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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

Empirically, crime rates do depend on race, not just class. It's not crazy to recognize reality.

detected crime rates depend on race. That's not surprising when institutional racism creates a system focused on criminalising black people.

Look at murder rates that are harder to overlook. The murder rage amongst black men is about 8-10x more then white men.

Obviously historical racism is the huge cause here. But you cannot just write off the crime rates due to different policing.

Poor Black neighborhoods are simultaneously over and under policed. Gangs and criminals have free reign and then cops capriously make a show of force.

> Poor Black neighborhoods are simultaneously over and under policed.

They are under policed ("guardian" model) and overmuch hostilely occupied by the police ("warrior" model).

They are the places most in need of effective community-oriented policing, and the places that get that kind of policing the least.

I knew quite a few people in college who used illegal drugs, some of them pretty regularly. (I doubt that I'm the only person for whom that's true.) That is crime.

To my knowledge, not one of them were ever investigated, searched, arrested, prosecuted, or convicted of a crime. (Well, there was that one guy who had a close call at a border crossing on a trip to Amsterdam.) I can't think of any way in which their behavior would be reflected in formal criminal statistics. But let's not pretend that "crime" of this sort is not rampant among white students on college campuses around the country.

A large fraction of the point here is that criminal statistics reflect who our society chooses to enforce its laws upon.

Empirically, a biker war is treated vastly differently in the press and by the police than a protest against a police killing.

There's no way to advance a discussion by simply stating there is a correlation between crime and race. What solutions come from that? Genocide? Internment?

Crime is a complex system that involves more than just the two axes race and violence.

If there is a correlation between crime and race, even after adjusting for SES, that of course does not justify genocide. An individual is accountable for what he does, not what members of his group does. I have no simple solution to propose, but I think the assumption that differences in incarceration rates must be due to racism is unfounded. The police and the courts should try to treat people fairly, and unjust practices should be changed, but we should not try to mandate equal results.

The racists and/or "human biodiversity" types have come out to play. Better to ignore the disingenuous comments and move on, as they tend not to be here for discussion. Articles on race and crime often draw out these sorts of "arguments".

For those that actually believe the GP might have some ground to stand on, the least they could do is to link to some sources or resources.

I would be genuinely interested in a rebuttal to elevated testosterone levels (the linked National Cancer Institute abstract).

I almost always provide links to sources that provide a reasonably analytic angle.

They are generally ignored or misunderstood. Because, you know, (structural) racism.

The testosterone argument is a bullshit one in this context: the article you posted isn't trying to connect the dots in the disingenuous way you are, it's talking about prostate cancer. It does not attempt to suss out whether or not testosterone levels are the cause of crime, period. The misstep you are taking is assuming that testosterone causes crime, rather than correlates with it. Even this article [1], which you will probably salivate over, doesn't suggest that testosterone causes crime, merely that it correlates with misbehavior (in a very particular setting, namely prison). Here's [2] research that suggests that socioeconomic status mitigates the correlation between testosterone and misbehavior. At a minimum, this suggests that we have a chicken-egg dilemma between testosterone and misbehavior. The next question I would ask is: Do troubled settings and poor childhoods engender higher testosterone levels in adulthood?

Lastly, above and beyond any correlation between testosterone and crime, how do you propose to use this information to inform policy decisions? My main gripe in this fantasyland of HBD-speak is that people use this information as "scientific" grounds for enforcing their racist policy predispositions. I'd like to hear where you think you would take this testosterone point, but all too often people (and unfortunately, I get the impression that you are one of them) imply that these few studies are grounds for damning and castigating entire populations because of their perceived inferiority and incorrigibility.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01918869940...

[2] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/1/3/209.short

EDIT for posterity: I would like to point out that you posted your cousin/uncle link upthread after I posted my GP comment above. I wouldn't have made as strong a comment had I seen links or sources.

Don't assume bad intentions. I used to think that there is a strong racial component, simply because it matched my everyday experiences. Only after I started traveling more did my opinion change - I'm now pretty sure that its mostly cultural.

Your previous reply sounded a lot like those "you are not allowed to say this" stuff that does a lot of harm, because it suffocates discourse.

So thanks for posting a factual follow-up, we need more of those and less of the political correct group-think dismissals.

Thank you for the reminder. I genuinely am not trying to suffocate discourse and I am interested in engaging in conversation, but I have no qualms about pointing out disingenuous or deceptive pseudo-discourse when I see it. Posting a link to a study that mentions testosterone in a different medical context, and using it to justify to racist institutions is, IMO, inflammatory and dishonest to say the least.

It's actually easier not to engage with racist trolls[0] at all, you're not likely to change anyone's mind.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9576895

Thanks for the effort of listing those, some of them definitely cross the line. However, I disagree that staying silent is always the best way to handle this - there is an audience that can still be influenced by convincing arguments, even though they might remain invisible.

Your theory is just damn racist. You make a huge jump from correlation to causation that isn't warranted from the data you present -- it's that (I stress, obnoxiously unsubstantiated) jump that's damn racist.

Ex: "Melanin is positively correlated with crime. <Insert some unsubstantiated purely conjectural causal explanation about how melanin effects the psyche>" is exactly the same argument, and is (I hope obviously) damn racist.

The study cited also doesn't say what you think it does, and your misreading is obnoxiously wilful, to the point that it's clear you're looking for evidence to back something you believe a priori. But someone else has already taken that on.

Anyway, the bar for these sorts of claims is high for a reason: people have made these "black men just have medical differences that make them more susceptible to violence/rape/murder/crime" arguments since the existence of modern medicine. The evidence behind these claims has always been pure bullshit racism masquerading as science.

If testosterone has nothing to do with incarceration rates, what mechanism do you propose for why men are in jail at much higher rates than women?

(Structural) sexism? Poverty? Poor fashion sensibilities?

> If testosterone has nothing to do with incarceration rates, what mechanism do you propose for why men are in jail at much higher rates than women?

> (Structural) sexism?

In the specific form of paternalism this would certainly seem to be a factor, at least.

First, Even if testosterone plays a role in male incarceration rates, your conjecture that a 15% increase in average testosterone can explain the severe racial disparity in incarceration rates in unsubstantiated. Even if "X causes Y", it does not follow that "15% more X causes xx% more Y".

Second, there are tons of alternative explanations (e.g. socialization). Nature vs. nurture is adolescent-level stuff, and obviously males and females are socialized differently. Stop being thick.

Third, that's not how science (or anything except religion) works. You don't get to make fallaciously substantiated conjectures and then demand everyone believe them until the core claim is disproven.

edit: Oh wow, based on prior coments you're actually just straight up early 20th century style racist, or a troll, or both. Done engaging you, and really hoping you're just a stupid troll and don't believe anything you're saying here.

The genetic term is non-zero. It discomfits, I know. But that doesn't make it less true.

> Empirically, crime rates do depend on race, not just class.

Some of that is racism in crime reporting and law enforcement behind the stats, and some if it is a real disparity, and at least some of that real disparity -- perhaps all of it -- results from the fact that black people in the US come from a cultural which has very different attitudes due to a very different experience with authority historically, with de jure discrimination and overt police repression of the black community extending into living memory (and even stronger farther back where it still exerts considerable cultural influence), which has a considerable impact on attitudes towards institutions of authority and the broader society.

Piling more racism by the broader society on top of that is not going to alleviate that problem.

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