I agree.
After reading this over the last few days–that is the same conclusion I have come to. Both sides have established themselves as this is where I am staying and no one is moving me from this position and basically resorted to name calling instead of good debate. Perhaps if this ‘issue’ had been in Great Debates rather than the Pit a more satisfying discussion might have been had?
I haven’t. This thread has become obscessed with the racial aspect, resulting in (as I said) two groups who are largely talking past each other. Can we at least all agree that we shouldn’t be looking at this case wrt to the races of the accuser and the accused? There are so many other relavent facts that can be used to get to the bottom of it.
And can we drop the “absent any other info” hypthetical since it never happens that way in real life? We always know more than the race of the people involved, and if for some crazy reason we didn’t, the only thing we could say with any confidence is that we need more information.
I don’t live in Mathworld.
The reliability of eyewitness’s is notoriously bad, but if an eyewitness says that it was a maroon car, driver by a green haired clown, wearing a white with purple polka dots clown suit, as crazy as that sounds that’s the information that goes out in the APB.
It would be nice if the DoJ actually did the math on crime stats based on police reports and court records instead of “0.0* *Estimate is based on about 10 or fewer sample cases.”
[
](NCVS Methodology)Does everybody finally get it? They survey 76,000 people, if they get 10 or fewer sample cases they put 0.0.
0.0 means we don’t have a fucking clue what the real number is.
We don’t do a survey to determine prison population we take head counts.
CMC fnord!
Except that it is smaller than 10. And therefore
Isn’t that exactly what we are talking about - the likelihood of rape for “members of various racial groups” and the “characteristics of violent offenders”?
It seems to me that if you can’t get 10 people to mention that they have been raped by white people out of a population of 76,000, then it can’t be all that common.
This doesn’t mean it never happens and can’t happen. People who are arguing that I (or Huerta88) are saying that it doesn’t and can’t are misrepresenting the argument.
We do have a fucking clue what the real number is. It seems to be quite rare, as far as can be told. Not inherently impossible - rare. Now there could be a whole bunch of reasons why it is so much rarer than intra-racial rape. But we don’t need to say why it is rare before we can recognize that it is.
Regards,
Shodan
Minor nitpick: they put an asterisk, not 0.0. They still calculate a number; non-zero numbers in that table also have an asterisk.
So obviously, even if a statistical analysis were reasonable, those particular statistics aren’t meaningful. Several people have wondered aloud about Huerta’s motive for looking at national race stats regarding rape, as opposed to more speciifc stats like North Carolina.
Why do you assume those more specific stats exist and are online? You consider what you have. Once more compelling evidence surfaces, you move on to that. Or, at least, you’d be allowed to do so in a perfect world.
Also, I am nervous about saying that eyewitness accounts always trump <whatever> in cases where whether or not an actual crime took place are only based on that witness. The McMartin family got jail time based on that paradigm. Yes, bizarre satanic rituals are vanishingly rare, but we have eyewitness testimony!
In “he said / she said” rape cases, adopting the assumption that a crime did in fact take place because one side said so is faulty. In other words, if she’s lying, then there is no witness.
Clarify this for me,
What is smaller than 10?
who do you think makes up this group of 76,000, i.e 76,000 black women who have been raped?
CMC fnord!
Because a nationally-derived stat will likely be a lot smaller than stats taken from a state with a black:white ratio higher than the national ratio. If your intent is to make white-on-black rape look as rare as possible, you’d choose the national stats. That’s why his motives look suspect.
Tack on “if it is relevant” to this and we’ll be in agreement.
Rarely would that be your only evidence, though. At a mininum, you usually have the defendant’s alibi, some circumstantial evidence (e.g. suddenly selling your car), or some other kind of data that points to you (some incriminating stuff you might have said to a cop before talking to a lawyer). I mean, you have to have some evidence beyond what a witness says. I’ve never heard of anyone being indicted just on someone’s say.
There’s medical evidence, for one. If the woman showed up to the hospital looking like she’d been in the boxing ring a few times, that’s something. Right?
According to this site, Nifong squeaked out a re-election victory over his two challengers, with 45 percent of the vote to (white) Freda Black’s 42 percent and (black) Keith Bishop’s 13 percent.
What role did the Duke lax/stripper case play in the win? Any armchair analysts care to weigh in on that?
Now that he’s won, will Nifong dial back the public displays of pandering, and at some point announce regretfully that the victim of this heinous crime has chosen not to go forward with the prosecution because it would be too traumatic for her? Or is he likely to actually try the thing to a jury?
Experienced prosecutors wonder the same thing -
Lacrosse case begs question: Does Nifong know something we don’t
I think the upshot is that, objectively, there’s really no significant downside for Nifong to carry this thing forward.
Assuming there’s no compelling smoking gun re guilt of the players (and none has been presented to date) let’s look at the likely scenario -
Case goes to trial, evidence presented, Jurors decide plaintiff claims are not credible and players are declared not guilty. Nifong gets street cred with black community, and can always claim he was just doing his job. Short of some over the top ethical violation by him who is there with any immediate and effective power over him to call him to account and punish him for wasting resources pursuing a weak case? It’s his call as to the merits of the case. Even if it’s a crass political decision he’s untouchable until he next election.
You’re not thinking this through (or you think rape is a heck of a lot more common than it is). The US population is roughly 300 million. For 2003, the BJS estimates 169,340 rapes/sexual assaults for the whole population. That means that the 76,000 households reported about 43 rapes/sexual assaults.
The BJS estimate is that 24,010 rapes/sexual assaults had black victims, which means their sample had about 6 cases of black victims. The number of white on black victimizations will obviously be a fraction of this.
Not that nationwide statistics are relevant to anything, but given the tiny sample sizes this number is based on, we just barely have a fucking clue what the real number is. Just for grins, I looked up the numbers from past BJS reports:
year # black victims % white perps
---- --------------- -------------
96 44890 13.5*
97 43890 0.0*
98 47490 7.2*
99 67890 0.0*
00 33780 7.0*
01 29980 13.4*
02 59490 14.2*
03 24010* 0.0*
Just the spikes in the the number of victims for 99 and 02 make me suspect their methodology isn’t very robust.
If we assume that the demographics of attackers of black victims has remained constant over the years, this averages out to 6.9%, or about 1 in 14.
You don’t live in Mathworld, where all vehicles are either red cars or maroon cars, but if you think that means that mathematics has no applicability in the world in which you do live, I despair.
…And if an eyewitness says that the perp was a seven-foot Martian riding a brontosaurus and brandishing an amethyst-encrusted trident? 
By the way, your habit of putting url tags around an entire multi-line paragraph is something I, for one, could live without. It’s hardly Pittable but I’d like to register a plea that you adopt a different style. It’s less jarring on the eye if you do it like this: cite. Thanks.
The number of sample cases.
IOW, much less than one in ten, if your assumption is correct. Therefore relatively rare.
And it is that fraction that we are arguing about. But it is difficult or impossible to slice the fraction such that it is anywhere close to a proportion commeasurate with the frequency of white males in the populace, or even white rapists.
Whites rape blacks at a rate far less than if they chose their victims at random.
White-on-black rape is rare. We do know this, to the degree we can know anything from statistics. Do you disagree?
Regards,
Shodan
“to the degree we can know anything with statistics”? I’m not sure what that means. The study could certainly use a larger sample, or be designed in other ways that would increase the confidence level.
“Rare” is relative. It’s been repeatedly asserted in this thread that the number is zero.
Since this woman was in the house, she was no longer ‘random’; so what does the statistic have to do with this case?
Any chance that you could give an example or three? I know the she and I had a few bitter exchanges way way back, and I just now found out she was a black woman.
I think that the complainant will refuse to testify. I am basing this assumption on my belief that her version of what transpired is a fabrication. Bear in mind that we are a year away from a trial, so it is anybody’s guess.
Meanwhile this quadruple murder is still awating DNA testing. http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=local&id=3730471
The second dancer shows her [del]ass[/del] manners in court. http://www.wral.com/news/9294698/detail.html
This person accused of first degree rape and resisting arrest has a bond of $150,000, less than half that of the Duke students. http://www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-739380.html
It establishes the fact that white-on-black rape is statistically rare, and that white rapists of black women are disproportionately under-represented.
I can’t tell if you are genuinely arguing a position, or simply playing dumb. I didn’t claim that white rapists choose their victims at random, nor does the survey demonstrate this. I’m not sure why you dragged that in.
Yes, but it is as close to representative as we have. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t completely worthless either.
“To the degree we can know anything with statistics” means that we are talking about probabilities, not certainties, and correlations, not (necessarily) causation.
Every time someone in this thread tries to speak precisely, some clown on the other side (not speaking of you or holmes here) dismisses it as meaningless disclaimers or something. How basic do you need me to be?
It is not impossible that this woman is telling the truth (the second time, when she claimed three rapists instead of twenty). It is also not very likely, based on the incidence of white-on-black rape as far as can be told. The other factors brought forth by Huerta88 seem to mitigate against the possibility that she is being truthful. She is not a credible witness, there is no physical evidence, the timeline seems problematic, her physical condition at the time of reporting can be adequately explained by (ahem) other factors, and the only other witness to have come forward has changed her story, and there is reason to suspect that this other witness made the change for her own financial and legal benefit.
And Nifong seems to have been influenced, to say the least, by a desire to curry favor with his constituents rather than an unsullied desire to see justice done. All of which tends to bear out what was remarked at the very outset - the escort’s story is not at all a common one. White-on-black rape is rare and unlikely.
What, of any of this, would you care to deny?
Regards,
Shodan
Well we have this from WeirdDave:
Shodan
and it continues… it seems to me and again, this only my opinion, that the thread turned even nastier after YWTF gender and color came into it. That her opinions were ‘tainted’ and dismissed as those of hysterical black woman, looking out for her own.
That’s simply not true. The stats used weren’t correct and even if they were, they shouldn’t have been used in the way that they were. Over and over again YWTF tried to explain why, and these guys wouldn’t have it. They still won’t. John Mace asked if we can at least agree that the stats are irrelevant. No one’s agreed yet, instead they’re still sticking to 'em.
I agree they are irrevelant.
I wasn’t clear, I’ll clarify. We know that most rapists have at least passing contact with their victim. The reason why inter-racial is rare is because we still live in a somewhat segregated society and the type of ‘contact’ that would allow for an interracial gang rape to occur, simply isn’t often there. that’s IMO is what makes it rare. This a matter of proxmity, not ‘attractiveness’; which I believe is the underlying reason why people were and still are so willing to believe what this stat infers about this case.
However as repeatly noted in this thread, all those ‘rules’ fly out the window in this case. There was booze, there was sexual tension, there were guys egging each other on, and a woman who by the nature of her profession could’ve been seen as an object and she was in proximity. Those statistics are universal, when to comes to creating an ‘environment’ for a gang rape to occur and fail to see why the color of her skin would ‘protect’ her from it; but that’s the only conclusion you can come to if you believe these stats have some value in this case.
Holmes, I just don’t see a particularly nasty tone in those posts, especially considering the context of this thread. I assure you that I was a lot nastier than that in my exchanges with ywtf, as was she with me. I don’t see any reference to an hysterical black woman either, unless you believe that “emotional” and “hysterical” mean the same thing.
I have never seen any particular relevance to the referred statistics, but I know very little about the field. Didn’t Huerta pretty much say “Forget it, I’m sorry I brought it up.”?
This whole thing has been a colosal hijack. And yes, the two sides seem to be talking past one another.
Like I said, it’s my opinion.
I don’t think you can unring that particular bell. I guess if Huerta said, the stats didn’t o don’t mean what I think they did, that might have ended it, but as you note; they’re still being defended.