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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

These are not hidden facts. You can find them quite easily with simple queries...

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/African-Americans-cite...

"African Americans in San Francisco are cited for resisting arrest at a rate eight times greater than whites even when serious crimes are not involved, according to statistics drawn from court records."

Here is also a good overall source (but the author has a label on him).

http://www.colorofcrime.com/2016/03/the-color-of-crime-2016-...

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You can be arrested for resisting arrest, without being charged with any other crime. If the entire crux of this debate is a systemic racial bias on the part of law enforcement, it stands to reason that you shouldn't use statistics from law enforcement to argue against law enforcement's bias, doesn't it?

The report explains why the law enforcement statistics are trustworthy, and specifically why arrest rates (especially for violent crimes) are likely to be particularly accurate. The report itself is very thorough.

The statistics quoted above do not relate to this particular case. Overgeneralizing much?

I wasn't overgeneralizing anything. I was responding to "you shouldn't use statistics from law enforcement..."

Except if you dig deeper into those stats, you'll see that something like 5% of the same cops account for over 40% of "resisting arrest" charges, and 15% account for ~75% of those cases [1]. So most of it seems to come down to the police and how they approach making arrests.

[1] http://project.wnyc.org/resisting/

Does that take into account the type of police officer making the arrest (patrol, traffic, detective, narcotics, transit, desk/administrative, etc) and also the deployment and arrest location?

If the same cops patrol the same demographic and the same high crime areas it would reason that the same cops (and same type of specific category) will be making the majority of the arrests. Which will skew the mentioned statistic to them.

Now you're reaching. Read the accompanying story for more information. This is a widely recognizing problem.

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