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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

You use the phrase 'objective pattern' here, but that conflates causation and correlation.

For example: black men in the US are more likely than white men to have criminal records, but this in no way means that black men are "objectively" more criminal.

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Let me catch up with the double-think. They commit more crime on average but they are not more criminal? What kind of olympics-grade mental gymnastics are these?

To start with, 'more likely to have a criminal record' and 'more likely to have committed a crime' are not actually the same thing.

You're rewording what they said. If any group of people is more policed than another group of people, said group is more likely to have a criminal record. Doesn't mean they're more "criminal" than any other group but more of a reflection on the current state of the criminal justice system.

To paraphrase Warren Buffet: "If a cop follows you for 500 miles, they're going to find a reason to give you a ticket."

Could be true for trivial felonies like a ticket, but if we talk about real crime thats not really an excuse. Would be more inclined to think black people commit more crime because socioeconomic factors, as poverty correlates crime.

It really depends on how you define crime. Usually crime and prosecution is defined in such a way as to impact the lower classes more than the upper classes.

Murder is rather easy to define. There is a dead body with holes in his/her head, there is a murder. The tragedy being that murder is way more prevalent in the black community, partly because of underpolicing.

I wouldn't be so fast with that assertion.

If your life is a cesspit and you can count on the authorities to be part of the problem, where does murder end and self defense begin?

See the song "I shot the sheriff." I'm most familiar with the Eric Clapton version, but googling it recently suggests to me it was originally written by Bob Marley.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_the_Sheriff

This is a rather naive understanding. For example, there were nearly 3000 deaths in the 9/11 attacks, and about 4800 soldiers have died in the subsequent war with Iraq.

There are plenty of dead bodies with holes in their heads, but it's not clear how one accounts for crime among those 7800 dead.

...which, even if true, would circle back to 'being black' being a correlation to but not causative of criminal records.

"The offending rate for African Americans was almost 8 times higher than European Americans, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84% of European Americans victims killed by European Americans, and 93% of African Americans victims were killed by African Americans.". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S....

How does overpolicing explain both arrest for murder rate and victim of murder rate have a significantly higher prevalence within black community?

In Memphis, TN, black people commit more murders than about everyone else. They don't even report many of them since (a) tourism and (b) it's already most news stories. Most whites in poverty turn to drugs, do petty crimes, higher than national average suicide rate in some places, etc. Blacks, recently Latinos (esp cartels), were unique in doing all kinds of violence in their own communities plus others at random. Whites usually use violence on others externally to benefit their own group, esp via military. Most people writing comments like yours try to explain the difference with all kinds of stuff about oppression, environments, etc pinning blame in one place. Yet, the whites so oppressed they're doing drugs and/or killing themselves aren't murdering other people in their neighborhoods due to their oppressive environment nearly as much. The hard data argues a difference that's not from white people since they'd have been doing it first if it was.

I have a feeling most of you went to white schools or lived in white areas instead of black ones in bad places. Most in my area that went to the latter, including black folks, know where this comes from. I already described it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660278

You folks need to stop just dismissing all blame on the black side as "cops must just always make stuff up or police them harder." There's plenty of that worth calling out. However, the biggest hole in your argument is murder in high numbers. You can watch folks that don't kill people or who get shot all day in whatever selective way you want. In the end for poor neighborhoods, the black ones you watch will have committed many more murders hitting many more black victims than the white ones.

And, if gangs are involved, the dealers and killers will often be told they're in for life. They'll be perpetuating it in a way that has nothing to do with white people. And you should be calling them out hard on that if you really care about thugs getting arrested by cops and/or protecting their victims which are mostly black. Instead, it's whites (damage of some kind) blacks non-stop in your comments or the media vs thug culture from blacks murdering black people all the time. And, it seems, something like that with machismo and cartels in Latino areas. I have less experience with them, though. I didn't get to since we had to leave the neighborhood after a small confrontation led to one putting a contract on our heads that canceled (maybe) if we moved.

So, I'm calling bullshit unless you're saying there's both racist over-policing by cops (mostly but not all white) and thug culture coming from blacks creating killers that take out tons of blacks blacks. Something similar for Latino areas. Then, it fits the data.

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