You wasted my time tracking down cites for the sentencing difference between crack and powder, and then tell us “I don’t care what that ratio is.”
What is very VERY clear from your post here is that your mind is made up. Presenting facts to you is a complete waste of time.
Did you read any of the cites I presented? Did you Google “mandatory minimum sentence” to find out what that phrase means?Evidently not, because your “If it’s unequal for different reasons, like multiple arrests, multiple infractions, then I can see why sentencing could vary” is a non sequitur in context — proof that you either didn’t read, or didn’t understand the articles I wasted my time Googling up for you.
A black locked up for five years for personal crack use while a white cocaine dealer goes free is OK because, after all, crack smoking is illegal.
You’re apparently entirely ignoring the posts pointing out that WE DO NOT KNOW whether black people are committing proportionately more crimes than white people.
What we know is that proportionately more black people than white people are arrested, tried, and convicted for crimes. That is not the same thing; and racism, both in police forces and in other forms, is very likely to be affecting arrest rates, prosecution rates, and conviction rates.
I expect you’re going to ignore this again; but I thought I’d give it one more try.
This might be the case for some pettier crimes. Officer ‘discretion’ may have racial bias, as may sentencing. Poverty probably doesn’t help when picking out someone to defend you in a court of law either. But according to this article blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes. The relevant parts…
Just so you don’t feel like you entirely wasted your time, I did find those cites to be informative. Thank you for them, even if they were wasted on your intended audience.
Maybe he had a personal grudge. Maybe he lost his temper, went into a fit of rage- his complaints show he has a deep-seated anger problem.What the complaints dont show is any racial issues.
Are you saying every time a black man kills a white man or a white man kills a black- it has to be racist based? Why assume that?
Look, Chauvin straight up murdered Floyd, of that there is no doubt. But we dont know why.
The suggestion that the discrepancy in crime rate was caused by police being more inclined to arrest blacks would make sense if the majority of crimes reported consisted of people being caught in the act by police. But this is not the case.
The vast, vast majority of crimes are reported to the police by victims and witnesses, and police only show up when they’re called. And they are called most often by black victims in black neighborhoods. And since most crime is committed within communities and intra-racially, that means mostly black criminals. (If you look at crime stats by race, you’ll note a surprisingly large number committed by “unknown race.” This isn’t usually because cops arrest the guy and can’t figure out his ethnicity; it’s because those crimes are unsolved.)
In order to think the reported crime figures are significantly out of whack with actual crimes committed, you have to presume either a large number of nonblack crime victims, who, having been robbed/raped/assulted/etc. just decline to call the cops. Or else a large number of black people calling in to the police and making formal reports of crimes that in fact never happened. Neither of those seem plausible.
If fact, to the extent that some black crime victims don’t want to call the police, as some in this thread have suggested, that would mean the disparity in the true crime rate would be greater, not less. The same goes for the suggestion that"officer discretion" is racially biased. To the extent any cops are hostile or indifferent to blacks, we would expect them to vigorously pursue crimes in white neighborhoods while ignoring/downplaying/declining to take reports in black neighborhoods (and if you listen to black crime victims, this does in fact sometimes happen). But if that’s the case, that means the disparity in the true crime rate would again be greater, not less.
In general, issues of crime start looking a lot different when you start thinking from the victim’s POV.
Do you have cites a) that the majority of arrests are based on victim complaints rather than on a combination of police patrols, traffic stops, etc. and b) that police are called most often by black victims in black neighborhoods?
I’m not saying that it isn’t so; but I’d like to see the studies.
In any case, police might still be more inclined to make actual arrests if the person accused, or the person they suspect, is black than if that person’s white; and/or there might be more likely to be convictions. It might be useful to see statistics of the percentage of cases in which an arrest / conviction is made if a white person accuses a white person, a white person accuses a black person, a black person accuses a white person, or a black person accuses a black person.
– googling that brings up mostly individual cases, not statistics, and I haven’t got much time to put into the search right now; but this article and study seem applicable: