On 9/1/03 10:26 PM, "Wendy Introwitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> That specific racial groups are appearing in court disproportionate to >>> their numbers in the general population is a result of a >>> disproportionate crime commission rate among those specific racial groups. >> >> Prove it. > [...] > > This is least interesting for starters, Mike: > > http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:LRMKyEm3JLUJ:https://www.patrick.af.mil > /deomi/Library/EOReadFile/Racial%2520Profiling/RP_Spring02/Study%2520Suggest > s%2520Racial%2520Gap%2520in%2520Speeding%2520in%2520New%2520Jersey.pdf+new+j > ersey+speed+blacks&hl=en&start=5&ie=UTF-8 Except it's from 2002. And New Jersey. And it involves speeding, which is hardly the sort of crime we've been discussing. And it hardly seems unbiased. And the studies' shortcomings are not hard to find. It's still interesting -- it just doesn't get us very far. > Less scientific a study, but more fodder for discussion... tell me why my > scrawny white teen son has 3 times been beaten up by different black kids in > different situations... twice robbed... once left unconscious... but never > beaten or robbed by white kids? Our house has been broken into and robbed 4 > times... 3 of the 4 times by blacks... once by a white guy... yet our area > of town is 49% white, roughly 24% black and 23% hispanic. If the population > percentages were true to crime stats, my son should have been beaten up more > often by white thugs, and our house should have been robbed by whites twice, > blacks once and Hispanics once. Disproportionate numbers again. This doesn't get us anywhere, though. My experiences in the Twin Cities were totally different: 1 car theft (white guy); 1 attempted car theft / pathetic carjacking (white folks); 1 burglary (white guys). There's no way to quantify this. Plus, my "prove it" comment was a softball, because most of us assume that many crimes tend to correlate with income. E.g., if it turns out that almost all burglaries are committed by people below a certain income, how do the prosecutions and convictions compare w/r/t ethnic populations in that income? And so on and so on. I just don't see any way that these generalizations can be supported, and nothing very productive comes out of discussing generalizations. Regards, Mike Skoglund - NYC / MSP / 123 / Etc. TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
