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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

The incarceration rate is 5x higher, not "the rate that Blacks commit crimes" as you falsely assert. Tone down the racism, it isn't very becoming of a member of the HN community.

And the capitalization of the Whites/Blacks just makes you come across as Dylann Roof.

Take a chill pill and try to find sources when you want to make assertions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_Afr...

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> And the capitalization of the Whites/Blacks just makes you come across as Dylann Roof.

Whoa, that's way out of line.

> Take a chill pill and try to find sources when you want to make assertions.

That's not ok either.

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. Please follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

He is correct that the incarceration rate has little to do with prevalence of criminality. It has to do with the "school to prison pipeline" and differences in enforcement, especially regarding drugs.

Being correct has nothing to do with violating the HN guidelines. If anything it makes it worse.

Thanks for the refresher dang. My apologies. I will think more carefully about posts. I was just so offended by his lack of consideration about race

Whites probably are prosecuted less for minor things like pot or jaywalking or what have you.

But for high-profile things i.e. the things that should be priority for a justice system, things like rape and murder, it is the simple, uncomfortable fact that blacks outpace all other races by a wide margin.

If you think that demonstrating that blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than whites somehow disproves the above facts and somehow proves that whites commit more rapes and murders than blacks but are not caught/incarcerated, then for that to be the case, given the amount of rapes and murders that blacks commit, there would have to be a huge number unsolved rape and murder cases.

Are there a huge number of unsolved rape and murder cases? No there aren't, the number of unsolved cases is probably not even 15% of the solved and prosecuted cases.

Maybe you should develop a simple command of the facts before you literally compare someone to a mass-murderer in your grammar naziism.

before you literally compare someone to a mass-murderer in your grammar naziism.

I want to believe this was intentionally meant to be hilarious.

That's what I thought of saying to dang, "But it was funny right, a good zinger?"

> Maybe you should develop a simple command of the facts before you literally compare someone to a mass-murderer in your grammar naziism

This breaks the HN guidelines. Please comment civilly or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That isn't really a function of skin colour though. Black people don't commit more murders because they're black - they commit more murders because they live in under-resourced, under-educated, poor communities that have been created by decades of racism by employers and authorities.

A white person and a black person are equally likely to commit a murder given the same set of circumstances, but the way society works means black people are more likely to face those situations.

Implying that blackness is a causal factor is both entirely wrong and hugely racist.

That isn't really a function of skin colour though.

Race(genetic relatedness within certain bounds) isn't purely skin colour, race is a whole host genetic expressions that develop over time in response to selection factors in an environment. Skin colour being one of the more visible of these genetic expressions.

Black people don't commit more murders because they're black - they commit more murders because they live in under-resourced, under-educated, poor communities

That's a hypothesis. You're free to go about proving or evidencing your position in whatever way you see fit then presenting your data to our peers for evaluation.

The unfortunate fact is that blacks have elevated levels of criminality compared to other races across all socio-economic categories.

A white person and a black person are equally likely to commit a murder given the same set of circumstances

Again, this is a hypothesis and you are free to try and establish a base of evidence to support it(although good science simply evaluates hypotheses against impartially collected evidence). A couple things off the top of my head you may be interested in as you evaluate this hypothesis.

I believe there have been studies looking into racial variability among things like impulse control, and what is known as "future time horizon." I can't seem to find any of them at the moment.

Another thing to consider, there are a number of very poor white areas in the US, I think some of the poorest counties in the US are mostly white. I'm also pretty sure the crime rates in those areas are not as high as comparable black areas. Feel free to double check that.

Implying that blackness is a causal factor is both entirely wrong and

I don't know how you got that implication from my previous comment which simply stated the fact that the crime rate among blacks is much higher than among whites and other races.

hugely racist.

If you want to discuss these matters productively it's really best to avoid jumping to words such as "racist" that, when not clearly describing obscene behavior, are just used in attempt to discredit other people.

>> Black people don't commit more murders because they're black

>That's a hypothesis. You're free to go about proving or evidencing your position.

Here in Switzerland black Swiss do not commit more murders than other "races". Surely you won't argue the alpine winds changed their genome with respect to black Americans now would you?

Ok, minefield here, but 'black' isn't a genome. In fact, Africa, cradle of all humanity, has more genetic diversity even today than the rest of the world.

If one were to evaluate that hypothesis, the data from Switzerland would probably not be particularly helpful and may be potentially misleading because it is a small sample size, and as you may know Switzerland is particularly judicious in who it allows to immigrate which one would imagine results in a skewing of the general population dynamics.

Here in Switzerland black Swiss do not commit more murders than other "races".

[citation needed]

> A white person and a black person are equally likely to commit a murder given the same set of circumstances, but the way society works means black people are more likely to face those situations.

Actually, that seems like the type of thing for which somewhat decent statistics should be readily available, do you know where one might look this up?

This thread is about Black crime rates, not their causes. As I said in my post, even if poverty was the only cause, it would still be hard to expect Whites to ignore the racial crime gap, since White people also avoid lower SES Whites who are likely to commit crimes.

In fact, poverty alone does not explain the crime rate gap. You can call this view "hugely racist" but I don't see how you can rule out a whole set of other causes a priori. And I'm not mainly referring to genetics, but rather other sociological causes as are discussed in[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

It's racist to take crime caused by a sociological factor rather than a genetic factor and call it "black crime". You should be talking about "poor crime" or "under-educated crime" or "reoffender crime" if you believe sociological factors are the cause. Conflating them with skin colour, and thus implying skin colour is the cause, is pretty much the definition of racism.

We track crime by all kinds of measures. Race, gender, age, income, education... why is one metric less significant than another? If it is, why do we track it at all?

The fact that black people commit more crime isn't less significant, it's just that it's only half the story. If we said "people living in poverty are 5* more likely to commit crime" then the obvious solution is for everyone to work harder to raise people out of poverty. By saying "black people are 5* more likely to commit crime" it defers responsibility for the crime rate away from society as a whole and on to the black community alone - even though it's the fact they're far more likely to live in poverty that's the real cause, and that's something society as a whole should be working to fix.

The problem with that is that it infantilizes a whole people. Yes, it is unfortunate the conditions[0] that some blacks live in, but there has to be a point, a line that is not crossed and if it is the individual is held fully responsible. Why shouldn't all adults be held responsible for their actions? What good does it do to send an infantilizing message saying, "If you want to commit a heinous and horrific murder, don't worry we'll take the blame :)"?

Do you think "affluenza"[1] was a worthy defence and justified not holding the person in Texas who killed people while drunk driving accountable?

Also, how does your assertion that poverty among blacks is the main if not sole cause of their elevated murder rates square with the fact that the murder rates among impoverished whites is not comparable?

[0]It is also unfortunate and misguided to place responsibility and thus responsibility to solve the problem solely on outside groups. What outside group or society should we blame for the relatively materially impoverished state of some Australian Aborigine, Papua New Guinean, Sub-Saharan African, and American Indian groups that was discovered upon their first contact with other groups? Some people just live in different ways, owing in part to the selection pressure of the environments they evolved in over many years, there's no reason to blame anyone for that.

[1]https://duckduckgo.com/?q=texas+jury+affluenza

My original point was not about who is responsible for the issue, or who should be blamed. The point was that you can't look at White attitudes towards Black people, and critique White people for being fearful towards Black people, while totally ignoring the relative crime rates.

The fact that some of these difference in crime rates can be explained by factors such as poverty, doesn't change the fact that on encountering a Black person, a White person is in more danger than encountering a White person.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

How is stating the truth racist? I think you are the one who needs to "take a chill pill".

EDIT: You need to scroll down in the wiki article to get rates for specific crimes. E.g. from the Homocide section: the offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites.

EDIT 2: And regarding capitalization, see http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173974/are-white-... It's not just murderers who capitalize Black and White.

I think arthurcolle's point is that most people believe our justice system is inherently racist; poor minorities do not have access to the same financial means for legal resources, they are not given as many breaks as rich white people, etc.

His concern seems to be that your stated source focuses on "offending" which implicitly infers that they are caught and charged by law enforcement.

Your assertion was about "commit[ing] crimes" while your fact is about "offending" or charged or convicted with crimes.

Access to legal resources is nearly exclusively related to wealth, not race. A black person will have pretty much the same access to legal resources as the equivalently wealthy white person. Poor people regardless of race don't have much access to anything.

> I think arthurcolle's point is that most people believe our justice system is inherently racist; poor minorities do not have access to the same financial means for legal resources

Class segregation isn't the same thing as racism.

Perhaps, but if you have a non-uniform distribution of race amongst classes, it's not entirely unrelated.

In that case you should check out the section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

It seems clear to me given the evidence presented, that bias in the justice system does not account for the gap when it comes to serious crimes. Given this, in my opinion "Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites" is a fair claim. I actually should have said 8x, I misremembered the article.

One interesting thing to me is that within parts of academia, it is not controversial to claim that Black people commit more crimes. Such academics seek the causes of this difference in various sociological explanations. You can see the discussion in the rest of the wiki article. But outside of academia a very different story is told. I believe that academics think that ordinary people cannot be trusted not to draw "racist" conclusions from the statistics about crime. Therefore liberal academics do nothing to dispel the myth amongst mainstream liberals, that Black crime rates are mainly due to bias in the justice system.

That Wikipedia article reflects some of the worst problems of biased sourcing on Wikipedia. (I say this as a Wikipedian who tries to fix those problems.)

I've seen a lot of different studies related to race and crime, and nothing that would imply a bias in the justice system that could explain the 8x greater rate of crimes such as homocide.

My original post was fair and correct, because all the available evidence makes it very clear that the rate at which Black people commit crimes is much higher than for White people.

There are just some things you're not supposed to notice in the US.

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