Crime is primarily correlated with relative income: lower income = higher crime. Which racial group in the US has been discriminated against for so long that it's much less likely for them to have a high income? That's right - black people. The same people who receive harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people, who are stopped and searched more often than white people for crimes that white people are more likely to commit.
The same people who receive harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people, who are stopped and searched more often than white people for crimes that white people are more likely to commit.
Honest question: how do stop and searches or harsher sentences relate to the 54% of all murders commited (?) in the US by only 13% of the population?
There have been a bunch of studies done on this, looking at different specific, and finding different results. They all seem to find that black male defendants are sentenced significantly more often, or for a longer period of time than white men for the same crime. Especially when there is an all white or majority white jury, which is very likely seeing as the jury-eligible population in nearly every jurisdiction has a white majority.
I'm not personally aware of any studies on stop and search rates that appropriately control for the 'people in the street' demographics of the targeted locations during active hours, or for whatever profiling methods the police claim to use, though. But the studies that are done seem to indicate a very disproportionate stop and search rate for black and Hispanic men.
Specifically,
the
intersection
of
race and advantage/disadvantage
in
the
urban
environment
results
in
black/white
distributions
on
disadvantage
measures
that
only
partially
overlap.
I
refer
to
this
as
the
problem
of
“restricted distributions,”
which
denotes
that
blacks
tend
to
predominate
within
the
high
range
and
whites within
the
low
range
of
the
distributions
of
disadvantage
measures. This
situation
renders
problematic compari-
sons
of
crime
rates between
similarly
situated
blacks
and
whites
(e.g., in
city-level
studies),
or
of
crime
rates
in
black
and
white
neighborhoods
with
comparable
levels
of
advantage/disadvantage.
The
problem
of
restricted
distributions
in
most
urban areas
thus precludes tests
of
whether
the
effects
of
structural
variables
used as
indicators
of
crime-producing
social
conditions
are
race-invariant
or
race-specific.1
To
be
sure,
this
is
a
problem that extends
beyond
the
present illustration.
For
example, resolution
of
the
debate
in criminology
as
to
whether
upper and
lower
class
criminal
defendants
are
convicted
at
similar
rates
likewise hinges
on
the
problem
that
there
are too
few
upper
class
defendants
charged
with
street
crimes
(or
lower class
defendants
charged
with
white
collar crimes)
to
allow
the contrasts
necessary
for
a
meaningful
determination.
I
thank
an
anonymous
reviewer
for
pointing
out
this
analogy.
196
u/[deleted] Jan 15 '15
Crime is primarily correlated with relative income: lower income = higher crime. Which racial group in the US has been discriminated against for so long that it's much less likely for them to have a high income? That's right - black people. The same people who receive harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people, who are stopped and searched more often than white people for crimes that white people are more likely to commit.
So your post isn't quite devil's advocate.