This Person is a Member of the US House of Representatives

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Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro

liberals are far far far to eager to score political points by talking about racist conservatives ( and if they have a chance to work in some pet policy issue of theirs like gun control or the death penalty or drug wars they jump on it) and by now republicans are sick of it and assume anything the liberals say about it is bogus race baiting. Liberals are far too happy to believe the problem is something they enjoy it being.

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That's exceptionally cynical, even by your standards. I find it hard to believe that everyone is acting in complete and total bad faith.

In other news, charges will be filed and there will be a trial. Good. That's how this is supposed to work.

According to a senior law enforcement official, Corey is expected to announce that Zimmerman will face state charges. The number or nature of the charges was not immediately known. [...]

Some of the charges that Zimmerman could possibly face range from involuntary manslaughter to voluntary manslaughter to second-degree murder, according to Mary Anne Franks, associate law professor at the University of Miami School of Law in Coral Gables, Florida. Both involuntary and voluntary manslaughter could carry up to 15 years to prison, while the second-degree murder charge could carry a sentence of life in prison.

The law enforcement official said that authorities knew where Zimmerman was and were planning to arrest him soon rather than let him turn himself in. The official said he was not in Florida.

lyk dis if u cry everytym

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

I take it you are not a fan of the book "The New Jim Crow" that all the Sociology majors at my campus have to read.

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I am not. The author goes to ridiculous lengths to blame black incarceration rates on anything and everything besides black behavior, and her talk of a new caste system and a new Jim Crow forces the reader to question her grasp of the subject matter. Also, it is essentially a copy of several other books with the author's unsupported assertions worked in here and there. Basically, it is pseudo intellectual dribble propped up by pseudo science meant to give new life to the black oppression industry, and it does not surprise me that it is being peddled on college campuses.

If the author wanted to be truly groundbreaking, as her prose makes it desperately clear that she does, she could have attempted to address the reasons why black people are more likely to engage in criminal behavior than other races. Such an investigation would have certainly highlighted some actually important issues surrounding severe poverty, the lack of opportunities in inner cities, the cultural failings surrounding familial and parental expectations, and a culture that glorifies criminal activity. Such a line of reasoning apparently did not occur to the author as she seems incapable of accepting the basic premise, preferring to blame all of black America's problems on what she refers to as the 'white system'.

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Originally Posted by Strike

It becomes a revolving door only after the book gets thrown at them the first time.

The outcomes of the United States justice system are racist. That is not to say the institutions are racist but the end result certainly is.

I don't think you can ever prove why that is without conjecture but we can at least acknoweldge that fact. The data points that out beyond a doubt.

We are only 40 years removed from firebombings and assinations for equal voting rights. Why is it so out of the realm of possibilty that the system can still be prejudical?

Really the end result of the disproportionate penal population is the culmination of a litany of things including but not limited to the drug war, overcrowding, three strike, mandatory minimums, the fallacy of being "tough on crime", bias

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I do not believe adverse impact is a valid concept. Black people are imprisoned more often than whites for the same crimes because they often have longer criminal records than whites. Black people are policed more than whites because they often live in high crime areas - crimes committed by black people. The truth is that black people are the genesis of the 'problem' of disproportionately high black incarceration rates. I would even go so far as to say that black people are the genesis of most of their own problems in contemporary times. That fact cannot be obscured by conjuring up sympathetic emotional appeals to fire bombings or other excesses from the '60s.

What is more disturbing is the logical outcome of such thinking - affirmative action in sentencing.

I'm not absolving anyone of their crimes, just looking for answers. What passes for black culture in America is really the culture of the underclass, and a big reason for the cycle of povertyYes it is true blacks have longer records and live in higher crime areas due to the fact the book is thrown at them more oftenI'm not asking for any special treatment just recognition. The problems can be fixed or at least mitigated without ever bringing race into the legislationTyped from my 0hone

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Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger

I am not. The author goes to ridiculous lengths to blame black incarceration rates on anything and everything besides black behavior, and her talk of a new caste system and a new Jim Crow forces the reader to question her grasp of the subject matter. Also, it is essentially a copy of several other books with the author's unsupported assertions worked in here and there. Basically, it is pseudo intellectual dribble propped up by pseudo science meant to give new life to the black oppression industry, and it does not surprise me that it is being peddled on college campuses.

If the author wanted to be truly groundbreaking, as her prose makes it desperately clear that she does, she could have attempted to address the reasons why black people are more likely to engage in criminal behavior than other races. Such an investigation would have certainly highlighted some actually important issues surrounding severe poverty, the lack of opportunities in inner cities, the cultural failings surrounding familial and parental expectations, and a culture that glorifies criminal activity. Such a line of reasoning apparently did not occur to the author as she seems incapable of accepting the basic premise, preferring to blame all of black America's problems on what she refers to as the 'white system'.

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But let's talk about an example and see what your response is to that. If I remember correctly, the penalties for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine are very disproportionate. Drugs are often absorbed and incorporated into a "scene" or social group and associated with them thereafter. For crack cocaine, it's the lower ends of the socioeconomic ladder, while powdered cocaine is what the rich bankers and wall street types are doing off their escorts for the night. It's the same drug, cocaine, just in different forms, different methods of absorption into your body. Why is it that the one which affects the disproportionately poor black is punished way, way harsher? You can talk all you want about black behavior, but why is it that the laws are different to begin with, and is this a problem from your perspective?

Mind you, I am not trying to take a side here. I just want your side fleshed out a bit more.

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

But let's talk about an example and see what your response is to that. If I remember correctly, the penalties for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine are very disproportionate. Drugs are often absorbed and incorporated into a "scene" or social group and associated with them thereafter. For crack cocaine, it's the lower ends of the socioeconomic ladder, while powdered cocaine is what the rich bankers and wall street types are doing off their escorts for the night. It's the same drug, cocaine, just in different forms, different methods of absorption into your body. Why is it that the one which affects the disproportionately poor black is punished way, way harsher? You can talk all you want about black behavior, but why is it that the laws are different to begin with, and is this a problem from your perspective?

Mind you, I am not trying to take a side here. I just want your side fleshed out a bit more.

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Poor whites do crack also. Punishments for meth are very high as well a drug mostly used by whites. It all revolves around wealth not race. Blacks will never be able to advance in American society like they whine for until they discard their asbsurd and constant victim complex. Where is the thread for the beating of that white man in Baltimore by those blacks? Now THERE is a racially motivated crime. I'm sick of America's obsession with color its pathetic.

GC seriously you change your opinion on everything so quickly..... do you possess any deep seated beliefs whatsoever

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Originally Posted by Centurion1

Poor whites do crack also. Punishments for meth are very high as well a drug mostly used by whites. It all revolves around wealth not race. Blacks will never be able to advance in American society like they whine for until they discard their asbsurd and constant victim complex. Where is the thread for the beating of that white man in Baltimore by those blacks? Now THERE is a racially motivated crime. I'm sick of America's obsession with color its pathetic.

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And there are rich blacks as well. This is all missing the point though. Blacks are disproportionately in the lower ends and whites the other way around. I don't know the proper expression, but you get what I am saying Cent, yes?

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

But let's talk about an example and see what your response is to that. If I remember correctly, the penalties for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine are very disproportionate. Drugs are often absorbed and incorporated into a "scene" or social group and associated with them thereafter. For crack cocaine, it's the lower ends of the socioeconomic ladder, while powdered cocaine is what the rich bankers and wall street types are doing off their escorts for the night. It's the same drug, cocaine, just in different forms, different methods of absorption into your body. Why is it that the one which affects the disproportionately poor black is punished way, way harsher? You can talk all you want about black behavior, but why is it that the laws are different to begin with, and is this a problem from your perspective?

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They reversed that a couple years ago. It's a good example of an injustice, but we are still stuck without a glimpse of the whole picture.

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Originally Posted by Lemur

In fairness, I do understand why some folks are dismissive of white racism. The video linked below the spoil, for example, is guaranteed to make any citizen's blood boil, especially when the chief of police announces it is not a hate crime.

Warning, graphic video of a guy getting mobbed, beaten and stripped. Profanity is the least of it. Guaranteed to raise your blood pressure and make you angry/sick/disgusted, so watch at own risk.

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That puts Mr. Derbishire's rules for navigating America's racial waters in a different perspective, no? That poor tourist broke a number of them and paid the price.

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Originally Posted by ACIN

But let's talk about an example and see what your response is to that. If I remember correctly, the penalties for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine are very disproportionate. Drugs are often absorbed and incorporated into a "scene" or social group and associated with them thereafter. For crack cocaine, it's the lower ends of the socioeconomic ladder, while powdered cocaine is what the rich bankers and wall street types are doing off their escorts for the night. It's the same drug, cocaine, just in different forms, different methods of absorption into your body. Why is it that the one which affects the disproportionately poor black is punished way, way harsher? You can talk all you want about black behavior, but why is it that the laws are different to begin with, and is this a problem from your perspective?

Mind you, I am not trying to take a side here. I just want your side fleshed out a bit more.

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This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. When crack hit the scene in the 80's, it was devastating to urban communities in a way that powdered cocaine never was (Wall Street types could party on the weekends and make it in to work on Mondays). Politicians, including many black leaders, pushed for tougher laws on crack in response to the perceived crisis, just as meth laws have been strengthened in response to the real or imagined 'epidemic'. It is standard fare for politicians to react to ‘crises’ with tough legislation.

Debating the efficacy of such legislation and particularly whether harsher sentences deter drug use is a legitimate discussion. What is not legitimate is to inject race into the issue in order to imply the existence of some nefarious system built to keep the black man down. I mean, if it could be said that crack is a black drug (which it certainly is not), it could be said that meth is the drug of choice for white trash across the country. Should the war on meth be interpreted as a plot to keep Appalachia in trailer parks and out of mainstream society? The author and people who argue from that perspective twist facts and stats to fit a racially driven narrative that an objective analysis of that information would not support. It is intellectually bankrupt race baiting, and it should be called out as such.

The real story, if there is one to tell, is that harsh drug laws probably do more damage than good. And to bring this all the way back to Trayvon Martin: as Lemur has said, there is a legitimate story about whether the police responded to the incident correctly or not. However, the race baiters have twisted the story into one of racism and racial injustice, despite all facts to the contrary. I hate these people. They seek division and perpetual racial disharmony in America under the guise of fighting for the exact opposite position.

Tough legislation would be a good idea - make the tough decision to legalise it and set up a god newtork of support and rehab clinics. Take a way the stigma.

Posturing to lock people up for 50 years is easy.

~:smoking:

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Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

And there are rich blacks as well. This is all missing the point though. Blacks are disproportionately in the lower ends and whites the other way around. I don't know the proper expression, but you get what I am saying Cent, yes?

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Thus proving my point, it is not racial its about the lower classes being underrepresented. Why blacks are poor is another minefield to cross.

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Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. When crack hit the scene in the 80's, it was devastating to urban communities in a way that powdered cocaine never was (Wall Street types could party on the weekends and make it in to work on Mondays). Politicians, including many black leaders, pushed for tougher laws on crack in response to the perceived crisis, just as meth laws have been strengthened in response to the real or imagined 'epidemic'. It is standard fare for politicians to react to ‘crises’ with tough legislation.

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Don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining. The idea that somehow the wall street types were more apt to pull themselves out of their drug stupor is a fallacy. Walls Streets neighborhoods were less patrolled, their lawyers better, and the sentences lighter. Thus poor black men go to prison longer and more often and they come out violent.

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Debating the efficacy of such legislation and particularly whether harsher sentences deter drug use is a legitimate discussion. What is not legitimate is to inject race into the issue in order to imply the existence of some nefarious system built to keep the black man down. I mean, if it could be said that crack is a black drug (which it certainly is not), it could be said that meth is the drug of choice for white trash across the country. Should the war on meth be interpreted as a plot to keep Appalachia in trailer parks and out of mainstream society? The author and people who argue from that perspective twist facts and stats to fit a racially driven narrative that an objective analysis of that information would not support. It is intellectually bankrupt race baiting, and it should be called out as such.

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It's not nefarious nor is it a conspiracy. There is an overwhelming amount of empirical data to back this up, we all know it is but if want me to link it I can. Certain legislation has led to racial outcomes in the judicary that can't be chalked up to chance alone. Now I certainly don't place the blame soley on the justice system, the media is just a cuppable for glorfying black culture in the most primal ways.

I agree the drug war is the root of all this, I'm just not going to discount the race factor simply becuase it's icky. Race baiting is Trayvon Martin, this is not.

Why would cops patrol low crime neighborhoods instead of high crime neighborhoods? I would rather someone explained the empirical data to me than linked to it. It's quite possible that the best police method leads to a disparate outcome. Should we make it so that all lawyers work for the same fee?


edit: basically, one of the main justifications for the war on drugs is supposed to be that it allows police to go after violent criminals. People who get beat up often are wary of testifying, so it's much more effective to get the violent criminals on drug charges.

Going back to the Martin case, now that Zimmerman is charged and in custody, the best possible outcome would be for him to get a fair trial. Here's hoping.

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Originally Posted by Papewaio

Being a poor minority does disenfranchise people from the mainstream.

And socio-economic background particularly parenting is a major factor in how a child develops.

It's interesting to see how different immigrant groups prosper in new countries. Those which integrate, which work hard, which have a low crime rate... Look for the magic sauce in that.

Building block of societies are families. Dysfunctional families in groups create dysfunctional neighborhoods. Make it multi-generational and you have self replicating dysfunctional groups. The key is to figure out what can be done to stop the cancerous spread and reverse it. One thing to do is penalize deadbeat dads on the social welfare system. However as enamouring as that stick is, it doesn't stop the next generation forming. You've got to somehow instill pride in self and something to live for in youths who have no viable role models.

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From what I have seen, pretty much the only real determiner of success and prosperity is education, and children only get educated if their parents support them. That doesn't mean the parents need to be educated, only that they instill the idea that getting out of a crap life is education.

On topic:

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0514hm.html

HEATHER MAC DONALD
Distorting the Truth About Crime and Race
The New York Times is at it again.
14 May 2010
The New York Times’s front page story this week on the New York Police Department and its allegedly racist stop-and-frisk practices follows a well-worn template: give specific racial breakdowns for every aspect of police behavior, but refer to racial crime rates only in the most attenuated of terms. Disclosing crime rates—the proper benchmark against which police behavior must be measured—would demolish a cornerstone of the Times’s worldview: that the New York Police Department, like police departments across America, oppresses the city’s black population with unjustified racial tactics.

This week’s story, written by Al Baker, began with what the Times thinks is a shocking disparity: “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.” (The fact that blacks, Hispanics, and whites are arrested at the same rate after a stop undercuts, rather than supports, the thesis of racially biased policing, but more on that later.)

The Times’s story includes a graphic breakdown of police stops by race: blacks made up 55 percent of all stops in 2009, though they’re only 23 percent of the city’s population; whites accounted for 10 percent of all stops, though they’re 35 percent of the city’s population; Hispanics made up 32 percent of all stops, though 28 percent of the population, and Asians, 3 percent of all stops and 12 percent of the population. The article details a host of other police actions by specific racial numbers, including arrests, frisks, and use of force.

But when the Times gets around to mentioning crime rates, more than halfway into the piece, it does so only because the NYPD raises them in its defense, not because the Times deems them independently worthy of note in a story on police stops. And it mentions them only as a form of reported speech, in the most generalized of terms: “Mr. Browne, the department spokesman, . . . said the stops mirrored crime—that while a large percentage of the stops involved blacks, an even larger percentage of violent crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims.” This formula, which carefully brackets a non-specific statement about crime rates as what the police department says, as opposed to simply what the facts are, is by now standard Times practice:

February 11, 2010: “Police officials have said that while a large percentage of the street stops involve blacks, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”

May 13, 2009: “On Tuesday, Mr. Browne said that the stops ‘comport by race proportionally with descriptions provided by crime victims.’”

February 11, 2009: “The police have said that while a large percentage of the stops involve black people, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”

May 6, 2008: “The police have said that while a large percentage of the street stops involve black people, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”

Only in 2007 did the Times disclose some actual black crime rates in discussing stop-and-frisk activity—though as usual, only as an aspect of the NYPD’s defense of itself, and only by attributing those crime rates to what the police “say,” as if they were a matter of opinion, unlike the stop-and-frisk rates, which the paper reports as a fact so indisputable that it does not need a source. That 2007 slip has never been allowed to reappear, however; the disclosure of crime rates has been purged from all subsequent Times stories on the NYPD’s stop activities. The actual numbers convey the shocking magnitude of the city’s crime disparities with a vividness that a mere generalized statement about a “larger percentage of crimes than stops” cannot, which is why the numbers are almost always left out. The actual crime rates reveal that blacks are being significantly understopped, compared with their representation in the city’s criminal population, another reason for omitting them from the paper’s reporting.

Here are the crime data that the Times doesn’t want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator—a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times’s lead, which stated that “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped.” These crime data are not some artifact that the police devise out of their skewed racial mindset. They are what the victims of those crimes—the vast majority of whom are minority themselves—report to the police.


You cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime. Crime is what drives NYPD tactics; it is the basis of everything the department does. And crime, as reported by victims and witnesses, sends police overwhelmingly to minority neighborhoods, because that’s where the vast majority of crime occurs—by minority criminals against minority victims.

The Times’s analysis, by contrast, which follows in lock step with the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, assumes that policing should mirror census data. The only numerical benchmark that the Times provides for the NYPD’s stop data is the city’s population ratios. According to this analysis, since whites are 35 percent of the city’s population, they should be 35 percent of police stops, even though they commit only 5 percent of all violent crimes. But using census data as a benchmark for policing is as nonsensical as it would be to use census data for fire department activity. If a particular census tract has a disproportionate number of fires, and another census tract has none, no one expects the FDNY to send out fire trucks to non-existent fires in the fire-free census tract just for the sake of equal representation.

The proactive policing revolution that began under NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994 declared that the police would actually lower crime—an unheard-of idea in the annals of policing. To accomplish that feat, the department began rigorously scrutinizing crime data on a daily basis and deploying officers to crime hot spots. Once there, officers were expected to be on the look-out for suspicious behavior. If there had been a string of robberies at ATMs in East Flatbush, for example, and an officer saw two guys apparently casing an ATM user from across the street, who then walked quickly away when they spotted the uniform, the officer was expected to stop and question the two men. If thieves had been preying on senior citizens in Harlem, someone walking closely behind a retiree in the 28th precinct and looking furtively over his shoulder would likely be stopped by an officer deployed there in response to the crime spike. Those stops may not have resulted in an arrest, if no evidence of a crime were found, but they may have disrupted a crime in the making.

This data-driven, proactive style of policing, which came to be known as Compstat, led to the largest crime drop in recent memory. The biggest returns were in New York’s minority neighborhoods, because that’s where crime was and still is the highest. Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79 percent of the 78 percent decline in homicide victims since 1990. Over 10,000 black and Hispanic males are alive today who would have been dead had homicide rates remained at early 1990s levels.

The Times’s article is filled with the usual NYPD critics. There’s Donna Lieberman and Christopher Dunn from the New York Civil Liberties Union, Darius Charney from the Center for Constitutional Rights (which is suing the department over its stop policies), Jeffrey Fagan from Columbia University law school, and “researchers” from the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. These critics’ understanding of policing and crime is quixotic, to put it kindly. At a panel on stop and frisks at the New York City Bar Association this March (in which I participated), Fagan proposed the Chicago Police Department, which does not use proactive stops, as a model of policing that the NYPD should emulate. Fagan did not mention that New York City’s homicide rate is two-fifths that of Chicago, and that juveniles in the Windy City under the age of 17 are killed at four times the rate of those in New York, an epidemic of youth killings so severe as to prompt an emergency visit from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last October. The director of John Jay’s Center on Race, Crime and Justice maintains that because the absolute number of homicides committed nationally by blacks, on the one hand, and whites and Hispanics, on the other, is roughly the same (though blacks commit more), there is no black crime problem.

The Times, however, did not consult any minority supporters of Compstat policing to get their perspective on whether the police are bearing down too hard in high-crime neighborhoods. A good place to start would have been a police-community meeting in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, or other any high-crime area. Here is what the reporter would have heard from community members: “We want more officers, we want more arrests, we want the dealers off the corner.” The police cannot respond to these heartfelt requests for public safety without generating disproportionate stop data that can be used against them in a racial profiling law suit. If a grandmother in a public housing project calls the police about the young drug dealers in her lobby, a properly responsive officer is going to question the youths hanging out there. The officer is not “profiling” the youths; he is responding to a citizen request for action. But the NYCLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights will tally all those stops against the police as evidence of “racial profiling.” The police aren’t getting calls from Riverdale residents about the young gang members congregating on the corner or in their lobby. If they were, the police would respond the same way that they do in Harlem: by finding legal grounds to stop the gang members and let them know that they’re being watched. (For the record, the paper cited me as the other voice besides the NYPD spokesman supporting the department’s stop tactics.)

Contrary to the Times’s assumption, the fact that an identical proportion of stops of whites and blacks—10 percent—results in an arrest or summons strongly suggests that the police use the identical quantum of reasonable suspicion in stopping whites and blacks. The police stop a greater absolute number of blacks because the overwhelming majority of crime, suspicious behavior, and calls to respond to crime occurs in black neighborhoods.

Given the vast disproportion in the city’s crime rates, you can either have policing that goes after crime and saves minority lives, or you can have policing that mirrors the city’s census data. You cannot have both. If the NYPD responds to the incessant pressure from the Times and the city’s anti-cop activists to conform its policing activity to population rates, the law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods will be hurt the most.

The Times’s radically incomplete front-page story, like so many that preceded it, only makes the NYPD’s job more difficult. It fuels the animosity against the police that makes witnesses less likely to cooperate with officers and suspects more likely to resist arrest. It is crime, not race, that leads to more stops in minority neighborhoods. The crime disparities in the city are deeply troubling, and thus have been regarded as taboo. But until those crime rates are acknowledged, reporting on police activity through an incomplete racial lens will continue to defame the NYPD and mislead the public about its work.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Are Cops Racist? How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans.

Interestingly the comments in the NYT article linked at the beginning are very anti-nyt on this one. How much of the anti-police stuff from left wing journalists is just an attempt at squeezing more mileage from racial profiling anecdotes?

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Originally Posted by from the comments

I am african-american, a former New YOrker, female mid 40's well dressed. I was walking with a white female into subway in Brooklyn. A female officer stopped us and said to me and gestured "her bag," to me and a male officer doing the scanning. My friend thought she meant her, the fem officer again said-"no her." The only difference other than race was that my bag was slightly bigger-big enough for a computer. They swiped and scan my bag for bombs. I Felt I was racially profiled-even more I felt like we now live in a police state! The police man then asked us "so where are you guys coming from?" We just wanted to get on the subway that's all no more no less, freedom of movement freedom from harrassment. Is this still America?

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Though they usually try better anecdotes than this one :laugh4:

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Here are the crime data that the Times doesn’t want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator—a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times’s lead, which stated that “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped.” These crime data are not some artifact that the police devise out of their skewed racial mindset. They are what the victims of those crimes—the vast majority of whom are minority themselves—report to the police.

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Thank you for posting that article Sasaki.

This is what I was trying to say. The race baiters conflate the percentages of different races in the general population with the percentages of races in the criminal population in a cynical effort to prolong racial animus in the country. White privilege, institutional racism, and a new caste system are all red herrings. Prison populations are disproportionately black because the criminal population is disproportionately black. If they accurately represented racial crime rates, they would probably be even more black than they already are.

What is truly lamentable is that the current slate of black leadership is full such race baiters, more content to blame black problems on abstract, reality-challenged notions of white racism than to confront the truth about their own community. Until they do, black people will still make up an incredibly high percentage of the nation's criminals, and that fact will still somehow be the fault of white people.

In other news, another day, another clown with a scary amount of influence in national politics. (And no, she's not on her way to a costume party.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmg1aY6_AJI

So the critical question here (and one that may not have an easy answer) is why is the criminal population disproportionately black? Do we want to make any argument that it involves genetics? Can it all be explained by economic factors? How much of it is tied to black culture (and how did the culture get that way, and what would it take to change it)? What other factors may be playing a role?

Ajax

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Originally Posted by ajaxfetish

Do we want to make any argument that it involves genetics?

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That strikes me as unnecessary when there is a much more proximate cause for social-norm breakdown at hand: the deliberate breaking up of families under slavery.

The family is the basic unit of social cohesion and civilization. Destroy the family unit over multiple generations? You get what you get. (Reminds me of Lincoln's quote, not the one about the internet, but about how America will pay for slavery for at least as long as the peculiar institution existed. So 150 years down, only 250 to go!)

Note that black immigrants post-slavery generally adhere to the usual immigrant statistics; there's nothing extra-bad about them. They perform in line with the Irish and Italians and so on and so forth. So clearly the cause for breakdown is closer to home, and I think it's blindingly obvious.

No idea what our society as a whole can do to address it, however. No clear fixes for dysfunctional family units.

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Originally Posted by Lemur

That strikes me as unnecessary when there is a much more proximate cause for social-norm breakdown at hand: the deliberate breaking up of families under slavery.

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I find it difficult to subscribe to this notion. It plays into white guilt more than statistical reality. Modern scholarship can trace no direct line between slavery and the state of the modern black family, as the breaking up of families was not as common as was once assumed and black families strengthened (i.e. became more two-parent) for several generations before deteriorating. Contemporary understanding of the problem pins the blame squarely on the welfare policies of the Great Society that perversely encouraged black men to live outside of the home so black women could collect.

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IT ONCE WAS fashionable to suppose that slavery had made the conventional family difficult to sustain because of spouses so often being sold away from one another and children being separated from their parents. A natural conclusion was that, after slavery, the old patterns persisted, especially given how difficult conditions continued to be for black people, and that this was an understandable precursor to the fatherless norm in inner-city black communities after the 1960s. There is, indeed, sociological literature showing that it was hardly unknown for black people to be raised by single mothers during slavery and afterward. In fact, over the last 150 years, there have always been proportionately more single-parent black homes than white ones.

However, as classic work by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman has shown, despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.

A standard reference on the subject by University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles in 1994 is most often taken as evidence of the uninteresting—that, gosh, in the old days poor black people didn’t find single parenthood unusual. What is actually more important in its findings is that, from 1880 to 1960, fewer than one in three black children nationwide didn’t grow up with two parents. Another key statistic, from Barbara Agresti in 1978, is that, just past emancipation, in 1870 in Walton County, Florida, about 57 percent of black children lived with two parents; just 15 years later, 89 percent did. Or, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton told us in Black Metropolis, in Chicago in the 1920s, it was considered a problem that just one in seven black children were born to single mothers. What’s more, that number went down during the Depression, not up.

Data like this are important because they show that the reason so few black children grow up without fathers today is not a mere matter of economics or, more graphically, because black men without college degrees find it so hard to get decent work that they abandon their children. After all, black people living under the vicious racism of 100 years ago nevertheless tended, very strongly, to form two-parent families.

Rather, what happens today is more a matter of what people in inner-city neighborhoods grow up seeing as normal (note my evasion of the loaded word culture, although for those who can stomach it, it is precisely what I mean). Plus, there is the sheer fact that, from the 1960s until 1996, expanded welfare policies made it possible to stay on welfare as a mother indefinitely without job training—impossible before the ’60s, and much less common today in most states than it was before 1996. This is why a man could so easily leave kids he fathered to be raised alone—and unsurprisingly, starting in the 1970s, an unprecedented number did.

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Originally Posted by Lemur

Another one bites the dust at NRO.

In fairness, I do understand why some folks are dismissive of white racism. The video linked below the spoil, for example, is guaranteed to make any citizen's blood boil, especially when the chief of police announces it is not a hate crime.

Warning, graphic video of a guy getting mobbed, beaten and stripped. Profanity is the least of it. Guaranteed to raise your blood pressure and make you angry/sick/disgusted, so watch at own risk.

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See people! I'm telling you; Baltimore. :no:

Is it possible to necropost within an active thread?

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Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger

Modern scholarship can trace no direct line between slavery and the state of the modern black family, as the breaking up of families was not as common as was once assumed and black families strengthened (i.e. became more two-parent) for several generations before deteriorating. Contemporary understanding of the problem pins the blame squarely on the welfare policies of the Great Society that perversely encouraged black men to live outside of the home so black women could collect.

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That sounds rather incomplete as an explanation. Doesn't address why (in some regions) black families are so much more fragmented than, say, Appalachian white families. After all, the largest percentage of welfare recipients are white. Why don't they have the same level of familial breakdown? Or do they fragment with less result?

Like I said, incomplete.

I'm not one to invoke white guilt, but buying and selling mothers, fathers, sons and daughters for centuries seems like the sort of thing that might have an impact on the family unit. That's not statistics, that's common sense.

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TAfter all, the largest percentage of welfare recipients are white. Why don't they have the same level of familial breakdown?

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Just being clear, do these percentage take into account the higher population of white people in america overall?

Check out the videos o Eric Holder going before committee in 2010 for the new hate crime laws, and upon being asked how and when it would be applied in identical cases of blck on white crime, his response was something to the effect of "we are only going to pursue cases where the victims belong to a group that has historically been oppressed."

I get it. Very well, actually. And it's retarded.

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Originally Posted by Greyblades

Just being clear, do these percentage take into account the higher population of white people in america overall?

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Actually, my statistics appear to be out-of-date anyway. Supposedly there are now more black Americans than white Americans on welfare. My bad. In my defense, I can only say that there used to be more whites on welfare than any other ethnicity. I expect some combination of Clinton's welfare reform and the recent mega-recession changed that fact.

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Originally Posted by Lemur

That sounds rather incomplete as an explanation. Doesn't address why (in some regions) black families are so much more fragmented than, say, Appalachian white families. After all, the largest percentage of welfare recipients are white. Why don't they have the same level of familial breakdown? Or do they fragment with less result?

Like I said, incomplete.

I'm not one to invoke white guilt, but buying and selling mothers, fathers, sons and daughters for centuries seems like the sort of thing that might have an impact on the family unit. That's not statistics, that's common sense.

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It may be common sense, but it does not actually make sense when the historical statistics on black family creation are examined. In order to convincingly hypothesize a link between slavery and the poor state of the black family unit today, one would expect to see a steady, or at least a steadily trending, rise in the percentage of single parent families from that era to today as the effects of the family breakups compounded and became normative. Instead, the data shows that slavery was not all that damaging to the black family and that the percentage of single parent families decreased dramatically for multiple generations until the sudden reversal that began in the '70s. Why would the existence of slavery more than a century before cause a sudden and rapid deterioration of the black family when it seemingly had no effect on earlier generations that were chronologically closer to the institution?

I agree that the welfare theory is incomplete, but it does make more sense in my opinion than trying to draw a link back to slavery. For over thirty years black parents had a financial incentive to live apart. A family could not receive welfare if there was an able-bodied male living in the home. That is enough time for some very insidious habits to form, habits that correlate very closely with the sudden breakup of the black family. Add to that the Cloward-Pivenite social activists that targetted inner city black communities specifically to normalize welfare and swell the rolls, and you have a very unique incentivization for broken families that did not exist in other parts of the country such as Appalachia. In any event, it seems to be a theory that many social scientists and historians are gravitating toward.

I am having a hard time believing that a welfare check is a big enough incentive to ward off people falling in love with each other and forming families.

Maybe I just don't know anything about people.

sometimes "families" are accidental...sometimes people are teenagers...

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Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro

sometimes "families" are accidental...sometimes people are teenagers...

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But what came first, the high percentage of pregnant teenagers or the breakdown in black culture that set the stage for a higher percentage of teenagers to become pregnant.

ask antonio cromartie