This is sort of funny… Barking Spider, monstro wasn’t being serious about her comment, she was making an ironic statement, a joke of sorts! Don’t take what she said seriously…well, maybe the message, but not take it literally serious!
PD. Oh yea, the message wasn’t that “Whites” should be profiled…it was that profiling itself is a silly concept!
Hey, it sounds good to me.
BS, Planning to blow up any federal buildings?
I keep wondering when this Monsto person is going to show up and defend herself. I’m tired of doing it for her.
Esprix said
I’m presonally waiting for december so I can yell HAT TRICK!
Don’t the statistics at least indicate that of a random selection of 10 out of 100 blacks, and 10 out of and 100 whites, that it is at least more LIKELY that more of the blacks than whites selected will be ‘criminals?’ Maybe this is part of what BARKING SPIDER is trying to convey.
Sorry if this seems ‘racist;’ hey, I’m white, WTF do I know?
Yes, 10 out of 100 black college students are far more likely to be crimainals than 10 out of 100 white kids from South Boston. You’ve hit the nail on the head.
:rolleyes:
Yes, I threw in a rolleye smiley. Deal with it.
You can read, but cannot understand. Or you have simply set up a straw man…
The statement did not represent Monstro’s position. Most everyone else can see that…
Mr. Spider, please take note of the part where I have already indicated your statement to be false. It is boloney, bullshit, horseshit, bullocks, ridiculous, ludicrous, without merit, false, inaccurate, fantastical, untrue, irrelevant, not cogent to the topic at hand, unnecessary blather, and a whole bunch of other terms to describe something as a poor argument.
I’ll repeat my question for your ease (so you don’t strain your hand scrolling all the way back up)… if we had a single black man living in a city of 5,000 white men, and that black man committed a crime, he would be responsible for 100% of the crimes committed by black people. But would that one single person be any real criminal threat when compared to, oh, the 200 white people who each committed a mere .5% of the crime committed by whites?
I fail to see how you can expect to be taken seriously without even addressing that simple question. A basic “Yes” or “No” will do.
Any randomly selected group of 10 or 100 or 1000 black people cannot be compared on a valid basis with any randomly selected group of 10 or 100 or 1000 white people, simply because the sample groups as proportions of their respective total populations would be so vastly different - it doesn’t matter whether you’re analysing crime, health, employment, whatever. It would be like taking 10 people from a small rural area and comparing them with 10 people from NYC - the results aren’t going to be meaningful.
In case you haven’t been following the whole thread, no-one is arguing that the per capita incarceration rate isn’t higher for black people than for white people. What people are objecting to is that statistic being interpreted as an indicating that black people are in some way inherently more likely to be criminals than white people.
This thread inspired me to start this GD thread about the falicies that BS, zorch et al are building their arguements on.
Or maybe http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=119605 this will work better.
I wonder about Barking Spider’s thoughts on poofy hair, overweight women, etc…he reminds me of someone we deal with here from time to time.
Casting a wide net isn’t justified if a couple of the people you catch actually are guilty- you’re disenfranchising a hell of a lot of innocent people.
Every step taken to tell someone this isn’t their country creates more criminals. We all know the girl who got a “reputation” in high school- eventually she started to live up to it.
Another problem is that profiling places more effort on preventing a smaller proportion of crime, thereby lessening the pressure on others. Example; I knew a woman who used to smuggle drugs over the border from Mexico- she did this precisely because she knew she wasn’t who the cops were looking for. (I don’t think she ever got caught, but she did quit doing it.)
On a purely statistical level, it would make you more likely to find a criminal. However, in a real-world environment, pure statistics are a poor substitute for common sense. I’m sure that if we scrutinized white people more carefully, we’d find more naughty things they’re doing, too. Further, the statistical difference between the two races isn’t great enough, in my opinion, to justify such a profiling.
Now, if we had a case where, say, 98% of the black population was committing crimes, then I would understand profiling. But the vast majority of the population is completely innocent.
Additionally, a crime-fighting point of view would want to simply limit the grand total, regardless of demographic percentages. The black population is hardly the largest criminal group in the statistics.
REPRISE—I did not mean to imply that Blacks are INHERENETLY more likely to commit crime, be in prison, or be on welfare, and I think any thinking person would agree.
grendel72—Neither am I a fan of the wide, ‘profile’ net, and for the reasons you state. I notice that in your OP here you take BARKING SPIDER to task for his welfare statistics. Are his stats incorrect or untrue? If so, rock on. If not, has the truth become racist because a racist says it?
REPRISE—I did not mean to imply that Blacks are INHERENETLY more likely to commit crime, be in prison, or be on welfare, and I think any thinking person would agree. IMHO, This is only common sense.
grendel72—Neither am I a fan of the wide, ‘profile’ net, and for the reasons you state. I notice that in your OP here you take BARKING SPIDER to task for his welfare statistics. Are his stats incorrect or untrue? If so, rock on. If not, has the truth become racist because a racist says it? [I assume BS doesn’t mind being called a racist, and if he does mind, EXCUUUUUUSE ME–this is the pit.] Maybe he would prefer, ‘melanin challenged.’ 'scuse again.
I don’t know about BS’s welfare statistics, they could very well be true, and, no, the truth isn’t “racist”.
I didn’t explain very well why that quote set me off, and several people have assumed I dissagree with the statistics- I don’t. What set me off was how he brought welfare into something completely unrelated, that type of thing is a typical tactic of bigots. While statistically he may be right that more blacks are criminals and on welfare, he chooses to see this as “them darkies is eeevil” rather than looking for an underlying cause.
The Cambridge-Somerville Project (still looking for a good link to an online overview) demonstrate the danger of interventions based on negative expectations. Briefly, in this project a group of 650 young boys identified as “pre-delinquent” were divided into a control group and a group which received counselling and other interventions aimed at influencing their future behaviour. It did. The group which received counselling and other intervention had higher suicide rates, less educational success, poorer social skills, and more extensive criminal records the control group. It is thought that the stigma of being formally identified as a “pre-delinquent” and treated as such by teachers, friends, and others let to the internalisation of the belief that these children were “bad kids” and that they then behaved in a way which supported that belief.
There are two ways in which we use statistics in criminology (as opposed to law enforcement). One is totally practical and allows us to allocate appropriate resources to law enforcement agencies and correctional facilities (such as placing police who speak a specific language in a precinct which has a high population of a given minority group). The other is determine what factors are influencing the crime rates for given groups and how those underlying factors can be changed. One reason criminologists use “self-reporting” statistics as well as official ones is because they give us insight into who is committing crimes and not being caught (and, more inportantly, why they aren’t being caught).
If you have access to a major library, you might want to get hold of Everybody does it : Crime by the public (Gabor, T; 1994; Toronto CA : University of Toronto Press). It illustrates very well how stereotypes influence law enforcement and criminal justice at more levels and in more ways than you could possible imagine.
Even if BS’s welfare statistics are true – that is, that blacks are present on the welfare rolls in amounts disproportionate to their percentage of population – they are relatively meaningless. All they give us is a snapshit: What percentage of the black population and the white population are on welfare right now. More meaningful analysis would require us to ask:
–What is the average length of time a black family remains on welfare? A white family?
–How likely is it that a given recipient will return to welfare at some point in the future? How often? Are there significant racial differences?
–Is there a large cross-generational effect, with multiple generations of a single family collecting welfare over time? Are there significant racial differences?
Those are the kinds of questions which give us useful information regarding welfare. And the answers, I suspect, are not going to be what BS wants to hear.
Snapshit?