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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> To choose one category of crime, blacks make up about half of of murderers.

They may make up half of all people convicted of murder, but then its been widely observed across many different categories of crime that, on similar fact patterns, blacks are more likely to be charged with a crime and are likely to be charged with a more serious crime than whites.

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Check out the National Crime Victimization Survey which corroborates the conviction stats.

The NCVS, for obvious reasons [0], doesn't even track homicide (nor, from looking through the questionnaires it uses, does it appear to gather information on perpetrator race), much less corrobate the conviction stats presented for murder (and, in any case, as victims of crime often rely on law enforcement to identify the perpetrator, wouldn't really be an independent check, even for those kinds of crime it does address, on the UCR for perpetrator demographics, though it can be, for those crimes that both address, for crime incidence and victim demographics.)

[0] "In the last six months, have you been murdered?" is not a particularly viable question.

I think the point tsax meant to make is that the NCVS tracks most crimes besides homicide. For crimes besides homicide and burglary, the victimization surveys agree well with the arrest rates.

I suppose this data doesn't rule out the possibility that the UCR is not very biased for robbery/rape/assault, but is biased for murder.

If you are interested in this topic, Scott Alexander has a recent blog post on it that's well worth reading: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

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