Comment

Tea Party Leader Mark Williams: The NAACP is a 'Vile Racist Group'

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Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)7/14/2010 1:12:58 pm PDT

re: #68 lostlakehiker

If blacks are arrested seven times as often as whites (one of the points in the post), and if they, like white felons, are then barred from voting as part of the consequences of a felony conviction, and this results in seven times the rate of vote-barring, the arithmetic suggests that arrests are correlating fairly exactly with probability of a felony conviction. The police are supposed to be making arrests on race-neutral grounds, and if they are, then the arrests they do make should lead to convictions as often with one race as with the other.

You’re mixing stuff up terribly here. Not only are blacks more likely to be arrested, but also more likely to be convicted. That the higher rate of black arrests results in a higher rate of black convictions is not a defense against racism in the system.

The demographic data for crimes committed shows that there are roughly equal percentages of offenders in the white and black populations when it comes to drugs. You are ignoring this point, for what reason I have no idea.

Why are you ignoring that?

That is, the evidence on the topic of arrests, convictions, and voting denial is consistent with the hypothesis that it is actual higher offender rates, rather than police bias, that leads to the “7 times” figure.

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.