At a panel last night on the ACLU, I mentioned that the organization’s standard method for accusing the police of racial profiling–comparing police stop rates to racial population ratios–ignores crime rates. In New York City, for example, blacks are 23% of the population and 53% of all stops, but commit 66% of all violent crime and 80% of all shootings–according to the victims of and witnesses to those crimes.
Well, if such statistics are true, responded ACLU president Anthony Romero (without offering any evidence why they were not), you are ignoring the lack of opportunity that blacks face. Moreover, your employer, the Manhattan Institute, only exacerbates that lack of opportunity with its favored policies.
I’m just wondering: would Romero, Sharpton, Jackson, et al. ever accept “lack of opportunity” as an excuse for a white-on-black shooting? Because there are so few of such incidents:
Seventeen percent of what the FBI calls “white” homicide victims in 2009 were killed by blacks, compared to 8 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by “whites.” There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. If Hispanics were removed from the category of “white” killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls “white”-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs.
there’s not much precedent to evaluate, but somehow, my gut tells me: No, the lack of opportunity defense would not be allowed.
@Heather:
Not a legal defense, certainly, but isn’t it obviously an explanation–in fact a theory of everything–for race hustlers and their media allies. It excuses them from noticing black-on-black homicides, sure, but it’s also the basis for education and contracting quotas, and…well, I needn’t tell you.
Your NRO post is excellent. Question: suppose the “defense” is “I’m just another ghetto kid without a father”? Isn’t that the pathology you’ve identified? Isn’t that by definition “lack of opportunity”? Will it begin to go away just as soon as the Sharptons of this world start sounding like Thomas Sowell?. I’m not holding my breath.
“There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined.”
Maybe I’m sleepy, but what does the bolded portion have to do with the rest? The ratio of black-on-white to white-on-black crime doesn’t depend on sizes of those populations, since that’s only an overall multiplier. If there are W white and B black people, the number WB sets a scale for the number of black-white interactions you’re going to have per year, some of which are going to be criminal. Any difference in the number of white on black and black on white crimes comes from differences in rates, not in population sizes.
IOW, say the prob of given black person killing a given white person is p, and that for white person killing black person is q. Then number of black-on-white crimes is (p W B) and number of white-on-black crimes is (q W B). The fraction you say is 5/2 is pWB/qWB = p/q, independent of W/B which you say is 1/6. I think.
It’s the job of police to solve crimes and protect people and property regardless of what the causes of crime are. Romero’s response was irrelevant to the argument over racial profiling — quick change of subject as a rhetorical tactic. Or perhaps he actually meant to suggest that police should deliberately avoid solving crimes and protecting communities because everybody does not have the same opportunites? An unequal society should have deliberately inadequate policing? And who would that hurt the most?