Following up with what I wrote yesterday about the missing and incorrectly interpreted data we have on Murder in terms of Race and Gender, there is another point I want to discuss about other crimes to provide context.
As we all should know Murder isn't the most prevalent crime in the world. So if you're going to argue that "Blacks are more criminal.." or "Black commit more Crime" shouldn't you start with what the most common crime is?
Well, what's that?
If you look here on FBI Uniform Crime Report Table 1 you can see that the rate of all crimes since 1993 has fallen to nearly half, going from a rate of 747.1 down to 386.1 in 2012 so our level of concern and paranoia about crime should be similarly decreasing. Unfortunately it isn't - and also Murder isn't anywhere near the most frequent crime in the U.S, so it makes a very poor example for determining who is "most criminal".
Crime |
Count |
Murders |
14,827 |
Forcible Rape |
84,376 |
Robbery |
354,520 |
Assault |
760,739 |
Property Crime |
8,975,438 |
So when we look at the Property Crime, what's the largest portion of that?
Robbery |
354,520 |
Burglary |
2,103,787 |
Larceny-Theft |
6,150,598 |
The interesting thing is that generally speaking Black guy are far more associated with Burglary or Robbery, but not necessarily
Larceny. Again, there isn't a breakout chart of this by race of the offender [Ed. oh yes there is, see below!] as there is on Murder, but that tends to be the association. Also Robbery and Burglary are often considered Felonies and are punished more severely than Larceny which is often only a Misdemeanor.
Clearly the people doing the Larceny-Theft are much more prevalent than the Murders, the Robberies or the Burglaries by a measure of well over 3 to 1.
And what Larcenies are these?
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program defines larceny-theft as the unlawful taking, carrying, leading, or riding away of property from the possession or constructive possession of another. Examples are thefts of bicycles, motor vehicle parts and accessories, shoplifting, pocket-picking, or the stealing of any property or article that is not taken by force and violence or by fraud. Attempted larcenies are included. Embezzlement, confidence games, forgery, check fraud, etc., are excluded
Pocket-picking |
29,462 |
Purse-snatching |
26,329 |
Shoplifting |
1,144,279 |
From motor vehicles (except accessories) |
1,476,403 |
Motor vehicle accessories |
465,984 |
Bicycles |
223,123 |
From buildings |
743,031 |
From coin-operated machines |
17,189 |
All others |
2,024,798 |
All Others then would exclude Embezzlement, Forgery, Check Kiting, but would include ripping off your boss for office supplies. By far these are far more common crimes than any of the others. So here's the next question, how often do people get caught and arrested for this stuff? Police call it a "Clearance" when a suspect is arrested, although whether they are successfully prosecuted is another matter. The FBI Provides a Graph for this.
As you can see the clearance rate for violent crimes are far far higher than they are for property crimes such as Burglary or Larceny - yet Burglaries and Larcenies occur many times more often, which means that since the most common crimes actually lead to the lowest percentage of arrest we really have NO IDEA whose doing what "the Most".
If they're only arresting 22% of the people who perpetrate larceny, that means 78% of them are getting away with it. 78% of 6.1 Million is 4,797,000 Crimes being committed that no one is being arrest for.
And guess what else I discovered when I checked for arrest information? A breakdown of arrests by race.
Here are the basics by Crime for the Total, White and Black defendants arrested. I've highlighted when one column is greater than the other. [As with the Murder Race/Victim chart I suspect this is limited to single offenders as the totals here don't match the totals above.]
Crime |
|
White |
Black |
TOTAL |
9,390,473 |
6,502,919 |
2,640,067 |
Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter |
8,506 |
4,101 |
4,203 |
Forcible rape |
13,886 |
9,027 |
4,512 |
Robbery |
80,135 |
34,761 |
44,002 |
Aggravated assault |
299,943 |
188,505 |
102,371 |
Burglary |
219,232 |
147,156 |
67,554 |
Larceny-theft |
994,304 |
677,895 |
288,025 |
Motor vehicle theft |
52,952 |
35,251 |
16,301 |
Arson |
8,827 |
6,500 |
2,083 |
Violent crime2 |
402,470 |
236,394 |
155,088 |
Property crime2 |
1,275,315 |
866,802 |
373,963 |
Other assaults |
924,839 |
606,048 |
294,678 |
Forgery and counterfeiting |
51,759 |
33,950 |
16,900 |
Fraud |
117,706 |
78,331 |
37,171 |
Embezzlement |
12,371 |
7,994 |
4,103 |
Stolen property; buying, receiving, possessing |
75,516 |
50,144 |
23,787 |
[Yet again there's data missing - even though they have American Indians, Asians and Pacific Islanders included this table has no data for Latinos. None. They don't commit crime? They don't get arrested? Weird.]
Summary.
In 2012, 69.3 percent of all individuals arrested were white, 28.1 percent were black, and 2.6 percent were of other races.
Of all juveniles (persons under the age of 18) arrested in 2012, 65.2 percent were white, 32.2 percent were black, and 2.5 percent were of other races.
Of all adults arrested in 2012, 69.7 were white, 27.6 percent were black, and 2.7 percent were of other races.
White individuals were arrested more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race, accounting for 58.7 percent of those arrests.
The percentages of black adults and white adults arrested for murder were similar, with 49.3 percent being black and 48.3 percent being white.
Black juveniles accounted for 51.5 percent of all juveniles arrested for violent crimes.
White juveniles accounted for 61.6 percent of all juveniles arrested for property crimes.
Of the juveniles arrested for drug abuse violations, 74.0 percent were white.
White juveniles accounted for 55.2 percent of juveniles arrested for aggravated assaults.
Overall, nearly 3 Times as many White People are Arrested for Crimes than Black People. In nearly every category except Murders and Robbery White People are arrested for crimes more often than Black people by more than a
Twice as Often.
As you can see nearly 9 Million cases of the Property Crimes and Larceny-Theft are generating only about 1 Million arrests. Most of those arrests are of White People, by an amount that far out strips the number of both Murders and Robberies by several orders of magnitude.
If we are to go by the arrest numbers alone, we could say that White people commit more Fraud, commit more Arson, more Assaults, and steal more than Black people do, and even if you make the proportional argument that being at only 1/3rd or so of rate of actual people arrested is too high when they are 1/6th of the population, let's remember that not everyone arrested includes all the people who committed the crime in the first place. Particularly not when it comes to the most common crime, Larceny, which only has a clearance rate of 22%.
[Ed. To reinterate: being ARRESTED MORE OFTEN doesn't mean that someone is necessarily GUILTY More often. Arrests only show the amount of focus that Police are placing in that particular area, so what we can see is that the Police focus is HIGHER for Murder and for Robbery than it is for Burglary and it is for Larceny, even though Murder and Robbery are much less frequent than the others. It doesn't mean Black people committed more of these crimes, it only means they get presumed guilty and arrested for them more often.]
It's very possible that Black People are arrested more often simply because they are suspected more often regardless of whether they did the crime or didn't. We can see from the results of the Innocent Project that using DNA evidence 317 people who had been convicted and sent to death row - Couldn't Have Done the Crime, so exactly how positive can we be about everyone else in prison with cases against them that are nowhere near as rigorously vetted as Death Row Cases are?
The Causes of Wrongful Conviction
As the pace of DNA exonerations has grown across the country in recent years, wrongful convictions have revealed disturbing fissures and trends in our criminal justice system. Together, these cases show us how the criminal justice system is broken – and how urgently it needs to be fixed.
We should learn from the system’s failures. In each case where DNA has proven innocence beyond doubt, an overlapping array of causes has emerged – from mistakes to misconduct to factors of race and class.
Countless cases
Those exonerated by DNA testing aren’t the only people who have been wrongfully convicted in recent decades. For every case that involves DNA, there are hundreds that do not.
Only a fraction of criminal cases involve biological evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing, and even when such evidence exists, it is often lost or destroyed after a conviction. Since they don’t have access to a definitive test like DNA, many wrongfully convicted people have a slim chance of ever proving their innocence.
Common Causes
Here you will find further information about seven of the most common causes of wrongful convictions:
Eyewitness Misidentification
Unvalidated or Improper Forensic Science
False Confessions / Admissions
Government Misconduct
Informants or Snitches
Bad Lawyering
The presumption of Black Guilt drives police to stop, question, ticket and arrest black people far more often than they are found actually committing crimes, and the same type of thing affects who gets charged, who gets sentenced harshly [remember "affluenza"] and who ultimately winds up in jail and prison for longer periods. This is has been shown to be case
by many studies.
Criminologists agree the race disparity in arrests cannot be fully explained by differences in criminal behavior. The authors examine social environment factors that may lead to racial differences in police contact in early adolescence, including family, peers, school, and community. Data are from 331 eighth-grade students. Blacks were almost twice as likely as Whites to report a police contact. Blacks reported more property crime but not more violent crime than Whites. Police contacts were increased by having a parent who had been arrested, a sibling involved in criminal activity, higher observed reward for negative behavior, having school disciplinary actions, and knowing adults who engaged in substance abuse or criminal behavior. Race differences in police contacts were partially attributable to more school discipline.
This has been shown even specifically
in Ferguson, Mo.
Ferguson police are much more likely to stop, search and arrest African-American drivers than white ones. Last year, blacks, who make up a little less than two-thirds of the driving-age population in the North County city, accounted for 86 percent of all stops. When stopped, they were almost twice as likely to be searched as whites and twice as likely to be arrested, though police were less likely to find contraband on them.
Pronounced as those statistics may seem, they don’t necessarily make Ferguson an outlier.
What we don't see here in any of the data is a greater propensity for Black Criminality
Across the Board. It's not across the board, where's there's a disparity it's limited to specific areas and doesn't spread to every type of case.
Yes, even if we were able to add a control to eliminate the police disparity and bias that has been repeatedly proven, proportionally Blacks would probably still be far too represented in cases of Murder and Robbery, but there may be reasons for that. Many of the Robberies are economically induced. People steal because they Want Stuff they don't have. People who have stuff, and are earning a decent wage at a decent job don't usually need to commit Robberies - those people can commit Larceny by stealing from their employer while they're on the job.
Also a lot of Murders in the Black community are retaliatory, especially when Gangs and the Drug Trade are involved. They're Pay-Back for someone else being Murdered. People are getting Street Justice, because they don't think the POLICE are going to catch the person who did the first crime [rightly or wrongly the perception is that many murders of Black people are far more likely to go unsolved without an arrest or prosecution even when other Black people are the perpetrators], so as a result they take the law in their own hands. Do it yourself, Law and Disorder. And then the other guys strike back. And then they counter-strike to that, and so on and so on. It's literally - IMO - an "Eye for an Eye, making everyone Blind". It's like the NRA's "Gun Self Protection Wet Dream" gone all wrong and wonky in the midst of drug cartels and emotional mass destruction. In the Ghetto just about everybody has a gun. And they aren't afraid to use them, even when they know everyone else probably has a gun too. That's what drive-bys are about, getting a strategic advantage over other people you already assume are armed too, because they probably are. Look at the murder rate among the Mexican Drug Cartels, this isn't a uniquely Black or even an American problem, it's largely about protecting your "turf" in an underground economic system.
Yeah, it's an issue. Yeah, they're out of "proportion" in these two areas. But it's interesting how people that harp on this proportion stuff, don't ever want to recognize that they're also dramatically out of proportion on access to jobs, access to healthcare, access to housing, and access to decent education. Their out of proportion in their access to HOPE, and without Hope nothing good can flourish. These things are not unconnected. If you go further down the table Black people are actually below their proportion - just 12-13% of those arrested - when it comes to DUI and liquor laws but I'm not really expecting that they get any "credit" for that stuff. Blacks overperform in plenty of areas and that's used against them all the time.
But again, the total number of Murders we're talking about are fairly small compared to every other crime that's happening on the list. Same thing with the Robberies. Take an unemployment rate somewhere in the 20-30% for young black men, add some resentment, persecution, lousy schools, hopelessness, desperation and puree for 50 years and a shit load of pointless Murder and Robbery is just a couple of the crappy results you're gonna get. Shiny Happy Talk about "Opportunity" and "Pulling up your Pants" aren't very convincing in that environment.
Yes, Murder is a far more serious crime, but is Robbery really that different from Burglary or Larceny? We're literally comparing Millions of Crimes, with Thousands, and Hundreds. Why doesn't that proportional difference count?
Either way we can see that Larceny - one of the most common crimes - isn't where you see Black people jumping out way ahead of White people. Not even.
In raw simple numbers Black people with 2.6 Million Arrests really can't possibly commit More Crime than White People at 6.5 Million Arrests. That's just not logical. Maybe if Black people were only at 1.7 Million Arrests, or 1.4 Million some people who seem eternally bothered by this would feel better - but it still feels like a big smoke screen to take our attention away from the OTHER 4.7 Million Criminals that are getting away without an arrest and without a conviction for their crimes, year after year after year. Now I think it's safe to assume that some of those missing arrests are for repeat offenders, even if they don't get caught the first, second, third or tenth time - they might get them on the eleventh so there just might not be a one-to-one relationship between one single crime each being performed by one single criminal.
But then that means we really have no fracking idea how many of who is actually doing what now what do we? All we know is who is far more likely to pay the price for it in our jails and losing their lives on our streets.
Although I can't prove it, somehow I just don't think most of those missing guys and gals doing the most crimes and not getting caught - are Black. I just don't. Black guys, generally speaking, are automatically suspected of everything and practically can't get away with anything.
Vyan
12:39 PM PT: HT to A2nite.