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Comment by ddlatham | Hacker News Reader

Most striking are the race differences revealed in the study, Brame says. In particular, the research points to a higher prevalence of arrest among black males and little race variation in arrest rates among females....

By age 23, 49 percent of black males, 44 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of white males have been arrested....

By age 23, arrest rates were 20 percent for white females and 18 percent and 16 percent for Hispanic and black females, respectively.

By age 23:

- Black males have been arrested at a 29% higher rate than white males.

- White females have been arrested at a 25% higher rate than black females.

While the absolute rate of especially black male arrests is troubling, I find the racial differences in both genders striking and particularly surprising in the female case.

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Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males. If the police completely ignored race, we would expect black males to be arrested at a higher rate than white males.

The most troubling possibility that the black male vs white male rate suggests to me is that police might not be taking black victims as seriously as white victims.

Blacks die by homicide at a rate that is around 16 times the rate whites die from homicide, for instance. I haven't analyzed this to make sure I'm not running into something like Simpson's Paradox or something similar that makes it easy to mess up when looking at cross group statistics, but my first impression is that if police were working as diligently to solve crimes against black people as they do to solve crimes against white people, they would be arresting a lot more black criminals than they do.

The female data is interesting. I don't even have a guess as to why white females might be arrested at a higher rate than black females.

Black females don't have the time in the day to get arrested. White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't. A dozen other things. It depends how frank we all want to be.

>Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males.

Who on earth is the intended audience here--

Why downvoted?

Because of this:

White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't.

While absolutely true in North America, it's one of those things you're not permitted to say:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Hence, the downvotes.

Sorry, it is not true.

For instance, you ought to visit some rural areas sometime and see the "consequence-free environment" in which white women there live.

If you want to talk about middle-to-upper-middle-class white women in urban and suburban areas that is a different story, though "consequence-free environment" is still a bit of a stretch.

Just a guess: more white females than black females go to college, where they have plenty of opportunities for underage drinking, marijuana use, trespassing, vandalism, or other minor crimes. More black women at that age are mothers, where they have to provide for their kid and don't have time to get into mischief.

The arrest rates at age 18 were nearly identical for white vs. black females, the discrepancy only arose in ages 18-23. It would be interesting to see the data broken out by crime and by educational achievement.

Just a guess: more white females than black females go to college,

In terms of raw numbers, yes, because there are more white females than black females in the U.S. In terms of rates, no, black women enroll in college at a higher rate than white women [0] and are awarded degrees at a higher rate than white women [1]. Now this is a relatively recent (last 10 years) development so it could be that arrest rates haven't had time to adjust for this if the hypothesis is correct.

[0] http://www.census.gov/hhes/school/data/cps/2011/tables.html look at the "White alone non-Hispanic" and "Black alone" table data and assuming we're limiting the comparison to 18-24 yro per the post I'm responding to, 4.6% of black women attend college vs 4.3% of white women.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72

As mentioned elsewhere, the journal article on which this is based specifically found that the difference in rates among women was not significant enough to make a statement about women arrest rates based on race. So the data provided in this article are based on a restricted sample size and it is challenging to make statements about the overall population saying that "white females are arrested at a higher rate than black females". That might be true but we simply can't be confident in saying that that is true unless more data is gathered. Speculation on why such a difference could occur is harder still.

When is comes to violent crime, yes. However violent crime arrests make up a relatively small amount of arrests (about 8% of arrests according to my accounting, including arson [0]). Drug related arrests make up 12% of arrests, that's an area where whites and blacks are known to use use and sell at about the same rates [1] but blacks are arrested at higher rates. I'm not sure about the other classes of crimes (burglary, fraud, disorderly conduct, etc), but I suspect those are highly dependent on local conditions.

[0] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-like... - this is link to a mainstream media summary, the data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health for various years goes into more detail, I just don't have time to look it up right now.

I'm not sure what the data looks like for your reference on black vs. white drug use since the original data isn't there.

Some data indicates there is a 23% higher level of drug use among blacks than whites [1, Table 1.19B]. That would explain _some_ of the higher arrest rates of blacks for drug crimes.

[1]http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTables/De...

Some data indicates there is a 23% higher level of drug use among blacks than whites

My quote was "whites and blacks are known to use use and sell at about the same rates" - your link shows 8.7% of whites use drugs vs 10.0% of blacks in the past month, and 15.9% of whites used drugs vs 18.7 in the past year (and when looking at lifetime use, that usage flips) - I think "about the same rates" is a fair characterization of that data.

When we're talking about a 20% difference in arrest rates, if the difference between drug use rates is >10% I don't think it's fair to characterize that as "about the same".

>I don't even have a guess as to why white females might be arrested at a higher rate than black females.

Have you spent any time around white American females?

Please understand that this is a racist comment.

My first reaction was that it reads to be about American culture (and wonder if 'schrodinger' is Swedish, racism accusations are used as often as "hej" these days).

My second reaction is trying to replace 'white' with 'black'. Also, considering the heterogeneity of different parts of USA...

OK, racist.

Culture.

Much too late, but my explicit point was:

It sounded like culture to me too, until I replaced the word "white" with "black" in my head.

If I should say anything more: There is a limit of different standards for different groups (somewhere between a factor two and five), when it becomes disgusting hypocrisy.

schrodinger, which part of your comment is racist?

Strange, but coming from an European background while taking in a lot of American culture, I was (pleasantly, I guess) surprised that the discrepancy between white and black males wasn't larger. I am more or less shocked about he percentages overall, but really thought the gap was much larger.

Sorry if this doesn't add anything substantial, but I honestly would have have guessed that it was about 3 times more black males getting arrested than white males. I need to broaden where I get my US-information from obviously.

The arrest rate is also different from the incarceration rate, which is much more heavily skewed. According to Pew, black men are incarcerated at ~6.5 the rate that white men are, per capita[1].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/06/incarceratio...

As tzs points out above, this could be because police take crimes against black victims less seriously.

I had the same reaction, and even though I have an European background I don't think it has anything to do with it.

There must be another divide in play there in addition to racial. Small town vs big city? Poor vs. rich? Cold vs. warm climate? Those percentages seem incredibly high, and looking at the circle of people I know, I would never have guessed it that high. It could be that people just don't talk about their criminal records but it's still not 1 in 5.

Your perception is mostly based on TV.

Crime correlates to poverty. People with nothing to lose roll the dice and do dumb shit.

I grew up in NYC and a rural part of Upstate NY that were about as opposite as you could get. The small town still had "bad" neighborhoods, they were run down trailer parks with old trailers and poor people. They committed the same types of stupid crimes, like robbery, vandalism and fighting. The drug trade was there, but mostly centered around smuggling and growing weed. (There are only so many drug users in a town of 2,500 without a major transit route, so the retail business wasn't great!)

In the inner city, you get the added instability of the retail drug market. IMO, population density and the retail drug business are the reason why black males get arrested more. Desperate white people are just as desperate as their black equivalent.

It's interesting the article downplays the discrepancy in the female arrest rates based on race.

It's because the author is bad at interpreting statistics and doesn't recognize that a 4% difference when the average rate is closer to 18% is a way bigger difference than a 5 or even 6% difference when the average rate is closer to 40%.

The manuscript highlights the differences among the male populations are significant while those among the female populations are within the estimated confidence intervals.

Correct. To see the original, you can check the journal itself [0] (check for it on google scholar if this link doesn't work) or look for it at your nearest academic library, if they have it. It is published in the April issue. The conclusion was that the difference was not significant for the female population. Keep in mind that the study was based on a limited sample so care must be taken when generalizing conclusions from the starting data to the population as a whole.

[0] http://cad.sagepub.com/content/60/3/471.abstract

This is a curious approach to the study. You'd think you'd at least consider using census data paired with arrest data. Sure there are statistical biases there, but they'd probably be smaller than the sampling error.

Yes, but the correct interpretation of that is not that the variance is too small, but that the population is too small.

The correct conclusion to reach here (and appears to match what the study says) is that there is a huge gender gap, amongst males there is a statistically significant racial gap, and amongst females the sample size was too small to detect if a similar gap exists.

The female racial gap may not be statistically significant, so you can't say for sure if it is there, but it is possible that it is actually much more significant than the male racial gap. The article says there is "little race variation in arrest rates among females", which is not true. There is more variation than amongst the male population --it just might not be statistically significant.

At best you can say, "despite even bigger variance between races in the female arrest data, the sample of female arrests was too small for it to be conclusive".

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