You’re offering a few hypotheses to explain the observation that more blacks are arrested then we would expect based on demographics:
911 calls are more frequent in majority black areas
Police patrol areas where the most 911 calls are made
The rate at which blacks vs. whites are arrested is what we should expect given the demographics of the areas the police patrol most often.
Do you have anything other than speculation to support these? If they are just speculation, then I would argue that we have better reason to think that it is racial bias that’s driving the observed disparities than that these three hypotheses are true (i.e., the hypothesis that race-bias is the cause of disparities in racial treatment by police is better supported by observation). It’s not impossible that your hypotheses are true, but given other observed correlations between police conduct and suspect race, the simpler explanation is that the same racial biases drive disparities in stops, searches, arrests, and sentencing, than that each of these similar race-correlated disparities is actually driven by a diverse set of additional hypotheses that just happen to result in what look like race correlation.
But your hypotheses seem testable, are you aware of any studies that test them?
EDIT: Here is a study that seems to support hypothesis #1, showing a higher rate of 911 calls from “predominantly black” neighborhoods. I’d like to see the actual correlation between black population and 911 call volume, but this is better than nothing.
How would I find out where the most 911 calls come from?
911 calls are more frequent in majority black areas
Which would be a majority of Ferguson in 2015, but I wonder if it’s as high as 3/4 of the entire city.
I added a link to a study to my last post before I saw your most recent post, but I’ll add it here too. See the map on page 865. Link updated, map is in the “Results” section.
Actually, it’s all common sense stuff and yes, I believe that what happens is a faulty overall result that looks like a race correlation.
Stops…more police in black areas doing their jobs equals more stops
searches…cooperate and you won’t be searched
arrests…witnesses/surveillance often identify suspect, failure to cooperate with police and you will be arrested
sentencing…are they repeat offenders yes or no?
It gives that error because it’s an https link and the https is misconfigured. You can still go to it using the advanced options, but I’ll see if I can find a version that doesn’t throw the error. I updated the link.
#3 is not common sense. #1 and #2 could be true, and police could still over-target black areas because of racial bias. And again, the evidence of racial bias at every other level of criminal justice interaction supports that conclusion.
It supports that conclusion because the people set the parameters up to be slanted…no common sense or an agenda to cause racial disharmony. If it has all been faultily set-up and interpreted like you want to, then sure white cops hate blacks and want to throw them all in jail.
I have to down load the PDF to read it? Is it worth it to find out the 911 call volume of that area in relation to non-black areas?
Right, this is the collection of diverse hypotheses I was talking about. Just going off of no evidence at all, your position is already less likely than mine because it requires more independent hypotheses than mine.
But we also don’t have to go off of zero evidence. How strongly are you willing to commit to the position that all studies finding sentencing disparities failed to control for whether or not the defendant was a repeat offender? That’s the easiest thing in the world to control for, studies have been done that do control for it, and they still find a 10% disparity in sentence length:
This is part of what I’m looking for but an overall one for 2015 and I need to see a map of the demographics, but I’m even finding it difficult to find a reliable source for what the black population was in 2015, rather than go by the 2010 census in light that the increase of blacks in Ferguson kept rising dramatically up until 2010, goes to reason that it kept rising until 2015.
What I find interesting in studies done on resisting arrest, blacks are more frequently arrested for it than whites. How do we find out the reasons why? Bodycams are going to capture these interactions but their use is recent and there may not be any studies yet that witness why.
The preset prejudice by an officer or is it the misbehavior of the suspect that leads to the arrest? Common sense, police don’t arrest for NO reason, so what were their reasons to arrest the black folks? This is what is not being discussed honestly, the cultural/racial differences, the training for those differences.
And yes, it is “common sense” that if all police are patrolling Chicago (for example), then most arrests are going to be in Chicago, especially sense police follow the 911 calls.
And the extremely high relative violence rate of blacks vs whites has nothing at all to do with police bias other than to help inspire it.
Yes, “unarmed” does mask assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest, but also a lot of failure to complies.
I asked Carleas, if a white person complies and does as they are told and a black does not, then the black person is going to get roughed up by police or even shot depending on what the police believe them to be doing as they refuse to comply.
Where are those studies? I guess that there is no liberal outcry for that truth, just the perverted way they want to represent reality that white police officers are bad prejudiced men.
In regards to the study you linked, taken from first paragraph of the report
So is the report talking about first time offenders of any crimes in both cases: black and white? Not made clear!
In 1st paragraph on page 2.
What does this mean?
Page 2, paragraph 2.
So racial disparity does not occur against black females enough to make their case. Why would it only be against black males and not against black females equally if race is indeed the factor for such disparity?
Due to a headache, I’ll let you get back to me on my questions and comments so far about this study before I keep going.
I think there are a few ways to design studies to try to address this, depending on what data is available and what we’re willing to treat as proxies for what:
If we have access to a lot of body camera footage, we could try score incidents to determine if suspect behavior really does account for the difference. If we want to be super rigorous about it, we could replace people with wire-frames or otherwise mask race prior to scoring. Either way, this would be hard and incredibly time consuming. It also depends on the quality of body cam data, which right now doesn’t seem that great; officers often have discretion to turn off their body cameras, and footage seems to go missing when convenient (but here I may be overrelying on anecdote).
We could look at how often resisting arrest charges are filed when a body camera is present vs. when one is not. We could also look at racial disparities in cases where a body camera is present vs. when one is not. We could look at trends in arrest statistics in areas as they roll out body cameras and that shapes officer behavior. We could look at how often cases are dismissed when a body camera is present, and any racial disparity there.
We could compare resisting arrest statistics between wealthy and poor areas, and (if data is available), between wealthy and poor defendants. There, wealth or income would act as a proxy for self-control, and we could see what if any difference that makes on race disparities.
We could control for intoxication, since intoxication is likely to be a good proxy for lack of self-control. If it’s an issue of behavior and cooperation, we should expect racial disparities to be reduced when comparing intoxicated black suspects to intoxicated white suspects, since we’d expect those populations to be both pretty uncooperative.
But I think a better question is what to do since we don’t have any of these studies in front of us. I’m saying, let’s turn to the studies we do have, and try to make sure our hypotheses are consistent.
What question are you looking to answer here? If a black person murders someone and a white person doesn’t, you can bet there will be some disparate police treatment, since murder is illegal and not-murder isn’t. That doesn’t tell us anything about race. Again, we need to compare like to like.
The “first paragraph” is the abstract, you need to look at that part of the report. From page 17:
I don’t agree that that’s how the report should be interpreted. The report is trying to compare like to like, and it recognizes that the criminal justice system as experienced by women is different from the criminal justice system as experienced by men. That’s clear just from the proportion of incarcerated people who are men (more than 80%, according to this report), but it is probably also reflected in the types of crimes, the lengths of sentences, and the factors that are considered. There may not be enough data on women to compare like to like for black women and white women. And in any case, looking at how race affects men is looking at how race affects the substantial majority of prisoners.
I gave a scenario that is alike, the police gave the same order to two people to raise their hands, one did as directed, the other did not which would escalate the policeman’s further reactions immediately. The type of crime does not matter, the defendants behavior does.
Page 17
Where are the specifics in criminal history discussed? What does behavior mean?
What’s different…the officers (NO!), the prosecutors (NO!), the judges (NO!)?
Right, so you are comparing different reactions to different behaviors. If we want to see what the effect of race is, we want to see what the reactions are to the same behavior. If you are right that race plays no part, then when two people of different races behave the same, they are treated the same. Comparing like to like means controlling for other things that could explain differential treatment (e.g. differences in behavior).
Page 9 and 10, also the data appendix starting on page 38 (page 40 in the pdf, the data appendix pages aren’t numbered). They discuss the calculation of charge severity beginning on page 45. So they accounted for both the number of previous charges and the severity of those charges.
The define behavior as “arrest offense, multiple-defendant case structure, and criminal history”. They are other variables they controlled for, attempting to isolate race.
If race is the consistent issue, it would be evident in a majority of cases for both genders where race differences are found, but like I mentioned, they had no case to unfold regarding racial disparities in treatments of women, which must be included to seal a case of racism. Racism against only men makes no sense and defies what racism means. Racism does not differentiate between male and female, being a racist is against all people of color, no matter sex, attire, age, etc.
Bottom of page 14
When they make claims like this I don’t understand why they are making the assumption that the same crimes were being committed when the charges are actually lumped into only two categories: misdemeanors and felonies. The type of felony would definitely weight a prosecutors actions and also a judges actions, but I cannot find where they have these specific stats, comparing a specific crime done by a white to the same crime done by a black. In other words, they are pulling facts and figures from all over the place and making these regressions (which I don’t understand) to try to come up with even sample sizes. If white people are not committing as much criminal activity or as severe criminal activity, why is that being fabricated to equal the sample sizes between blacks and whites? And how can a fabrication speak to real content and context? For example, they are not tracking 100 specific cases from start to finish for a homicide charge for a black man against 100 specific cases from start to finish for a homicide charge for a white man where both men share the same backgrounds, ages, education, economic status, county/state, etc. The clincher is the criminal history and when that is not specific it invalidates the entire study. Why aren’t they using first time offenders with similar backgrounds who have clean records and dispensing with all the other bullshit? Why?
Page 44
Assumptions vs ambiguities…seriously?
I thought this study was based on definitive statistics and case specifics, the information required to formulate a comprehensive study not based on assumptions…educated guesses which could be wrong in many cases.
This is what I was having problems with…guesswork. Why would you conduct a study that doesn’t have all the blanks filled in by factual data? Why base aspects of a study on assumptions, doesn’t that defeat the purpose and results of the study?
I’ll keep reading this study thing, but it’s admitted that it is sketchy several times over.
I don’t understand why they keep making assumptions concerning what I consider the most important aspect of all the cases…the criminal history.
What does this mean?
What is the binary variable?
Hispanics were counted where? They didn’t have their own category, except for in one aspect of the study, which I’m having trouble finding again???Seriously, Hispanics are floating in the white, black, Asian, Indian, and other categories? How is this even possible, let alone actual?
Not specific, not in-depth, and not linked through all the aspects of the study. How much extremely pertinent information is missing? What was this sample size for blacks and for whites?
Earlier in the study they brought up the record of criminal history being available through the AOUSC coding as either a misdemeanor or a felony but not any specifics, but not here. What gives?
Forgive me for the following hand-wavey explanation, I sort of understand statistical regression in the abstract, but I couldn’t do one myself.
Regressions are a mathematical tools that help match like to like. They’re the method by which the authors are controlling for things like criminal history and severity of the crime. The basic idea is that there’s some function that produces the measured outcome, in this case the length of a prison sentence. The function is something like,
(number if prior offenses)*x+(severity of offense)*y+(type of crime)*z+(some remaining unexplained factor)=(length of sentence)
That remaining unexplained factor is the error in the function. If we know the other things, we can guess the length of the sentence plus-or-minus that remaining bit. We can add other factors to try to reduce that remaining unexplained factor. Maybe length of sentence is affected by where in the country the case took place, or how good a lawyer the defendant had, or when the judge last ate. Adding those things to the function would reduce the error, i.e. if we know them for a case we can guess the prison sentence better. Other things we could add probably wouldn’t: defendant’s blood type, closing price of the S&P that day, whether the Red Sox won their last game.
Regressions are how we find this function. We take a bunch of cases and pull out all the information and see how much things contribute to removing the unexplained part, i.e. if we know some piece of information about a case, how well can we guess the outcome. Here, we’re trying to see how much of the difference is explained by race of the defendant.
We could do as you suggest, and limit the study to “first time offenders with similar backgrounds who have clean records”. We could do a thousand separate studies: first time offenders with background x, second time offenders with background x, first time offenders with background y, second time offenders with background y, etc. But regressions let us look at all those cases at the same time. Assuming that race is a factor that operates similarly in all those cases, we can get an idea of the general impact of race.
It should be acknowledged that this method isn’t perfect. We could be missing variables and it’s always possible that even where race helps reduce the error, it’s doing so by acting as a proxy for something else that we haven’t included. For example, if this study didn’t control for the geographical area (it does), race might be a acting a proxy for geographic area, e.g. if most black defendants come from certain areas, and those areas also have tougher sentencing in general. But it’s still a reliable method, and when we have hypotheses about other things that could be resulting in what looks like racial bias, we can plug them into the regression and see if they remove the effect of race. In this case, we controlled for geographic area, and we still see race as playing a role in determining sentence length.
Again, we’re trying to compare like to like. Where we know that the criminal justice system produces vastly different outcomes for men and women, we need to control for that variable, and compare male back defendants to male white defendants, and female black defendants to female white defendants. You’re assuming that “they had no case to unfold regarding racial disparities in treatments of women”, but that’s unfounded, the study doesn’t say that, it says it focused on men because the two populations are different men are 80% of prisoners.
As for why defendant sex wasn’t just plugged into the regression, it could be that sex is such a major factor in sentencing that it’s effectively not the same process. It could also be that the number of cases for women for which the relevant data was available was just insufficient to include in any meaningful way (for example, data from some states was excluded). It could be that intersectionality matters, and race really does do something different from women than it does for men. I don’t think we can assume that, and in any case it isn’t necessary to speculate in order to interpret this study: this study provides strong evidence that black men are given longer prison sentences because they are black.
They aren’t. After noting that a specific data set only indicates severity directly as a distinction between misdemeanors and felonies, the report notes that “charges are simply recorded as the detailed section of the criminal code a defendant is charged with violating”, i.e. the law that the defendant broke. The authors use those code sections to assess severity. This doesn’t resolve all ambiguity, but it gives a much finer-grained severity assessment than the misdemeanor/felony distinction.
As you note, this requires making “realistic assumptions” about how those code sections are applied. They are assuming, for example, that most convictions under a specific code section is not being sentenced based on some obscure aggravating factor mentioned in the code section. The assumptions are realistic in that they reflect how the code section is most likely to be applied.
I get the way you are upset with assumptions, but you can’t not make assumptions (I made this same mistake in my post above, but I caught it a few days ago!), and they state what their assumptions are. The right criticism can’t be “bullshit, they’re making assumptions!”, it needs to be “this specific assumption is unreasonable for these reasons, and if it’s false it undermines the findings in these ways.” There’s just no way to “have all the blanks filled in by factual data”, there are always blanks in any causal story.
What about all the Hispanics? In 2015, that was 17.6% of the US population which is a larger percent than the black population at 13%. pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/f … s-latinos/
How did the study filter out the Hispanics from the get-go? From what I read it did not, but did (and I don’t understand how) include one aspect of information about Hispanics they did have? How do you conclude a study about blacks and whites when Hispanics are mixed into both racial samples in unknown numbers?
Why wouldn’t they simplify the study so that criminal histories which are the most significant aspect would not be relevant? There would be no assumptions or ambiguities then.
Is this off their actual regression or is what’s above your made up version?
Checking if I understand…
Type of prior offenses(A,B,C) X severity(X,Y,Z) X current offense type (1) X (Unexplained factor/how did they calculate such a thing? a.b.c.)=actual length of sentence
Where was the amount of time already served for previous offenses included? This seems like an important factor for amounts of time served would influence how much harsher a sentence would be the next time around and might explain why a prosecutor would ask for the minimum sentence to be fulfilled.
If they are actually Hispanics lumped in with blacks, how do you figure a strong case against a tainted black sample? The unknown degree of Hispanic inclusion negates the entire study.
They divided it into what 6 sections of severity? Was that done for each previous offense? Then those numbers were added together? And what subsumed back into the six sections of overall severity? Somethings missing there. Then what about gang offenses when several people were involved? I didn’t understand how they measured and weighted those past offenses or if that past information was even known which would have also impacted previous sentencing which is another imperative part of their equation that seems missing.
The study wasn’t done correctly. Hispanics cannot be contaminating the samples. Their criminal history and past sentencing figures are missing, both very important aspects that needed to be calculated properly. Also, how did they come up with equal sample sizes when blacks and whites do not commit the same number of like crimes. Did they pick and choose certain cases to include and exclude?
Where was time served figured into the equation? If both the prosecutor and judge see that so and so served a good amount of time but didn’t learn from it, they may be punishing stupidity rather than blackness by asking for and giving the minimum sentence or worse.
Also the length of a criminal history may weigh against an offender before even taking the types of offenses into account, so how was that included? If the history for the study only took five offenses into account, but the prosecutor and judge saw many more offenses, that would have definitely given those with the longest records, the longest sentences.
But the fact that they didn’t use first time offenders for this study, which would erase the ambiguities and assumptions, doesn’t make sense unless it would have made a different case that racial disparity in sentence lengths between blacks and whites (and hispanics LOL)was no different.
First, let me take a step back so we don’t lose sight of the broader discussion: you seem willing to commit fully to hypotheses with no evidence (like that every unarmed black person that’s shot to death must have had their hands in their pockets and refused to cooperate), while for a study that does present evidence, and that attempts to control for a reasonable set of variables (including the one that you’d original suggested to explain sentencing disparity), you won’t accept it unless it eliminates every possible assumption. You’re holding competing hypotheses to wildly different standards of proof.
My impression is that that’s a running theme, and pretty flagrant in this case. You suggested that sentencing disparities could be explained by failure to control for criminal history. You provided no evidence, no data set, no methodology, nothing to support that conjecture. I provided a study that took the data we have, applied a reasonable methodology to do exactly what you were saying wasn’t done, and found that the sentencing disparity still exists. There may be other things we want to know from the data, more studies using the same data sets and looking at different questions could tease out different information. But “this study isn’t perfect and doesn’t tell us absolutely everything we might be curious about” is not the same as “my baseless conjecture is supported”.
Hispanic isn’t a race, so whatever the influence on sentencing of being Hispanic, it is separate from the role of race in sentencing.
First, there would absolutely still be assumptions or ambiguities. If we limited it to just first time offenders, we still need to control for the type of crime, i.e. compare murderers to murders. We need to control for the nature of the crime, e.g. murder with a knife is different from murder with poison. We need to control for the victim, e.g. child or adult, white or black, rich or poor. No two crimes are exactly identical, they all all differ in the details, and it’s impossible to create a data set that captures every detail that might be relevant. So we take the data we have, we make reasonable assumptions about how these differences average out, and we compare based on the data we have. That’s true even if we remove everyone from the data set except first time offenders.
Further, it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that race acts differently on first time offenders than it does on third time offenders. We could look at different racial disparities for different types of crime (and this study does a little of that, noting that disparities are much greater at the high end). But that’s just a different question. By combining all the data, we can see that there’s a racial disparity across all types of criminals, whether first-timers or repeat offenders.
But the disparity-in-disparities, even if it exists, would just mean that the overall disparity that this study finds is masking a much greater disparity in some specific subset of crimes. While that may be the case, it’s still sufficient to show that across all crimes, there is a disparity.
I think we’ve been conflating “criminal history” and “charge severity”. “Criminal history” appears to be a term of art used by the sentencing guidelines, that uses a point system to categorize defendants into 6 categories. I think the charge severity calculated in this paper was only applied to the charge for which the defendant is sentenced, and then they relied on the criminal history categorization that was used at the sentencing.
That hypothesis doesn’t need a bunch of evidence for it is based on common police procedure which is to verbalize orders to a suspect and either the suspect complies with the officers orders or he doesn’t. When a suspect does not comply with an officers orders, the situation escalates, often into areas of violent confrontation between the officer and the suspect and the suspect is arrested for failure to comply, resisting arrest, etc. If you want to make correlations between behaviors between blacks and whites when stopped by the police, lets look at the number of arrests made for each type of defiant behavior for blacks and for whites and see where we stand. That shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Show me that study.
I do not believe that a reasonable methodology was applied for it is still not clear exactly what was represented by criminal history, if it included the entire history which it doesn’t, nor does it include the time served or even sentenced for each prior offense.
If Hispanics are not a race then why are they considered a minority called Hispanics or Latinos? Why are American born Hispanic children classified as Hispanic and not white? I understand that the government is playing games with the differences between ethnicity, race, and minority status. On college applications, drivers license, medical forms, census forms, etc. when asked for race/ethnicity, Hispanic/Latino is a category, but I can’t explain why the government plays games with race.
From reading the choices above, what race is a shorter than caucasian, brown skinned, brown haired, brown eyed Mexican? Like I said, I see the games the government is playing with race, but I’ll let what Wiki deems race to be true ( ). You know it’s not true, don’t you?
Did this study compare for all these differences? I did not read where they say they do.
Where does the study say that they include the entire criminal history of each person sampled? From what I read it was only up to 5 previous offenses, wouldn’t 6, or 15 previous offenses matter greatly?
Also, why wasn’t time previously sentenced and time previously served included? Those are huge aspects of someone’s criminal history which both prosecutors and judges see and both would greatly affect a new sentence suggestion and ultimately its length. Sentence length discrepancies happened here and were not due to blackness, but rather due to the stupidity of being a repeat offender!
Why would a complete study looking at disproportionate sentence lengths not look at sentence lengths already served or assigned for repeat offenders? There would be a significant correlation between them. Instead, that is incorporated somehow into the study based on severity, not incorporated accurately but rather an assumptive approximation? LOL
Where is this evidenced? I didn’t see any distinction made.
A subject simply tops out at 13 points at level 6. Their criminal history can be a mile long and real ugly, but it stops at 13/level 6 or were the actual points tallied rather than just the level? Only 5 prior offenses…not very specific to get the true gist of how much prison time an offender has already served.
Carleas, I understand that this is an official study, but it could have been done differently and with more accuracy taking all the important aspects of criminal history into account rather than glossing over them or it could have been about first time offenders so there would be less assumptions and ambiguities regarding the criminal history. The study does point to racial disparity which is what it set out to do and they came up with a way in this study to depict the disparity, nevermind that it is an incomplete assessment of the offenders criminal history which discredits its accuracy from the get go. If you are happy with faulty studies because they show how white police officers set out to break the law and jeopardize their livelihood not to mention take the risk of themselves going to jail, I am happy for your happiness. Find a better study or we remain in disagreement. I’ve been unable to find any studies that set out with the intent to prove that whites do not mistreat blacks. Why do social scientists only wish to prove that white people are racist?
While I found articles by the police who are commenting on the ever growing epidemic of non compliance of offenders with the police, the comments were not race specific for whites only condemn themselves, rather than defend themselves so it’s doubtful that the behavior of the black community’s conduct will ever be called into the light and have a research study done to measure it.
). You know it’s not true, don’t you?