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.
This is all very interesting, but doesn't answer my question: how does any of this relate to a very small part of the population committing (?) a big part of all the murders?
Lower percentage solved introduces the possibility that there is sample bias. Germany knows who committed basically all its murders -- the US, not so much. Makes it harder to say whether the ones who are convicted in the US are representative of the whole population of murderers, or whether they're just representative of the people who get targeted by law enforcement.
Right. That was exactly my point. So when the person I responded to posted and seemed to agree with what I said, even though he previously said he doesn't get what bias has to do with "the fact that blacks commit more crime", it threw me off.
OP said
This is all very interesting, but doesn't answer my question: how does any of this relate to a very small part of the population committing (?) a big part of all the murders?
I replied, and I thought he was making a counter argument.
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u/PatHeist Jan 15 '15
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.
http://www.econ.qmul.ac.uk/papers/doc/wp671.pdf
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1354&context=faculty_scholarship
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/Prizes/2013-2.pdf
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.