Calls make police look more racist than they are

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Then, the blame or credit of the research, compilation and publication of the statistics is owed the U.S. government, isn’t it? The statistics show what they show according to the implications and opinions, if any, of various law-enforcement agencies, not me. I do believe, however, that they present evidence about the proportionality of crimes based on the race of the criminals. If this administration is shielding racism from critique in its body of research, please cite it. Furthermore, as CNN’s Chris Cuomo, J.D., learned very publicly this week, the Constitution for the United States of America protects speech, or “hate speech” in his case, with which some might consider repugnant. You would think he had learned ConLaw in his first year law school.


I disagree. Any such implication of the statistics is the responsibility of the U.S. government that researched, compiled and published them. Your weak inference that “quoting statistics concerning crime and race […] that all people belonging to that particular race are potential criminals” is an ecological fallacy. If the statistics make such an implication, please cite it.


I disagree that my citations were “irrelevant.” The topic is about the noted exaggeration of criminal reports by the witnesses making the reports. Beyond being nothing new (criminal-justice college majors learn this fact immediately by experiencing it themselves; ever see videotape of a classroom in progress while the professor storms in brandishing a firearm but not one student recognized that the “perpetrator” was the professor?), mistaken witnesses are a problematic fact of witness reports. Insofar as intentional exaggeration is wrong in any case of the reporting of crimes, the unintentional exaggeration is accurate within the context of what the witnesses believed truly that they witnessed given the preponderant representation of the statistics that I cited. And, yes, I believe that “the average person” would have a vague understanding of the disproportionate criminology based on the statistics. I believe certainly that I am an average individual, and I understand enough about the statistics to find them easily online as I have several times before when the need presents itself.

So, to recap, the statistics I cited were researched, compiled and published by leading law-enforcement agencies of the U.S. government, not me. Any implications observed within the statistics were made by the agencies, not me. Any inferences observed about the statistics as described by anyone but myself were theirs not mine. My description of the unintentionally exaggerated witness reports being “accurate” was so only within the context of what the witnesses believed truly that they had witnessed.

The nice thing about Wrong Planet is that we can disagree without being disagreeable.

AspieUtah-

But people do take statistics as such, and either lump a group people together for their alleged criminality out of fear, or some will believe that such statistics support their already existing racism.
For the record, I don't think you're a racist.

Thank you. I agree that some people do conflate the facts and trivia that they have learned. That is why we have a problem with unintentionally mistaken witnesses. A few exist among the intentionally mistaken crowd, certainly. But, I suspect that most people try to do their very best when called on to describe their witnessed experiences. Meanwhile, what do we do with the statistics that some very precise and experienced researchers have published over the years? I suspect that, like autism research from Autism Speaks or pharmaceutical research from the pharmaceutical industry itself, there are indeed some bad apples faking evidence for whatever reason (graft in my opinion), but certainly not all research is bad. There is some there, there ... with good evidence.

The government is racist. White supremacy is at the heart of the US. It has been since the very beginning. Ignoring it is perpetuating it.

Statistics represent the perspective of whomever produces them. They are nothing more than measurements of things that people found important. They become a tool that the power structure uses to manipulate attitudes and beliefs. The state is used to mediate between classes and distribute economic rewards and penalties, and racism has been prominent among the means of achieving the deleterious status quo.

It is our responsibility to seek out more information than that. Espousing racist opinions on the basis of "official statistics" furnished by the institutions that maintain racism is intellectually dishonest, if nothing else.

No it isn't; the topic is about people reporting other people for NO GOOD REASON. There were NO CRIMES OR EVEN POTENTIAL CRIMES WITNESSED to exaggerate in most of the examples. The anecdotes in the thread were about people reporting other people for walking in neighborhoods in which they were assumed not to live, for making people uncomfortable just by being around, for working on their own disabled vehicles, for looking "Muslim". I ask again; did you read that reddit thread that was linked?

An exaggerated criminal report is seeing a fistfight and calling it attempted murder, or having your newspaper stolen from your porch and calling it burglary. These people called and said that someone was walking down the street. That was accurate; not an exaggeration. These people called and said two guys pushing their disabled car had crashed a stolen vehicle; that's not exaggeration, that's complete fabrication.

That doesn't make any sense. Either a person is basing her assessment of an incident on her own perceptions, or she is not. If she is basing any part of that assessment on statistics, then she is also not basing that part of the assessment on what she truly witnessed, and her report is inaccurate. There is no accurate way to report a crime partially based on what one witnesses and partially on some statistics that one has read. People don't witness statistics.

Also, if you are telling us that people are misreporting crimes because of their consideration of these statistics, then you are effectively making an argument to the effect that the statistics should be weighed less, thereby contradicting yourself.

He is saying people think black people are criminals because black people are criminals. He's just dancing around a fairly straightforward racist argument.

Go starkid!

Anyway, the people who made these reports were definitely racists. Reporting someone because you think they don't look like they belong is racist, PERIOD. Reporting a black man for walking down the street in a neighborhood you think he doesn't belong in because you think it's a white neighborhood is racist.

I think this explains a good portion of apparent racism and profiling by the police, as in many cases no matter how inane the call the police think it is they must still respond regardless.

We should also keep in mind that there are still a lot of ideologies which must deny the existence of racism, implicit or otherwise, still existing among whites in large numbers, or those ideologies come tumbling down. Those ideologies depend on labeling modern anti-racist efforts as the playing of the race card by people like Al Sharpton and white guilt.

Things like Harvard's implicit associations tests must be ignored by such ideologies.

Sure the statistics may show how black people commit crimes more often than whites but I think that still doesn't justify calling the cops just because they see a black person doing something innocent. That would be like me calling the cops on a black person for walking down the street at night just because statistics say black people more often commit crimes than white people do. Should we all start calling the cops every time we see a black person because they might commit a crime? Come on. It's wasting the police time and the 911 dispatcher. I think people can use these statistics to justify racism.

But they do not.

To find out if blacks and whites commit crimes at different rates, it would require much more information. The only measure that we have access to via the previously mentioned statistics is the amount of police activity against white people and blacks.

We already know the police disproportionately target blacks, so saying "police arrest more black people" is a meaningless statement. It offers no additional information. And it in no way implies that black people commit crimes more often.

White people in the suburbs consume drugs at an equal or higher rate compared to urban minorities. Yet there are many more drug arrests against people of color in the inner city, because of the overpolicing of these communities. And their sentencing is usually harsher. They get harsher penalties for the same crimes...

White supremacy has got to go.

The disparity in conviction rates for violent crimes between the major races in America is too large to be explained by sampling error, particularly wrt. murder. I believe it is largely or entirely explained by sociological factors (such as the relative poverty and poor education of African Americans).

I do not think AspieUtah's use of statistics was appropriate for the reasons starkid raises. However, if you feel his motive for raising that point was subconscious racism as a result of spending decades living in a profoundly racist society, I don't think it is appropriate to bluntly call him or his argument racist. Point out the flaws in his argument rather than just attacking it.

Thank you, The_Walrus.

Why do you keep saying racism as it's the biggest of all evils? The statistics he gave you showed that blacks in America tend to be arrested more than whites do (if you think 12% doing 30% of the crimes is the result of racism within the police, how come whites are shot by police more often than blacks?), and if we can infer from the statistics that the blacks in the USA are more prone to crime, then maybe we should ask ourselves what the problem is with blacks that causes this problem? I for one, think it is not racism within the system, I think it is a culture of crime within the black community of the USA.

If racial profiling will help reduce crime rates, who are we to deny this? Maybe it could work.

So basically, according to denpajin, if a black dude is walking down the street, we need to call the cops.

If that wasn't his point, then he needs to make another thread, because the context of this thread is crap like calling the cops on black dudes walking down the street.

Look at it like this: I come across this really awesome, hilarious law enforcement Reddit thread about their getting racist calls that waste everybody's time and I thought it would be neat to share. There's been a lot of discussion about race and the police, especially how police are thought to be racist, so I thought this would be an interesting perspective: Getting it straight from the horse's mouth. I thought people would find quite a bit of common ground over really inane stuff like calling the cops on a black man walking down the street and feeling sorry for the cops having to respond no matter how inane and racist they think it is.

Instead, what do I see? Two people coming in getting all defensive, even apparently trying to justify the behavior that the cops themselves think is racist and inane!