Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell

Author:Thomas Sowell
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

Crime Statistics and Arrest Statistics

Some of the most gross distortions of reality through errors of omission have involved quite simple omissions. No one needs to be an expert on the complexities of statistics in order to see through many statistical fallacies, including those based on simple omissions. But it does require stopping to think about the numbers, instead of being swept along by a combination of statistics and rhetoric.

Statistics cited in support of claims that the police target blacks for arrests usually go no further than showing that the proportion of black people arrested greatly exceeds the roughly 13 percent of the American population who are black.

If anyone were to use similar reasoning to claim that National Basketball Association (NBA) referees were racially biased, because the proportion of fouls that referees call against black players in the NBA greatly exceeds 13 percent, anyone familiar with the NBA would immediately see the fallacy—because the proportion of black players in the NBA greatly exceeds the proportion of blacks in the American population.

Moreover, since blacks are especially over-represented among the star players in the NBA, the actual playing time of black players on the floor would be even more disproportionately higher, and it is the players on the floor who get cited for fouls more so than secondary players sitting on the bench.

What would be relevant to testing the hypothesis that blacks are disproportionately targeted for arrest by the police, or disproportionately convicted and sentenced by courts, would be objective data on the proportions of particular violations of the law committed by blacks, compared to the proportions of blacks arrested, convicted and sentenced for those particular violations.

Such objective data are not always easy to come by, since data reflecting actions by the police would hardly be considered valid as a test of whether the actions of the police were warranted. However, there are some particular statistics that are both relevant and independent of the actions of the police.

The most reliable and objective crime statistics are statistics on homicides, since a dead body can hardly be ignored, regardless of the race of the victim. For as long as homicide statistics have been kept in the United States, the proportion of homicide victims who are black has been some multiple of the proportion of blacks in the population. Moreover, the vast majority of those homicide victims whose killers have been found were killed by other blacks, just as most white homicide victims were killed by other whites.

Since the homicide rate among blacks is some multiple of the homicide rate among whites, it is hardly surprising that the arrest rate of blacks for homicide is also some multiple of the rate of homicide arrests among whites. It has nothing to do with the proportion of blacks in the general population, and everything to do with the proportion of blacks among people who commit a particular crime.

Another violation of the law that can be tested and quantified, independently of the police, is driving in excess of highway speed limits.

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