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To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com cc: (bcc: DANIEL DAVIES) bcc: DANIEL DAVIES Subject: Re: hate crimes weirdness
At 07:58 AM 2/29/00 +0000, you wrote:
>
First Russell, now this. Is someone sending fakemail to this list? :-)
>
>
>> Blacks are twice as likely as
>>whites to be charged with a "hate crime." According to data from a
>National
>>Crime Victimization Survey, published by the US Department of Justice,
>only
>>2,336 whites were charged with anti-black "hate" crimes in 1997, while
718
>>blacks were charged with anti-white crimes. Adjusting for the fact that
>>blacks make up just 13% of the population, they were statistically twice
>as
>>likely as whites to face prosecution for hate crimes.
>
[dd]>This is a junk statistic.
>It is probably a junk statistic, but for a different reason. It is a
>perfetly legitimate strategy to calculate the probabilities of being
>charged for different ethnic groups (as opposed to, say, looking into the
>ethnic distribution of the population of people being charged, as pundits
>often do).
Yeh, but the statistic mentioned doesn't measure that probability, which was the point of my hokey desert island thought experiment. The probability of an individual being charged can be estimated from the frequency of individuals actually charged if you assume a homogeneous population. But the population isn't homogeneous. The global statistic measures propensity and opportunity to commit (or be charged with) hate crimes jointly. Since there's a fairly huge white population with no opportunity, this swamps the measurement. As I said, county-level figures might be more meaningful.
>The following conclusions seem to be supported by these figures:
>1. Whites are more likely to be victimized by blacks than the other way
>around. This is particularly startling given that white to black
>population ratio is about 5:1. This means that if whites were as likely
as
>blacks to victimize someone of different ethnicity, black victimization
>rates would skyrocket.
See, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. Having grown up in a more or less all-white community, I can testify to you that if whites did not change at all but just *met* more black people, black victimisation would skyrocket.
>So contrary to your claim
>>be, though, but I suspect they may not give the politically convenient
>>implication that black people are twice as violent as whites.
>these figures suggest that black offenders are far more likely to violent
>against whites than the other way around. For that matter, black
>offenders are also more likely to be violent against blacks (89% black
>victims of completed violence were victimized by black offenders) than
>white offenders against whites (the corresponding figure is only 74.4%).
I swear to you that I'm not wrong on this one. The population statistics can only tell you about the frequency, not the propensity, because the assumption of a homogeneous population is not satisfied. You can't select 10000 black people and 10000 white people, put them together and expect these victimisation rates to prevail. There is a sense of "are more likely to" in which you're right, but it is not a sense which is contrary to my claim about whether [this statistic tells us anything about whether] black people are more (or less) *violent* than whites.
>These are the facts - the problem is what we make out of them. The
>conservatives might use these figures as the fodder for their racist
>beliefs or racial inequality, but a growing number people see it as the
>evidence that the so-called "black culture" is a problem. Those who still
>fail to see that may start with counting popular hip-hop lyrics glorifying
>gangsters and compare it with the number of lyrics glorifying black
>scholars, activists, politicians, or professionals.
>wojtek
I dispute that these are the facts, and strive to recall any rock songs about scholars, activists, politicians or professionals. "Doctor Love" is the closest that comes to mind :-)
dd
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