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Comment by Steer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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

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