The question is unanswerable because there is no real difference between the people you refer to as “white” and “african americans”
Try going into a few neighborhoods and you’ll find they’re basically the same as your own.
[[The percentage dropped sharply when we stopped Black males who were going through the higher levels of college, who did not dress the Black gangster part, or act the ‘Black Street’ part.]]
You gotta wonder why the cops were stopping them?
So far this question looks factually unanswerable. I’m wondering if it should be moved to Great Debates.
Jill
Bloody hell, don’t be so quick with the trigger!!! Chill for a moment.
First, contra sjgrocks, while there is not a genetic question here, there may certainly be cultural/socio-economic questions here which are both factually answerable and useful.
Secundo: I believe answering this question requires serious research. Which means we should lay aside the snap responses. I’d do it myself, but obviously my location makes that problematic at best.
Yeah, JillGat! I think with some research facts and crime stats can be found! Give us a moment.
Crime.org posits the question, How Accurate Is Crime Data?
It says, in part:
Crime reports are provided by criminal justice agencies, victims and offenders. In all three types of reports there are two general limitations which must be considered:
- only a certain type of criminal event can be researched
- only a certain type of participant is interviewed
For example, Victimization surveys only focus on the personal crimes of people who own phones, thereby excluding business crimes and crimes against children and the homeless [and the very poor]. Police reports, on the other hand, gather a wide range of data on a wide range of criminal events from a wider pool of participants, but do not include data on crimes where the victim is too ashamed to come foward. (bold, [brackets] and italics mine -Askia)
While keeping in mind the above limits, I’ll see what other statistics I can find.
First you’d have to find the black/white rates & then economic data, which could be tons of work. Seems to me the prison stats should speak for themselves, sort of.
Plus, what country? Say in Africa, wouldn’t there be more black people to do this? Then in say maybe Germany, there might be more whites. Looks like way too many variables.
I am not asking about race per se but about self-identified African Americans as a group. This would exclude Africans in African or African Europeans.
My belief is that if the crime rates were higher, it would be as a result of history as well as cultural factors and economic factors. Comparing the poor with whites might rule out some of the historical and cultural factors.
Please do this per e-mail next time. Thanks.
[[Bloody hell, don’t be so quick with the trigger!!! Chill for a moment.]]Coll
Okay, okay. Let’s see what you can come up with. I have also heard that African Americans have a much higher chance than other population groups of becoming crime victims. See what you can find on that, too.
[[Plus, what country? Say in Africa, wouldn’t there be more black people to do this? Then in say maybe Germany, there might be more whites.]] Handy
That’s why I mentioned looking at population rates, Handy.
according to this
nationally in 1999, the overall clearance rate for crime in America was 21%, with an average of 18% clearance rate for property crimes, and 50% clearance rate for violent crimes.
Now, one can actually do a reasonable study using a sampling of 21%, however, clearance rates are not at all a randomly selected group. Perhaps someone more versed in research design could explain how one could extrapolate usable data from this kind of sampling.
However, one also needs to keep in mind my earlier point (also mentioned by Askia K. Hale) that crime is not always reported.
Especially drug possession. It’s responsable for great numbers of prison inmates and crime stats in general, and yet I would think that it’s obvious as well, that only a small fraction of those who are in possession and/or selling drugs are actually among the crime stats. (another would be shoplifting - difficult if not impossible to get a handle on the number of offenders unless they have gotten caught - unknown would be who and how many stole all the other stuff in the stores line item for ‘shrinkage’ - I think that’s the correct term)
In addition, according to this the data widely varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, with Las Vegas showing a pretty dismal clearance rate.
The high solve rate for violent crime coupled with the relative less frequency of violent crime vs. property, though does exemplify why it’s so wrong to use the data re: racial charcacteristics for violent crime to suggest that one group vs. another is more likely to be acting in a criminal manner.
JillGat Here’s some vicitimization data for you. Specifically, it states
and another good start to crime data is this page
Sorry for the lack of statistics, but since everybody is offering ideas based on race, I thought I’d put in my 2 cents based on economic status.
I do know that when a health care worker (doctor, pharmacist, or nurse) is caught stealing/using drugs from work, counseling is offered rather than jail time demanded. There would certainly be professional consequences (license suspended or withdrawn) but I have never known an “abusing professional” to get jail time for it. To my knowledge, this is true regardless of the race of the “abusing professional.” I would venture to guess that the same would be true of a professional athlete or movie star of any race whatsoever.
Those who would like to get meaningful statistics from jail populations would have to face the confounding factor of prosecutions vs. crimes actually committed. Don’t ask me how to pull statistics on Offical Wrist-Slaps.
More Stats from fbi.gov (Requoted from some website that I can’t mention):
Blacks murder more than 1,600 whites each year.
Blacks murder whites at 18 times the rate whites murder blacks.
Blacks murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted about one million
whites in 1992.
In the last 30 years, blacks committed 170 million violent and
non-violent crimes against whites.
Blacks under 18 are more than 12 times more likely to be arrested
for murder than whites under 18.
About 90% of the victims of interracial crimes are white.
Blacks commit 7.5 times more violent interracial crimes than whites,
although whites outnumber blacks by 7 to 1.
On a per capita basis, blacks commit 50 times more violent crime
than whites.
The Report: “The racial distribution of arrestees for rape is similar to
the racial distribution for all violent UCR arrests–56% of arrestees
for rape in 1995 were “white,” 42% were Black, and 2% were of
other races.”
Black neighborhoods are 35 times more violent than white
neighborhoods.
“To confuse rather than elucidate, the DOJ and the FBI classify most Hispanics as
“White”, although the majority of Hispanics are non-white. The category “Other”
refers to American Indians and Orientals. Offenders from the Middle East, India,
Pakistan, etc. are also classified as “White”. Therefore, I’ve placed quotation
marks around White where ever it appears in the DOJ text.”
As I mentioned in the other thread, using DoJ and FBI stats and exptrapolated is problematic since the data collected is twisted by underlying biased thinking.
Here is a study that shows how blacks are overrepresented and judged more harshly. Their crimes are viewed as worse by our judicial system as compared to whites. http://www.sentencingproject.org/news/opinion.pdf
So how do you get accurate statistics with this kind of biased ingrained in the system?
I’ve seen the #'s that handy mentions on a variety of websites, but not the one the fbi runs (they don’t characterize the stats this way “blacks murder whites more than…”). some of the raw data may in fact come from the fbi, but certainly not the implications drawn.
Keep in mind, along with a grain of salt the size of Detroit, that whites (esp if you add in Hispanics) are the overwhelming majority of our country.
[[More Stats from fbi.gov (Requoted from some website that I can’t mention):]]
Please add the source of these statistics. If you won’t, this information is not useful.
Jill
The stats in question are quoted at This site
This is the site for "The National Association for the Advancement of White People.
Perhaps there are other sites which have them, but this is the one that comes up when you type in the first phrase into Google.
Why am I not surprised? :rolleyes:
Sigh…
I see where the pit threads in re Handy come in. Despite my earlier interventions, he willfully pays no attention to the issue of data comparability and the like. No, he quotes, to quote, from a website he can not name. Worse than useless this posting. I believe I can divine that this information, from its wording alone, came from a site with, how shall we say, a certain racialist point of view. Perhaps handy might wish to consider some certain criticisms of the quality, or lack thereof, of his posting.
Now, for those interested I do note that the FBI has crime data for several years back in XL files. However, I do not believe that we can control for socio-economic differences — i.e. the several issues I raised previously — in this data. Nonetheless it might be a starting point. Otherwise some peer-reviewed criminal justice articles, or better sociological studies would be the proper sourcing. That being said, berdollos, even accepting handy’s quoted data from an ‘unnameable’ website as accurate, and I have serious, indeed overriding reservations, we still do not come close to the issue of decomposing cultural, environmental, economic and even regional factors which I believe absolutely must be addressed in order to be able to say anything vaguely intelligent.
[[No, he quotes, to quote, from a website he can not name. Worse than useless this posting. I believe I can divine that this information, from its wording alone, came from a site with, how shall we say, a certain racialist point of view. Perhaps handy might wish to consider some certain criticisms of the quality, or lack thereof, of his posting.]]
Thank you, Collounsbury. I thought of simply deleting his offensive, useless post, but I’m going to leave it here with the responses. - Jill
My maybe bad, Jill.
What I did was I took the OP question & input it into the search engine: http://www.google.com/
Out came a list of sites & this little bit of data which I forgot to add:
“Neil Sheehan, an Australian reporter, dug out the following information for an article in the Sydney Morning Herald , May 2, 1995. Sheehan based his statistics on crime data compiled by the FBI (fbi.gov) and partially reported each year in The FBI Uniform Crime Report.”
That’s about all I can say after getting an email from JillGat, if you catch my drift. No offense meant of course.