If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Einherjar86]

There's a degree to which we don't choose what to observe, at least not directly. If you live in a high crime environment, you will have different observations than someone who lives in a gated community. If you happen to buy the NYT, you will have different observations than someone who reads TMZ. Now those are more superficial examples compared to statistics collecting, but if we want to talk about crime, to what degree can one claim bias in routine governmental crime stats collecting? The US collects more thorough statistics than all countries afaik, as it relates to crime. While you can massage data, there's little evidence that is occurring in crime statistic collection and reporting.

I'm resistant to moralizing over the data.

I don't think it's moralizing to suggest that blackness as a predictor for crime disregards alternative contributing factors, whether they be class, education, socioeconomic opportunities, lifestyle representation, etc. Or additionally, to suggest that statistics are filtered through definitions and degrees of criminality that can be easily manipulated.

It's not that the numbers themselves are inaccurate, but that they don't reflect a stable motivation, cause, or category for the crimes they document.

 

[Dak]

I don't think it's moralizing to suggest that blackness as a predictor for crime disregards alternative contributing factors, whether they be class, education, socioeconomic opportunities, lifestyle representation, etc. Or additionally, to suggest that statistics are filtered through definitions and degrees of criminality that can be easily manipulated.

Can you provide an example of this filteration?

 

[Einherjar86]

That the definition for violent crime includes unarmed burglary in some states, but not in others; drug trafficking in some states, and not in others. Or that a nonviolent crime becomes violent if a police officer sprains his ankle during an arrest. Or that violent crime is sometimes defined by the occurrence of bodily injury, which downplays threats of violence or intention to commit violence, etc.

My point is that there are statistics for violent crime that tag unarmed offences as violent, and that tips the scales. If someone is simply in possession of an illegal firearm while transporting drugs, that doesn't make the crime an unequivocally violent offense; but it does rationalize calling it a violent offense when an officer can say "he has a gun."

 

[Dak]

That the definition for violent crime includes unarmed burglary in some states, but not in others; drug trafficking in some states, and not in others. Or that a nonviolent crime becomes violent if a police officer sprains his ankle during an arrest. Or that violent crime is sometimes defined by the occurrence of bodily injury, which downplays threats of violence or intention to commit violence, etc.

My point is that there are statistics for violent crime that tag unarmed offences as violent, and that tips the scales. If someone is simply in possession of an illegal firearm while transporting drugs, that doesn't make the crime an unequivocally violent offense; but it does rationalize calling it a violent offense when an officer can say "he has a gun."

Well if the data is cherry picked state by state that may be an issue, but the FBI's UCR attempts to bypass these potential issues with uniform reporting:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/nibrs/summary-reporting-system-srs-user-manual

Part I offenses could generally be described as "violent crimes", while Part II offenses are not. But "violent crime" isn't explicitly a UCR term, although on page 55 it does refer to "Part I violent crimes", which may be in reference to the distinction between crimes against persons vs crimes against property eg, Part I Offenses against Persons being violent crime. If we wanted to be uniform, we might simply use Part I/Part II designators.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Can noticing be a neutral/indifferent behavior?

I feel that a large part of the argument between FD and HBB had to do with HBB's assumption that "noticing" a larger percentage of blacks than whites commit crimes. "Noticing" this fact led HBB to describe blackness as a predictor for crime, which isn't actually a factual statement--it's an interpretive statement, and interpretations are never neutral.

I'd suggest that noticing certain details of everyday life are almost always inextricable from the interpretations we derive from them, meaning that noticing itself is always a prejudiced behavior that deserves some discussion (maybe not the media excess that we find on the internet nowadays, but in some measured capacity).

And yes, I realize that what I just said is an interpretive statement.

No, it's factual. Correlative and not necessarily the essence of the link, but still factual. One can measure the percentage of X, Y, and Z people in various populations, measure incidence of Q event in the same populations, and mathematically determine whether or not the presence of any of said people in said population predicts the incidence of Q event. The interpretation comes after; "The presence of X people but not Y and Z people predicts Q event BECAUSE <insert opinion here>."

 

[Einherjar86]

Well if the data is cherry picked state by state that may be an issue, but the FBI's UCR attempts to bypass these potential issues with uniform reporting:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/nibrs/summary-reporting-system-srs-user-manual

Part I offenses could generally be described as "violent crimes", while Part II offenses are not. But "violent crime" isn't explicitly a UCR term, although on page 55 it does refer to "Part I violent crimes", which may be in reference to the distinction between crimes against persons vs crimes against property eg, Part I Offenses against Persons being violent crime. If we wanted to be uniform, we might simply use Part I/Part II designators.

That's a good thing for collecting general stats, you're right; although it doesn't do anything about the ways that certain areas define various kinds of crime.

Unfortunately, crime stats by race don't communicate the alternative social causes that likely contribute to crime. So, again, choosing to collect stats on "frequency of crime by race" (or some such) is already making an interpretive move. For what it's worth, I think they're important statistics to have. But the observation is already interpretive, since it's choosing a particular set of parameters.

No, it's factual. Correlative and not necessarily the essence of the link, but still factual. One can measure the percentage of X, Y, and Z people in various populations, measure incidence of Q event in the same populations, and mathematically determine whether or not the presence of any of said people in said population predicts the incidence of Q event. The interpretation comes after; "The presence of X people but not Y and Z people predicts Q event BECAUSE <insert opinion here>."

Describing them as "X people" is an interpretive move. You could alternatively choose to describe them as "black people" or "poor people," or "non-white people" or "uneducated people." Each label carries its own interpretive connotations.

This is a major topic in philosophy of science, and it has to do with whether observations are theory-loaded or not, to use language from Ian Hacking and Paul Feyeraband. Observations of unknown quanta (e.g. detecting radio waves before their classification) could be argued as theory-free observations. The problem is you can only really identify a theory-free observation ex post facto. It's incredibly difficult to distinguish theory (or interpretive connotations) from pure observation in the act of doing so.

 

[CiG]

I don't think it's moralizing to suggest that blackness as a predictor for crime disregards alternative contributing factors, whether they be class, education, socioeconomic opportunities, lifestyle representation, etc.

Does it disregard it or does the very idea of blackness as a predictor include class, education, socioeconomic opportunities, lifestyle representation etc? I'd assume all these alternative contributing factors are why blackness is a predictor because they're all overwhelmingly part of what it means to be a non-immigrant black person in America.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Sure there's a little flexibility, but "Black or African American—A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa", to borrow the definition from Dak's link, has a fairly obvious meaning, and isn't too difficult to apply as objectively as possible. The likelihood of the statistics being skewed because of, say, white people being mislabeled as black people, isn't very high.

 

[Einherjar86]

Does it disregard it or does the very idea of blackness as a predictor include class, education, socioeconomic opportunities, lifestyle representation etc? I'd assume all these alternative contributing factors are why blackness is a predictor because they're all overwhelmingly part of what it means to be a non-immigrant black person in America.

I think this is a great point. We could use a different word than "disregards." Maybe "elides" would be better--i.e. statistics that frame their findings as the correlation between race and crime conceal the relevance of other potential factors.

Sure there's a little flexibility, but "Black or African American—A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa", to borrow the definition from Dak's link, has a fairly obvious meaning, and isn't too difficult to apply as objectively as possible. The likelihood of the statistics being skewed because of, say, white people being mislabeled as black people, isn't very high.

I have no problem with "as objectively as possible." I'm just skeptical of the idea that statistics don't entail their own perspective.

I also don't think I meant that white people might be confused for black people, not sure if something I said suggested that...

 

[CiG]

I think this is a great point. We could use a different word than "disregards." Maybe "elides" would be better--i.e. statistics that frame their findings as the correlation between race and crime conceal the relevance of other potential factors.

I agree that the other factors should be the focus because you can't solve the problem of having a skin colour but you can attempt to solve cultures of crime, poverty, broken families, heavy handed police tactics, irrational laws etc.

But it's not really people like Dak or myself who expend great amounts of energy fighting to "raise awareness" about black people and how being low class, uneducated, without socioeconomic opportunities is synonymous with being black.

Seems like a bit of a cake eating contradiction here to admit that those things are synonymous with being black but then want the statistics to only focus on the elements that you yourself admit are what makes up a black American's existence. No?

 

[CiG]

Notice how nobody seems to have any problem racializing police shooting statistics btw?

 

[Einherjar86]

I agree that the other factors should be the focus because you can't solve the problem of having a skin colour but you can attempt to solve cultures of crime, poverty, broken families, heavy handed police tactics, irrational laws etc.

But it's not really people like Dak or myself who expend great amounts of energy fighting to "raise awareness" about black people and how being low class, uneducated, without socioeconomic opportunities is synonymous with being black.

Seems like a bit of a cake eating contradiction here to admit that those things are synonymous with being black but then want the statistics to only focus on the elements that you yourself admit are what makes up a black American's existence. No?

I honestly wasn't singling anyone out--just trying to intervene in a conversation about what it means to notice things around us. And I don't want the statistics to only focus on one thing. I'd like them to focus on as much as possible.

 

[Dak]

Regression analyses are employed to determine to what degree different covariates predict certain dependent outcomes. Without actually attempting to build a dataset and employ such an analysis, we can, to some degree, infer that there are much higher degrees of Part 1 Crimes against Persons in places like New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago than in other places, even after controlling for things like poverty. It's not even only about race. Males aged, roughly, 16-36, commit these types of crimes at a disproportionate amount, and then more particularly, non-immigrant black and hispanic males. All males follow this age pattern, just to a lesser degree as it pertains to Causcasians, then Asians, then Jews.

 

[CiG]

Liking all these scientists and professors slowly coming out against the SJWs.

 

[rms]

is that AL Franken photo actually bad? I'm blown away here

 

[no country for old wainds]

The white man’s blunders of ‘explorer’ Benedict Allen feed racist myths
Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff (lel)

the guardian is barely less awful than the sun or mail and i wish people would stop pretending otherwise. even its own commenters mercilessly wreck the majority of its articles.

 

[Dak]

Kind of like the NYT.

 

[CiG]

They give writing jobs to any old ideologically fundamentalist twat these days.

 

[CiG]

#triggered

 

[no country for old wainds]

he stole that joke from the RAF guy who did the same thing a couple months ago. fortunately penis jokes are timeless. imagine being the guy from the US navy who had to come out and give a straight-faced statement about how unacceptable it was.