Basically, he is using percentages to conclude that if it rains 25% of the days in June, 10% of the days in July, and 15% of the days in August, then it rains 50% of the days during the summer.
I would guess some people are being arrested multiple times, and you can count as more than one person in the numerator and not the denominator.
This is silly.
But the fact is that ignorance of statistics and statistical concepts is so widespread and so deep-rooted that it’s for the most part useless to try to explain them to many people. That post was aimed at people who could understand it. If that doesn’t include you, then that’s fine too.
Dancing in the street isn’t even against Ferguson’s Manner of walking along roadway ordinance. Second, the report’s examples of retaliatory arrests come from the officers’ own reports. Third, there are multiple examples. And fourth, that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, for every First Amendment violation, there are many, many Fourth Amendment ones.
That’s an absurd standard for a DoJ report. Are you being serious, here?
It’s crazy. Fox News fans would be exploding in rage right now if we were talking about a police officer who’d arrested a citizen for exercising his 2nd Amendment rights. They’d be calling for the police officer and that officer’s supervisor to be fired.
But a guy gets arrested for using colorful language? Meh. That’s what he gets for dancing in the streets. Someone coulda been kilt by all that gyratin’ and arm flappin’, don’tchaknow.
When conservative white people get as angry about the government trampling black people’s rights as they are about perceived threats to theirs, that’s when I’ll start saying we’ve come along way.
I’ve seen evidence of some racism, yes, but I don’t know if this shows that it’s the cops that are racist.
For example, using the Gannett stats it was pointed out that Ferguson, SF, and Atlanta have similar arrest ratios. Is it your contention that all three PDs are equally racist? Because to me it doesn’t seem likely (one is a conservative backwater, another a hotbed of liberalism, the third headed by black leaders). It really can’t be proved one way or the other which is why I’d like to know if there’s any substantial city that has a good arrest record. Is there something that city is doing different? Are they, in fact, less racist?
The arrest record of black males is a tragedy and I’ll look at any and all causes/remedies. However, I want to focus our energy on the real reasons, whatever they might be. I’m just not sure it’s the cops.
This, a thousand times this. Ferguson’s Failure to Comply ordinance, for example, is right out of a totalitarian state:
And the folks who (rightly) are skeptical of state power and arbitrary government in any other circumstance just shrug and bitch about Eric Holder. Something’s going on here, and it stinks.
You know, if you’re still eagerly employing the kind of “Vere Iz Your Paperz!” tactics that Apartheid SA abandoned in the 80s, you may just be a little racist.
I’m being entirely serious (if you are). Why are you holding the Justice Department to a different standard than the Ferguson police? Why does Eric Holder get to exercise discretion and the cops don’t?
That’s only evidence of racism if the percentage of crimes in Ferguson aren’t committed 93% of the time by African Americans. Take homicide victim data, for example. If we accept that people are generally murdered by someone they know and secondly by someone in their neighborhood, then we can expect a fairly strong correlation between the race of the victim and the race of the perpetrator.
Based on US demographics, we would expect the number of African American homicide victims to be about 12.8% of the total number of homicide victims. Instead, it is over half. If we try to correct for income, where 5.1 of 46.5 million people living in poverty are African American, then we would expect the number to be 10.9% - which is an even worse result (and unexpected).
I don’t think that there’s anything about skin pigmentation that causes a person to commit crime. If African Americans do commit crime more prevalently, then the causes are social. But I do think that it’s being intellectually dishonest to say that a higher reported crime rate among African Americans is de facto evidence of racism on the part of the police.
Something like, “Despite being searched at higher rates, African Americans are 26% less likely to have contraband found on them than whites”, is a decent piece of evidence (though not necessarily conclusive) of racism, since it would indicate a pattern of behavior that doesn’t follow reality.
And a parallel to this is that local governments tend to be the most corrupt, most unresponsive to the needs of the voters, and the most beholden to moneyed interests and and fringe politics.
The thesis that local governments are or ought to be or must be the least likely to be oppressive is fallacious.
The two police officers are in serious condition. It’s open season on police, most of whom are dedicated people striving to do their duty. Meanwhile the holocaust of black-on-black killing in American cities goes unreported. It just doesn’t fit the liberal agenda of evil white people.
Black-on-black violence negates all other types of violence to blacks (especially violence from the state). It really is the only violence that should be discussed.
Twopeople already replied to your previous comment about this. They seemed like pretty reasonable replies to me.
I’d like to ask what your belief is with regard to the commonality causing similar statistics if it’s not the police. It seems very likely since police are a self-selecting group of people who apply for the jobs, with similarities that are further enforced by the hiring process, the methods of training being similar across the country, and the actual manner and behavior of policing also being reinforced similarly across the country. What department actually makes a point of training or policing in a manner that is different than the majority? Look there and at least there might be some chance you find a difference in arrest statistics that normally are skewed by the race of arrestees.