No. Most black people do not commit crimes. Some do, as do some white people. Individuals commit crimes for a variety of reasons. My argument is that those reasons are more likely to be present among black people, largely due to the legacy of societal discrimination. If fewer people trust you and treat you decently, you have fewer options for a successful life, regardless of your race, and are more likely to commit a crime.
This is the wrong way to look at it. Again, most black people don’t commit crimes. Some do. Treating someone differently because they’re black is morally wrong – that’s good enough reason not to do it. It’s also a good reason because treating people differently perpetuates the cycle – you’re, individually, making life harder for black people, and therefore, contributing just a tiny bit to making some people more likely to commit crimes, if you’re treating black people with less respect and decency.
I don’t think “No, you shouldn’t be racist, you should just assume going into things that any given black person will have much less desirable life outcomes than a white person in a comparable situation!” is the knockout argument you seem to think it is.
This was my attempt to explain different outcomes. The best argument to not be racist is that being racist is morally wrong, and has been, historically, responsible for immense evil and nothing good.
A) I never said arrests = commissions. I acknowledged in my OP that using arrest numbers is only one part of the puzzle, but I don’t have any other numbers to go by.
B) Please explain to me the racial bias in arrests vs crimes when a Black police chief, Black District Attorney are the ones making the arrests?
They don’t, but I believe they have a heavy influence on law enforcement efforts and direction that carry down and affect priorities of individual officers.
They are also in a position to make the needed changes, if they are seeing a racial bias in arrests made by officers. That’s why it is hard for me to believe that with a Black police Chief and Black D.A., somehow the Atlanta police force is exhibiting a high racial bias against blacks with no recourse.
So you accuse me of cherry-picking data, I show you that I’m not, and your response is a pit challenge. You can’t explain the numbers without being a potty mouth?
First, “excuse” is a poisoning-the-well word. “Explanation” is the more reasonable word. Given your total lack of an explanation, you ought to look more carefully at the ones given you.
Second, the median income of households is irrelevant, unless you find that an equal number of people above and below the median commit crimes. What you’ll want to find is the median income of folks who commit these crimes, and you’ll also want to find out whether there’s serious income disparity in Atlanta, such that the median income doesn’t account for big chunks of the population.
So yeah, poverty may just account for some of this disparity in criminal arrests. Can you track for us any existent relationship in Atlanta between race and income, and between income and criminality? Unless you can show no such significant relationships, your dismissal of the poverty explanation falls flat.
Check out this map of Atlanta (you might have to select Atlanta from the drop-down box): the yellow dots represent impoverished black families, the blue dots in theory represent impoverished white families, although I’m not seeing blue dots.
GS-E, at this point, if you continue to dismiss the race-poverty connection, even if you continue to attribute crime to black people rather than primarily to poor people, it’s gonna look willful.
But the OP also says that the numbers “hold basically true for any month you look at.”
I invite the OP to show that, from month to month and year to year, every single murder, rape, and car theft arrest in the city of Atlanta was of an African American.
