4.5%, and the Demographics of American Murder
datahazard.substack.com
datahazard.substack.com
I agree this looks impressive i the level of research and detail, but I strongly caution the community not to jump to conclusions.
Be mindful of where the data comes from. Police and prosecutors can and do make mistakes, inadvertently or sometimes prejudiciously.
I've heard this statistic most of my life that Black people commit a significant amount of crime, yet being such a small percentage of the population. I just think it grossly over simplifies everything and its unfair.
I'm not sure how to account for that bias, I don't think we can draw conclusions until we can rectify some of that
That's one of the reasons murder is used. Hard to fudge the statistics on it, immune to overpolicing, most of it is intra-racial, and it's hard to misidentify a perpetrator so bad that they go from white to black.
But for non-murder, there is the National Crime Victimization Survey, that does not involve the police, and acts as a check on their data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_S...
Looks at other countries. No. Remove the damn guns!
Adjusted to the U.S. population that’s about 1500 deaths per year as opposed to around the 50,000 gun deaths the US sees in a year.
UK homicide rate: 1.1, Black population: 3.15%, homicide rate/Black %: 0.35 (0.65x that of the US)
So gun control seems to have helped, but not as much as 1500 vs 50,000. It would be interesting to see the homicide rate for UK Blacks specifically, but I could only find data about homicide victims by race, not perpetrators. Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingd...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
The rate dropped 38% in the US and 27% in the UK, which banned handguns in 1996.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/mur...
*I would've used the most recent US number (2020), but I couldn't find that data for the UK to compare apples to apples.
This article is instantly discredited for me because it pretends to know the cause of the drop in violent crime in the 90s.
That being said, the data itself looks solid and given that gun control isn’t happening anytime soon, we need to look at alternative solutions.
Unfortunately, IMO, the BLM movement focused on the wrong side of the equation. Instead of focusing on the police side of the equation, the focus should have been on increasing funding for non police interventions that are known to reduce crime, often significantly.
These include funding for community policing, after school programs, youth recreation centers, basketball leagues and courts, anti gang messaging, etc.
Even on the police side, there should have been a stronger focus on better incarceration procedures which separate gang members from non gang members and prevent non violent criminals from being locked up with violent criminals and gang members, which only end up feeding the gang pipeline.
Mandatory life sentences for everyone who uses them to murder someone else.