re: #77 Obdicut

No, it’s not. At all. You have not even made an argument. You’ve shown two things that one would expect— blacks are arrested at a higher rate and convicted at a higher rate— and concluded that there’s no racism. That’s a joke.

It’s not a joke. The arrest is not the cause of the conviction, the offense itself is the cause of the conviction. Blacks and whites who do get arrested are, on the evidence of the links and the statistics, about equally likely to be convicted. That’s because the quality of the arrests are about equally good.

You cannot maintain that the underlying offender rates are equal. They just aren’t. Victim surveys confirm that they aren’t.

I do not maintain that there is no racism. Only that this set of statistics advanced as evidence of racism is no proof at all. The facts are these: victim surveys demonstrate that the underlying rate of offenses is higher among blacks. Arrest rates are consistent with offender rates; a given crime is as likely to result in arrest when committed by a black, or by a white. And this is as it should be.

An arrest is as likely to result in a conviction when the person arrested is black, as when he’s white. This, too, is as it should be.

Racism factors into these statistics at a different point: when a black is turned down for a job a white would have been hired for, the white is put in a position where the decision to steer clear of a crime is made easier.

The law can’t excuse crimes on such a basis, and it doesn’t. So, arrest and conviction rates reflect unhappy facts, not racism by the arresting officers or by judges or juries.