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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

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.

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".

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.

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.

>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?