~23% of Oakland).

Very interesting.

Here is Oaklands rough data for robberies.

Black 8228 Hispanic 575 Unknown 462 White 107 Asian/Other119 -------------- Total 9491

Per 100K Black (non-hispanic) 8,000 Hispanic 575 White (non-hispanic) 89

This is something like a 100-1 difference? Can these numbers be right - I was having some trouble finding good data from Oakland though I know they look at this closely.

How is that related to stopping pedestrians or bicyclists? Do you stop random people on the road to check for murder suspects?

> 30 - 1 in terms of per capita likelihood of a suspect being black vs asian for example.

Well, that's exactly illustrating the problem.

Not sure why this is getting downvoting, perhaps people are conflating suspect, to being 'found guilty', and then to 'actually guilty'.

That's pretty common, in my experience. People read "suspect" and hear "guilty". Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese once said in an interview, "you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect".

As best I can tell, the average person interprets "innocent until proven guilty" to mean something like, well, you can't put him in jail until he's convicted, but once he's caught, that's just the court system.

It's a well-known fact that the US criminal justice system disproportionately arrests, prosecutes, and imprisons Black and Hispanic Americans, and has for a while. I'm surprised to find that my expectations of the HN community were too high.

> Is this the case?

No it's not. It assumes that groups have a uniform likelihood to break the law.

This is not an obviously true statement.

The reason people assert this is because of the focus on equal group outcomes rather than equal individual treatment.

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