Well, you have already disagreed with her. What more do we need?
Because the stripper was black.
Regards,
Shodan
Funny, for a person decrying the “race card” being played, you’re pretty adapt at dealing from the bottom of the deck.
You’re right that PPV will allow us to decide the probability that the witness will be able to correctly ID a maroon car out of population of maroons and reds.
But I doubt that in a criminal case, probabilities would matter that much. Establishing witness credibility is a lot more important. Rare events do happen and as such, any credible person who can attest to such a rare event brings something to the table.
The prosecution would likely put the witness on the stand and tout their reliability to the jury. The defense could come back and try to downplay that testimony by talking about PPV. But if all the other evidence is stacked in the prosecution’s favor, then the witness’s testimony–just one of many data points–could be the final nail in the coffin. It all depends on who is sitting in the jury box.
Well, the relevance is minimal, to be sure, but I thought we were discussing whether you could translate population-level statistics to an individual level.
Are we done “naval-gazing” yet? Hey, I think I see a fleet over there!
(you forgot the one that the DoJ tracked, ‘gang rapes’) anyhow, beats the shit out of me, and that’s the only thing that I kept hammering about. especially the folks who keep on posting “absent any other info”
'cause the fact is, that unless the accuser is dead or was incapacitated during the attack, the investigators will pretty much always have racial demographics. I wonder how comfortable those who support Huerta would be if it was standard practice with police agencies that the racial demographics would steer the criminal investigation thusly:
Accuser A White woman accusing white male “well, statistically, that follows, she’s probably telling the truth, let’s investigate”
Accuser B Black woman accusing white male “well, statistically that’s almost never the case, she’s probably not telling the truth, we’ve got other, more likely crimes to solve”.
I’d be horrified. and yet, that’s what the ‘absent any other information’ crowd seems to be advocating. and with a straight face.
and now, I see that the discussion seems to have veered off into “how do racial characteristics factor into sexual attraction”. what the fuck does that have to do with the crime of rape?
Um, if you were the cop investigating this hit and run wouldn’t you want to start by looking at maroon cars, and if you didn’t find one with parts of the victim on it move on to the red cars?
If the eyewitness said it was a maroon van we can cross all the maroon and red coupes, sedans, pick-ups, and sport cars off the list!
CMC fnord!
Hehe. I didn’t meant to say that twice.
In the maroons-‘n’-reds example, it will also tell us how often the witness “cries maroon”, as it were, on a red car, relative to the frequency of correct IDs. The real world, of course, is much messier.
I agree. In effect, establishing witness credibility is analogous to saying, “Look, this result comes from a test with very high sensitivity and specificity, and here’s the clinical data to back up my figures!”
Agree, again. In the presence of other credible testimony, the PPV rapidly rises, much like the PPV of an HIV serology in a high-risk population vs. the general population.
Now I’m off to stop torturing analogies and get back to my slides.
Exactly. As I said earlier, I can’t believe my eyes when I read posters here suggesting that we should encourage our law enforcement officials to make race-based decisions on the believability of crime reports. And “absent any other info” about a crime except the race of the peopel involved, I don’t want the cops to make any assumptions at all. I want them to get out there and get some more info.
Hello? I lost a little sanity the first time this idea was thrown out and no one seemed to take issue with it. It was just accepted, almost eagerly. To me, it’s just so obvious that this is wrong and I can’t believe that after 20 semi-odd pages, there a few folks who still do not understand this.
I’m ashamed to admit how much of a relief it is to see you echoing the same sentiments, John. I’m not surprised, just relieved. Because it means that the world hasn’t gone completely topsy turvy on me.
Oh, that deck’s already been cut, shuffled and we’re halfway through the first shoe. Or did you miss a few lines up where monstro laid this turd:
So, in monstro’s world, all stats relating to the frequency of interracial crimes are irrelevent, even when talking about the likelyhood of a crime with interracial victims/perps, yet here, in a color-blind a medium as you can get, an internet message board, where people are judged by what they write, their race not being evident, the reason everyone is giving YWTF an “unfair shake” is because she’s BLACK. Bullshit!
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. I have always said there were other data points in play here (in fact, the citation that has driven everyone insane came about six pages into this thread, which I joined on page two). Moreover, I have more recently said that all the other data points now available now swamp the DoJ point in relevance.
Your hypothetical is bullshit because it posits a single-data-point, binary determination (which I have never advocated in this thread) to “investigate” or “not investigate” (double bullshit – what I’ve said all along was that there was insufficient “investigation” of the totality of the circumstances before the decision to indict (i.e., to limit significantly the liberty of three persons), and before the decision by the mob to decry the “rapists,” and to introduce specious themes of sexualized racial oppression, were (respectively) made by the prosecution, the rabble, and Duke. You and others have continuously and systematically overlooked the many, many other substantive and procedural question marks that I’ve identified (none of them having anything to do with race) in both the report and the DA’s handling of it, and instead have, in an inadvertently-revealing way, attacked the strawman position that “Huerta believes that race and no other factor determines if a rape allegation is true.” Well goody for you for repudiating that position, which my three year old nephew could refute, but which I never actually advocated.
There seem to be some fundamental mis-conceptions here about the nature of the justice system, or of Internet debate.
Neither of them, in my understanding, promises to or could realistically promise to arrive at existential truth in every case. Neither promises to unearth and reconcile “all the facts” in every particular controversy, nor to provide a guaranteed determination of “what really happened” in every case – not after trial, not ever. There is not enough time in the world, and the limits of investigative capacity, human communication, and human understanding make it impossible in any event.
Thus, in either criminal justice investigations or Internet debate, we are instead setting up rules for evaluating, sorting, and dealing with fact patterns and related allegations that a defendant should face state sanction. Take the requirement that a crime must be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Well, but what about an “unreasonable” doubt? Some of those will, in the nature of things, turn out to be true. If my family shows up dead and the cops find me covered in blood and clutching the murder weapon, sorry, just about any jury is likely to convict me, even though since the dawn of time I am sure that more than one person who found himself in just that situation had in fact been framed or otherwise had an innocent explanation. On the other hand, there are times when it is pretty clear that a defendant probably did the crime, but the jury just can’t find quite enough conviction, or can’t reconcile apparent ambiguities in the case, so they acquit. In other words, our justice system assumes (and this is a hard pill to swallow) that some innocent people will be jailed and some guilty people freed. The question is, where do you set the bar in evaluating the reasonableness of a defense? We’ve chosen to set it at “beyond a reasonable doubt” but there is no a priori reason we had to do so – it’s just that experience has suggested to us that this produces the least-worst sorting of the (mostly) innocent from the (mostly) guilty.
So please don’t think that the practical function of the justice system is to determine all the facts that actually in fact happened in an actual case. Instead, its to flush out as many as possible and make a good approximation of what probably happened.
In other words, it’s a form of handicapping or actuarial betting. Sorry if you don’t like this, but it’s how the system is set up.
Over n cases, good actuaries and good handicappers make money by saying, in effect, to all guys in a given cohort: “Joe Dokes, you will probably die in 7.3 years” even when there is very little reason to think this is necessarily true of any particular Joe Dokes.
Since “the justice system” is a repeat player, like any other repeat player, it should acquaint itself with actuarial trends and determine if they have value in making sure that over n cases of fact pattern X, the correct weight is placed on factors that have been associated with past outcomes of “X is likely true/turned out to be true in such fact patterns” and “X is likely untrue.”
Then, because the justice system is a repeat player, but individual defendants are not, the system needs to accommodate due consideration of the factors that have in past been associated with “X not true.” All of the factors, I hasten to add. And of course (as is true to a limited extent of underwriting decisions using actuarial trends) this assessment is holistic and adjusted to fit the individual circumstances – as I’ve said six trillion times (not in so many words), a video of the company chaplain stealing the petty cash pretty much instantly trumps the value of actuarial data that (let us suppose) suggests that in the long run you are in generic cases going to make more money betting on the CFO as the embezzler rather than the chaplain.
Since the justice system itself, even at the jury trial stage, is based in part on handicapping plausibilities and likelihoods of fact patterns, it’s silly to suggest that these considerations won’t come into play when the prosecution is making a decision as to whether to indict, or when kibitzers on a message board are saying, hmm, what seems plausible here?
We make actuarial-style bets as to particular outcomes every day in our ordinary lives, and the (trivial) fact that “past statistics don’t guarantee a particular outcome in a new case” doesn’t stop us from taking into account all circumstantial patterns that have emerged in past cases.
Every prosecutor who does not have a video of the defendant committing the crime and a signed confession is making an actuarial bet to deprive (or not deprive) a defendant of substantial liberty. He is most certainly not saying (if he’s doing his job, which Nifong hasn’t) that “X definitely happened” – remember, the standard for indictment is “probable cause,” which could hardly be more clearly characterized as less-than-definite and based upon, well, “probabilities.” Because the decision to indict is a quasi-actuarial one, the distinction whether the population-wide validity of actuarial predictions (in aggregate) and the “determinative” (no one ever really suggested this) role of past patterns in a single particular case isn’t as great as some may think (again, in an environment of limited other particular facts of high inculpatory or exculpatory value).
no prosecutor I’ve ever known (and I’ve known quite a few) refers to DoJ stats to determine if a particular case has probative value.
Again, if I and that’s me, have a problem with people playing, “the race card”, I don’t deal from the same deck…but that’s me.
I’ll say this, and this is my opinion. The tone of the thread turned once YWTF’s color became part of it and that’s not only on her.
Maybe you didn’t see and still don’t, but I do.
Huerta: Can you specify exactly how you want the “fact pattern” of someone’s race to play into the either the investigation of or the trial for a crime? Let’s get out of the hypthetical and into the practical.
Weirddave, your last post demonstrates that you aren’t even willing to consider that maybe, just maybe, you are WRONG. Even when people take the time to expose the flaws of your argument, you hold on to it and keep repeating the same shit.
You aren’t interesting in having a debate so why do you keep popping into the thread?
Which is what the police here appear not to have done, leaving us in a bit of a vacuum until the defense started doing things the cops should have, but did not – as far as I can tell, the cabdriver wasn’t contacted by the police until they decided to arrest him on a three-year-old warrant once he substantiated the kid’s alibi.
And again, you imply that anyone was advocating for a single-data-point determination, which they weren’t.
would love to hear the answer to this.
I’ve been waiting since page 4. Don’t hold your breath because you will become cyanotic.
Since you’re here, Huerta, can you answer a question from me?
Does the fact that “race” is not a scientifically defined variable affect the meaningfulness of your DOJ crime stats?
If the accused in this case were brown-skinned Iranians, would the white-on-black crime stats be applicable here? What if the alleged victim is actually light-skinned biracial woman?
Perhaps wring knows how race is assigned when people are arrested? Are suspects allowed to self-identify as any race they choose (for instance, a dark-skinned Mexican can call himself “white”), or does an officer of the law assign the racial descriptor upon arrest?
Huerta, do you think this is an important question to ask when assessing the value of race-based crime stats?