> Who wouldn’t want science and empirical evidence to guide policy decisions.
One look at crime stats and this will not be a favorable idea.
One look at crime stats and this will not be a favorable idea.
Without asking "why" it may ignore That neighborhood is black, so historically racist decisions lead to extra patrolling (but no evidence of increased crime rates) which led to more arrests.
As the public doesn't understand statistics it would be easy to make that claim a truth by repeating it a few times.
Statistics are hard and the implications of some result are sometimes not intuitive. People don't care about what a standard deviation is, they just want more standard deviation than the other people over there because that makes them better.
I don't want to make a case for dismissing an empirical approach per se!
An current example from Germany right now: There's a part of the country that's in uproar because of new immigrants that came in 2015. Some people felt threatened and demanded more police in public spaces were immigrant youth gathers. So more police is present at those public spaces. Naturally this resulted in them being aware of more violent events (mostly groups of immigrant kids scuffling), which made the immigrant share of violent crimes double, and people feel "rightfully" afraid, as the stats now proof their suspicions! But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too; police just didn't take note and so those fights don't end up in the data gathered.
It's not guaranteed, no. But it's the only way we have any hope of it.
> An current example from Germany right now: There's a part of the country that's in uproar because of new immigrants that came in 2015. Some people felt threatened and demanded more police in public spaces were immigrant youth gathers. So more police is present at those public spaces. Naturally this resulted in them being aware of more violent events (mostly groups of immigrant kids scuffling), which made the immigrant share of violent crimes double, and people feel "rightfully" afraid, as the stats now proof their suspicions! But the reality of course is that German kids have fights in public, too; police just didn't take note and so those fights don't end up in the data gathered.
Is that actually true, though? I'm not familiar with the figures, but it's not unreasonable to imagine there may genuinely be more violent incidents among migrants from a war torn region like that. There were certainly serious cultural assimilation problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
Not deadly knife fights, though. We don't want to erase the difference between brutal murder (25 stab wounds) and "a scuffle", do we?
Does that make it less of a problem?
That you brought up the murder in the first place is exactly the misuse of statistics I spoke of. About 400 people get murdered every year in Germany, and you bring up exactly the one recent case were the suspects are immigrants.
You could have pointed out that number of arrests per area is the wrong measure and why. That would have been rational. Instead, you chose to drag identity politics into it. Brilliant.
But that's what you should have said if you were making a rational argument. Instead you made it a political statement by playing the racism card.
[1] - https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
An elegant way to select for the most violent young men and has genuine advantages over prison.