The recent police shooting of Roger Fortson, a US Air Force senior airman, prompts Vox to look at the bigger picture of police killings:
Black people comprised 13 percent of the US population but accounted for 27 percent of those killed by police, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit tracking this information.
That's one way of putting it. Here's another way:
Black people comprised 36 percent of violent offenders but accounted for only 27 percent of those killed by police, according to "Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees," a statistical brief from the Office of Justice Statistics.
The MPV figures are for 2023 while the OJS figures are for 2018, but the differences are likely to be minute. Note that the 36% rate of Black violent offenders comes from both the FBI, which tallies arrests, and the NCVS, which directly surveys victims of crime. Both sources agree quite closely.
Why do Black people commit violent crime at such a high rate? There are plenty of fancy arguments out there, but the most likely cause is that, on average, they graduate from high school with roughly 9th grade math and reading skills. Once you adjust for that, their crime rates are entirely normal.
They do, though. You even said it yourself even though you tried to explain it away by "adjusting" for systemic racism.
Yes. I think maybe Kevin should have gone with a headline like "Police do kill more Black people than white people, but it doesn't mean what you think it means"
But given that the police get to decide who the "violent offenders" are, getting good understanding from these stats is not straightforward. Is a cop really going to shot someone and then say there was no reason to do it?
Note the straw man.
Drum is comparing racial proportion of police shootings with racial proportions of violent criminals. There is no attempt to determine which people killed were actually violent criminals.
Given the very small numbers of people killed, there would be no impact on the statistics even if the police claimed every person they shot was a violent criminal whether true or untrue.
Who are you, and what have you done to MF? This non-troll comment is so drastically out of character for MF that I'm having trouble believing it's the same person.
I know, right?
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Beyond that, the data Kevin presents is irrelevant to the question that most people are interested in: are the police more likely to kill non-violent or unarmed black people? It's a difficult question to anwser but the data suggests that the answe is yes.
It would be hard to say, because despite the general impression, police apparently do not kill all that many unarmed Black people. Like, maybe 10-20 a year? It' a pretty small sample there.
For instance:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fact-check-how-many-unarmed-black-men-did-police-kill-2019/5322455002/
and
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/25/956177021/fatal-police-shootings-of-unarmed-black-people-reveal-troubling-patterns
Right, that's why I said the data seems to suggest it. But there's nothing conclusive.
"given that the police get to decide who the "violent offenders" are"
Yup. I didn't dig into how that stat is defined and gathered, but if you believe systemic racism pervades the criminal justice system, from police to prosecutor to judges, the number is inherently unreliable. Do external sociological factors driven by racism lead to more black violent offenders? Probably. But does police/prosecutor/judicial racism and corruption (plus less less resources to fight criminal charges) lead to more black people unjustly being classified as "violent offenders"? Almost certainly. I think Kevin is well meaning in his analysis of race and crime but as a highly educated, well off, white man, just can't avoid some pretty glaring blind spots in his perception of reality on the issues.
Good comments, but these comments have been made before. If I hadn't been reading Kevin for literally decades, I would think he was trolling readers or trying to get clicks.
Commenting late due to just now hearing something related on the NPR program Throughline about changes in interpretations of the Fourth Amendment.
Had missed a bit, so don't know the number of encounters to which this applies, but of the total number of people killed by police making traffic stops, one-third were Black. I didn't hear anything about the number who had weapons, or tried to use them, but based upon just some of the news reports of unarmed drivers who were killed (like the number killed when they or a family member called for help due to an emotional/mental crisis, with no apparent attempt to defuse the situation, rather than respond fast to end it), it might be similar.
Don't know why this was posted here; expected it to show under the one at the top as of Sunday st 7:17 pm
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510333/throughline
I can see what you're trying to reason here, but it is offensive, myopic, and partakes in racist tropes. There is an assumption that police arrests are somehow race-neutral acts. Can you see the fallibility in your assumption?
Chalking it up to education is a cop out. (Have you met black teens? Can you imagine how much harder it is to sit through high school when your mind and body have suffered through the effects of racism, intergenerational trauma, poverty?) I think you usually have great takes but this is a cloistered, dangerous one.
Data is not offensive.
Drum is analytically decoposing a problem.
Control for the issue of educational attainement and the crime profile on racial basis is similar.
This directs one to a better examination of root sources, rather than symptoms - which without doubt resolve back to structural deficits in educational resourcing for an ethnic minority in combination with community level issues themselves rooted in economic rooted dysfunctions.
Simplistic headline and moralising are fun of course for the ideological partisans whose positions are pre-set.
If intergenerational trauma is a reason to do poorly in school then why don't Jews get affirmative action to compensate for the trauma of the Holocaust?
It really does not matter why people did not get educations - whether due to racism, stupidity, or lack of money. The impact of low education on crime rate is clear, and vilent criminals are the vast majority of those killed by the police.
... the most likely cause is that they graduate from high school with roughly 9th grade math and reading skills.
Uh, no. I would say that graduation data are certainly very closely correlated effects, and that the correlation is close enough that they account statistically for almost all the variance among races, but I think they're very unlikely to be the "cause."
I think instead the true causes of both effects are the well-known ones of systemic racism and the current legacies of historical racism, and the consequent lack of adequate educational funding, greater prevalence of environmental violence, the daily insults of racist behavior, etc., etc.
"Correlation is not causation."
Continue your thread. You "think" is not enough. I dont know who is right, you or Kevin, but make a stronger case. Im interested.
Low educational attainment is also a predictor of criminality between different members of the same race. Therefore, it is hard to see how racism can be a common cause of both.
Again, that it's a statistical predictor merely indicates close correlation, not causation. The presence of umbrellas is a strong indicator of rain, but the umbrellas do not cause the rain.
In fact, one might speculate that similar rates of violence among similarly educated Whites, who are NOT subject to many of the other systemic and historical effects of racism, indicates that Whites in general are less able to cope with low education levels and other causative factors than are Blacks.
Sorry... you are going to have to explain this is a bit more detail.
Sigh. The OP says low education rates are the cause of violent crime rates and cites a close correlation between those data among all races as proof. No. At a minimum it shows only correlation, ie that the two are associated closely with each other, but NOT that one causes the other. It also may show that one is *A* cause of the other, or that each is *A* cause of the other; eg, might not one cause of people dropping out of school early be a high level of violence in their communities? But just because one set of figures lines up with another set of figures doesn't mean there's any "mechanical" or causative association between them.
In brief, "correlation is not causation."
And as to the speculative hypothesis I tossed out to show that the claim in the OP -- and by extension the implication that racism plays little or no part in causing violent crime -- is unsupported by the data cited, it may equally well be the case that both violent crime rates and low education attainment are caused by a mix of factors, racism being an important one, and the fact that violent crime rates are equal in Black communities that experience high levels of racism and White communities that do not would indicate that some other factor is present in White communities but not in Black ones, eg, say, a general inability to cope with low status and consequent violent acting-out, such as we see daily among Trump supporters.
In brief, it might be that Black people suffer from racism that causes both low educational attainment and high violent crime rates, and White people suffer from excessive entitlement and emotional underdevelopment that causes the same two things.
Thumbs up.
@MF
AA #1 and AA#2 are from the same community and are exposed to same social influences ("racism"). If thats a confounder, you dont have an answer. Did you mean low SES from different races?
If you split out either African Americans or whites and just look within a single race, low educational achievement is a predictor of criminality.
If both were caused by racism then since high and low education blacks and high and low education whites have similar experiences with racism then you would not expect to see a strong correlation between low education and criminality within a single race.
White race experieces racism? Maybe its your wording and im not getting your point.
Similar experiences with racism.
So even assuming the worst, both highly educated and uneducated blacks have the same experience with racism - people are racist towards them ("What to you call a black rocket scientist? A n*****.") and both highly educated and uneducated whites have the same experience with racism - they observe it but are never directly discriminated against.
When your sole goal is to blame racism for everything you’ll eventually be able to piece together some kind of theory.
... and when your sole goal is to minimize or deny entirely its existence or effects, you'll not only eventually be able to piece together some kind of theory but also get vociferous approval from others who share that goal.
👏👏👏
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This is a gifted link from the NYT...so it is also for everyone. Best Wishes, Traveller
(PS Let me clear up one other thing that has been troubling me...in the discussions on NPR, I strongly argued that's not what I'm hearing...and its not. I am listening to LA.ist, an NPR station but this being broadcast out of Pasadena City College, I am certain that my NPR is different than what one may hear in Nebraska or Ohio, and maybe even different than what Kevin hears...I kind of apologize for my arguments back then.
I sometimes wish Kevin would have an Open Thread where people could clear up their errors and mis-statements...not often, but once in a while).
It’s the rap music! 😂
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I have no idea what causes people to become violent. Desperation? Poverty? Mental illness? I’m going with all of the above plus probably many other pathologies. Mostly I don’t care what people do to each other. I don’t know them. I can’t stop them. I certainly can’t alleviate their suffering or distress. And now many of them are armed. This airman recently killed by police certainly didn’t have any chance to explain his actions before being shot. If he really did have a gun in his hand, even in his own home, I chalk it up to the second amendment freedom to bear arms. Live by the sword, die by the sword, or some such thing.
Just one more dead gun nut. Meh.
Why is it police kill and charge more black people for defending their homes with guns than white people when more white people defend their homes with guns?
I have no idea. This airman was probably a decent fellow except for the fact that he owned a gun, which made him an asshole in my book. Maybe they lived in a “bad” neighborhood and were afraid of neighbors. Hard to say. Otherwise, people getting killed by police are almost always assholes.
But I know you want to think the police are the assholes. Maybe you’ve been arrested yourself. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had. You have anger issues! 😂 😡
"...Once you adjust for that, their crime rates are entirely normal."
I doubt that. See the graph in this NYT article . It plots crime rates by race and parental income. I expect a graph using education would be similar.
" The sons of black families from the top 1 percent had about the same chance of being incarcerated on a given day as the sons of white families earning $36,000."
The Chetty paper is long and detailed. I remember the NYT story, and the graphics are excellent. But it may not be education and crime that are correlated; it may have something more to do with family structure—something AA boys, but not girls, are missing (independent of income, it seems, with exceptions).
So you're saying an United States Airman in his own apartment who has committed no crimes is equally likely to be killed by police as a white man in the same situation? Because otherwise this line of talk is just an effort to cover up that he, and every other Black person, are more at risk of being confronted by police, and during the confrontation more likely to be detained, injured, or killed regardless of guilt.
And let's not go with the Blacks do more violent crime (by %) than Whites. The fact is that Whites get away with a lot of stuff that Blacks don't, and especially Blacks in urban areas. Cops come to break up a party where a fight broke out in a nice White suburban enclave and even if anyone gets arrested they won't be charged and Mommy or Daddy will get them out.
But if that happens in a more densely populated area and the party is full of African American and Hispanic men, no matter how law abiding, someone's going to jail and if there's any evidence (and sometimes if there's not) there's going to be a charge of violent crime.
"And let's not go with the Blacks do more violent crime (by %) than Whites. The fact is that Whites get away with a lot of stuff that Blacks don't, and especially Blacks in urban areas ..."
Blacks are much more likely than whites to be murdered. See here :
"In 2022, the FBI reported that there were 10,470 Black murder victims in the United States and 7,704 White murder victims. In comparison, there were 454 murder victims of unknown race and 568 victims of another race."
Why do you think that is? Who is killing all those black people?
I see you're using a racist meme.
I wonder why you're using a racist meme.
"I see you're using a racist meme."
Is it sexist to point out that men commit more crimes than women?
He answered the door with a gun in his hand. The cop saw the gun and instantly shot him 6 times. Then the cop shouted for him to let go of the gun. (Watch the police cam on line.) The airman was reported for causing a disturbance, which seems unlikely since he was talking to his girlfriend on the phone for 30 minutes before the cop arrived at his door. Was he Doxed by the neighbor who called the cops?
A local incident about two weeks ago in Western Washington, the police cam showed a white guy with a gun who emerged from a restroom with his gun pointed ahead. The cops on the scene shot him instantly multiple times. If cops see a gun, they shoot.
That white guy/gun example - was it his home bathroom, or a public restroom? The two are very different scenes. I can’t find any news stories that seem related to that situation. And no, cops don’t shoot all the time when they see a gun.
Blacks graduate high school with 9th grade reading skills? Certainly the schools are to blame! /s
The schools and the politicians.
For example, in many urban school districts that are overwhelmingly minority and overwhelmingly failing, instead of adding intensive remedial classes in math and English they are requiring students to take ethnic studies and similar classes.
Why don’t you do a comparison of the parents in poor urban versus wealthier suburbs and the priority they place on education. Don’t blame the teachers. The teachers play the hand they’re dealt. Nothing the schools can do will help kids that don’t have any desire to succeed.
"...Nothing the schools can do will help kids that don’t have any desire to succeed."
Give me a break. The kids want to succeed but they know they aren't academically talented and they think (often rightly) that school has little to offer them.
Perhaps you have never worked in education, at least not in a multiracial multiclass environment.
Perhaps you shouldn't put kids down or restate racist memes.
Some kids are not academically talented. Others are... but they are stuck in classrooms with bored and disruptive students who do not want to learn or who have given up on learning and then make it impossible for anyone else in the classroom to learn.
"... but they are stuck in classrooms with bored and disruptive students who do not want to learn or who have given up on learning and then make it impossible for anyone else in the classroom to learn."
If in fact there are students who don't want to be there and who are causing severe problems for the other students then they should be expelled. Or at least moved to a classroom that they find more tolerable.
Agreed. But discipline like that can’t really happen any more because people cry racism.
"Agreed. But discipline like that can’t really happen any more because people cry racism."
If kids don't want to be there it isn't really discipline to allow them to stop attending school. And you don't have to listen when people cry racism.
Sure... but many parents who do want their kids to succeed are still stuck with children in failing schools that seem to have given up on teaching them.
Two other examples:
1. The elimination of tracking. The idea that a child at grade level and a child 4 years behind grade level can realistically learn at full potential in the same classroom is mindblowingly stupid.
2. The attempts to shut down gifted and talented programs and selective enrollment K-12 public schools.
Gee Atticus, we were so close to agreeing. Until that last sentence. Environment is a huge factor. Parents who nurture a child’s “desire to succeed” play a big part. Children living in an environment where success is valued an expected are much more likely to succeed and want to succeed. Locally in the news, a young woman with mental health problems tried to commit suicide and take her daughter with her. Luckily, she didn’t succeed. I don’t know what will happen to that child, but how would you rate her chances against a child with loving parents? Sure, we read about kids who overcome such trauma, but they are the exception.
But I absolutely agree that teachers have to play the hand they are dealt.
Is this different than white kids from universally poor districts?
Oh, it's not, is it?
You took two unrelated datasets and tried to make a racist argument, great. jfc Kevin, I already said you’re allowed to say the n-word, you don’t have to do your fake statistics thing to justify your racism anymore.
100%. And the defense of racism in these comments is really horrifying.
Whether more unarmed blacks are killed is interesting but doesn’t fully tell the story. Check out the rate and number of killings by police in the US vs other countries here (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-different-democracies).
Our police are terrified by the idea of a perp with a gun and often overreact. They are also emboldened and made aggressive (my observation( by their own guns. That and of course the fact that practically anyone can buy and have a gun on their person legally as well as illegally. You’d think the police would be out there supporting gun control and lobbying to take assault weapons off the market…..you’d be wrong.
That we have a gun problem seems indisputable. Even our conservative Supreme Court justices, the ones accepting “gifts” have armed guards paid for by you and me because they fear a picketer might carry a weapon.
We’ve become a sick society in which truth is undermined and in many cases eliminated from our public discourse. And Fortson is sadly simply collateral damage from the above trends.
Another thumbs up. Being a cop making investigating an incident in Japan etc. would be vastly different than here in the Wild West. It's bizarre that police here haven't figured it out and aren't advocating for the strictest gun control possible and then tightening it up after that.
Do they keep statistics on the race of “white collar” criminals? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.
No worries, Mr. Drum, if trump becomes president this will all change. Cops will shoot and kill all kinds of blacks, Latinx, gays, trans, and white liberals. It will be wild.
https://digbysblog.net/2024/05/11/a-vast-criminal-enterprise/
Good luck. Maybe instead of obsessing about crazy religious fanatics fighting half way around the world, y’all should look next door to see if your neighbors are well armed MAGGOT Trump scum.
I do not think it is a good idea to call fellow Americans housefly larvae. I always go with "MAGAts", which is totally different.
Going forward, I will adopt your framing! Thanks.
Black people are arrested twice as often for crimes that white people commit at the same rate, so you're full of shit on race, as usual, Mr. Drum.
The assumption that blacks comprise a portion of violent offenders is doing alot of heavy lifting here - racist cops will arrest blacks wrongly more times.
So it's still racism.
Oh goodness.....Kevin's logic here is astounding.
Mr. Drum is probably going to want to do a redo on this one.
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. This is the answer. Has been for 60 plus years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action
The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a 'tangle of pathology... capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,' and that 'at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.' Also, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. That particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late 20th-century black urban life.
Also, lots of black men are pigs. Sex gods… just like trump!
I see most commenters are unhappy with Kevin pointing out that some researchers insist that to compare blacks vs. whites killed by police, you have to adjust for violent crime rates. But this needs to be done when comparing any groups. That’s because the groups with lower violent crime rates make fewer violent threats toward police or toward other persons while in the presence of police. More violence on average within a group correlates with more violence toward police or others while police are watching.
The easiest example to see of this is men vs. women. Men are far more likely to commit violent crimes than women. And in encounters with police, men on average are far more likely to violently threaten police or violently threaten others in the view of police.
Police kill men at a 20:1 ratio compared to women. So if you say that you should ignore violent crimes rates between groups when comparing killings by police, then you must conclude there is massive systemic discrimination against men by police. But that's very unlikely to be true.
You are misrepresenting most of the objections. But you have done well in besting that strawman.
Few, if any, are objecting to the concept of using other data, most are objecting to the usefulness of the actual data used.
The whole argument rests on the percentage of solved cases. If black offenders are mostly caught and white offenders have a good chance of getting away with a crime then the whole argument falls by the wayside.
"The whole argument rests on the percentage of solved cases. ..."
Not really. I cited FBI statistics above that black people are the majority of homicide victims in the US. Who do you think is killing them?
I’m not into statistical analysis, so I’m just asking here-
One variable that jumps out at me, but is seldom mentioned - “Resisting Arrest”. The resistance of a felon who “ain’t ever going back” is understandable but what about the mindset of “I didn’t do anything so I don’t have to comply with police demands” ???
I’m no “nothing but Law and order” advocate, but it seems to me if the cop says “get out of the car” and you roll the windows up, you have unnecessarily escalated things. Your relief here is in court after you’re released, , not arguing with nervous cops and weapons drawn.
Again, I’m just asking- Is this mindset relevant? If yes, do critics of police shooting stats consider that?
Police shootings are the tip of the ice berg, and it's natural we notice them since they result in controversial deaths. But below the waterline is a vast mass of abusive policing of other sorts which power-tripping police enact against all sorts of people just because they can. I am white and middle class-- but at 18 I had a cop rough me up during a traffic stop to try to get me to lose my temper so he could arrest me for resisting his orders. There are plenty of people who have had such things, and worse, happen, and I believe there would be enough support for reforming the bad apples out of their uniforms and stopping such crap from happening on the scale it currently does. But focusing only on shooting deaths and only on those involving black men sacrifices that support.