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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> African Americans commit about half the murders in the US

not disagreeing, but you've also committed the statistical cardinal sin of survivorship bias here as well. It's not half the murders, it's half the _prosecuted_ murders. You don't know how many are not caught or known.

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And you left out another major issue. It's half of the homicides convicted as murders. People pleading guilty to negligent homicide or claiming self defense (or simply winning their case) aren't included. Which are outcomes associated with good lawyers, which is associated with wealth, which is highly correlated to race.

Claiming self defense doesn't change the charge from murder unless you are found not to have murdered the person.

Claiming self defense doesn't. Successfully claiming self defense means that you did not murder the person.

Successfully making that claim is associated with expensive lawyers rather than overworked public defenders.

The clearance rate for black victims of murder in black neighborhoods (where the perpetrator is likely to also be black) is the lowest out of all categories, which makes your point actually work against you

Unknown would be its own category, which means some of those unknown might actually make the African American stats even worse if they were attributed.

It's unknown, so the OP's original argument of maths:

> you could argue racism... Or math.

is not supported by the purported statistic of "half the murders are by blacks".

It's not prosecuted murders. The baseline stats aren't built on that number, they're built on the race of the perp when known.

Victimization surveys also corroborate these proportions at least for attempted murders and other violent crimes.

So it could very well be more than half.

Doubtful. Whites have more wealth and better lawyers.

Oh yes, thousands of murders a year dismissed by clever lawyers! Thousands!

The scarier possibility is "thousands of wrongful convictions due to ineffective representation."

... scarier and hard to discount.

And it is imho better for 9 murderers to walk free and prevent 1 wrongful conviction, than to have 1 wrongful conviction to keep 9 murderers off the streets.

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