JohnStOnge wrote:BTW, since I mentioned it I went ahead and located the latest table on the perceived race of violent criminal victimization offenders (2008). Maybe you can find a later one. But if you do the basic picture isn't going to change. I've followed these things for years because it has nothing to do with the Criminal Justice system so nobody can come with allegations about how the Criminal Justice system is unfair to Blacks and that's why friggin' something over 40% of people incarcerated in the United States are Black at any given time when Blacks make up about 13% of the population. Here's a link to the table:
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus ... cv0840.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I don't need to list numbers for you. You can look at the table and see for yourself. Another thing is that it's reasonable to think that somewhere around 80% of the crimes listed for any particular category were committed by males of any given racial group. You can kind of gather that by going to the index and clicking on the link referring to perceived gender of offender (index at
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/html/cvu ... ons462.cfm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). And you can use Census Bureau data to figure that Black males are about 6% of the national population.
So you can do some math and ballpark figure that the victims in about 36% of the robberies (offender perceived as male 85.8% of the time), for instance, perceived their attackers as Black Males when Black Males are only 6% of the population. That can't be translated to a rate at which individual Black Males commit robberies because criminals typically victimize on multiple occasions. But just for comparison we can create a "victimization factor" by dividing 33/6 to get 5.7. Go through the same process for White Males and you end up with a "victimization factor" of about 1. In other words, the proportion of incidents in which a robbery victim perceived the attacker as a White Male is equal to the proportion of White Males in the population while the proportion of incidents in which a robbery victim perceived the attacker as a Black Male is 5.7 times the proportion of Black Males in the population.
I suppose one can try to dismiss any observation of differences associated with race as "racism." But it doesn't make the differences any less real. There is absolutely no question, none, that if someone was released from the shackles of political correctness and allowed to do a risk model along the lines of what insurance companies like to do for other things "Black Male" would stand out as associated with a high relative risk of violent crime.
Of course most people don't think in terms of risk models. But their own qualitative observations and commons sense tell them the same thing. You'd have to be a complete idiot or be intensely devoted to not believing the obvious not to recognize it. Unfortunately there are a lot of people intensely devoted to not believing the obvious.
That high relative risk, in turn, means people are going to look at Black Males differently. But you can't legitimately blame them. It's a bit much to ask people to ignore the obvious reality that if you randomly select a Black Male and know nothing else about him you're looking at much higher risk than you are looking at if you randomly select, say, a White Male and know nothing else about him. If you randomly select one White Male and one Black Male while assuming the Black Male is more dangerous you could be wrong. But if you do that a very large number of times and pretty much make it your modus operandi you will be right a WHOLE lot more often than you will be wrong. I'd say it's reasonable to think something like 80 to 90% of the time.
If you know me you know I consider police to be a necessary evil and that the job selects for people that may not be of the most pleasant type. But police do encounter a lot of potentially dangerous situations and asking them to pretend that the obvious risk distribution that is reality does not exist is a bit much. To ask them to act like seeing a White guy means the same thing as seeing a Black guy in terms of what's going to happen over a large number of encounters is asking them to ignore the truth.
