Race, Crime and Statistical Malpractice: How the Right Manipulates White Fear With Bogus Data
http://www.timwise.org/2013/08/race...right-manipulates-white-fear-with-bogus-data/
Despite claims by right-wingers (both mainstream and overtly white supremacist) that violent crime by African-Americans is out of control — and that blacks are criminally victimizing whites at massive and disproportionate rates — the facts say otherwise. As I show in the below analysis:
* Only about 1 percent of African Americans — and no more than 2 percent of black males — will commit a violent crime in a given year;
* Even though there are more black-on-white interracial crimes than white-on-black interracial crimes, this fact is not evidence of anti-white racial targeting by black offenders. Rather, it is completely explained by two factors having nothing to do with anti-white bias: namely, the general differences in rates of criminal offending, and the rates at which whites and blacks encounter one another (and thus, have the opportunity to victimize one another). Once these two factors are “controlled for” in social science terms, the actual rates of black-on-white crime are lower than random chance would predict;
* No more than 0.7 percent (seven-tenths of one percent) of African Americans will commit a violent crime against a white person in a given year, and fewer than 0.3 (three-tenths of one percent) of whites will be victimized by a black person in a given year;
* Whites are 6 times as likely to be murdered by another white person as by a black person; and overall, the percentage of white Americans who will be murdered by a black offender in a given year is only 2/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.0002). This means that only 1 in every 500,000 white people will be murdered by a black person in a given year. Although the numbers of black-on-white homicides are higher than the reverse (447 to 218 in 2010), the 218 black victims of white murderers is actually a higher percentage of the black population interracially killed than the 447 white victims of black murderers as a percentage of the white population. In fact, any given black person is 2.75 times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by an African American.
Now for the full essay:
http://www.timwise.org/2013/08/race...right-manipulates-white-fear-with-bogus-data/
So Just How Dangerous Are Black Folks? The Trouble With Right-Wing Data Analysis
First, according to the 2008 data Williams relied on (see Table 42), which is the most recent comprehensive data published by the Justice Department on violent crime victimizations, that year there were approximately 3.6 million violent crimes involving a single-offender. These crimes include assault, both simple and aggravated (mostly simple), robbery, and sexual assault or rape.
Of those 3.6 million violent crimes, whites committed 2.1 million of them (58.4%) while blacks committed about 830,000 (22.8%) About 442,000 (or 12%) involved perpetrators whose race was not known to the victim. Thus, for crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known to the victims (about 3.2 million crimes), whites would have committed about 66 percent (two-thirds) and blacks about 26 percent (one-fourth). If we assume the same rough racial distribution for crimes where the perpetrator’s race was not known as for crimes where the offender race was known (a reasonable guess), this would mean that whites committed an additional 300,000 crimes, roughly, while blacks would have committed an additional 115,000. In all, this would mean that in 2008, whites committed roughly 2.4 million single offender violent crimes, while blacks would have committed around 950,000.
Since there were roughly 31 million African Americans, age 12 and over — and thus eligible for consideration in crime data — in 2008 (this is noted in the same DOJ tables Williams and I are both referencing here), at most, this would mean that for every 1000 blacks in the population there were 30 criminal offenders, and thus, at most, 3 percent of blacks committed a violent crime in 2008 (meaning, importantly, that at least 97 percent did not). And since there were approximately 205 million whites, 12 and over, in the population that year, this would mean that for every 1000 whites in the population there were 12 criminal offenders, and thus, at most, about 1.2 percent of whites committed a violent crime in 2008.*
Of course, in truth, and for both groups, the numbers are quite a bit smaller than this. After all, the 30 offenders per 1000 persons (the 3 percent rate of offending for blacks) are not 30 different people. In other words, to say that 3 percent of blacks commit a violent crime each year would assume that each offender committed only one crime, such that the number of offenses equalled the number of offenders, but that isn’t the case. There are, as we all know, many offenders who commit multiple offenses each year. As such, the number of offenders would be quite a bit smaller than the number of offenses.
Criminologists have estimated, for instance, that 70 percent of criminal offenses are committed by just 7 percent of the total offenders, meaning that there is a small hardcore group of seriously predatory criminals out there doing most of the crime. This would mean that 93 percent of all offenders commit just 30 percent of the crimes. So this would mean that of the 950,000 violent crimes committed by blacks in 2008, 70 percent of them (or 665,000) would have been committed by just 7 percent of all black offenders, while 285,000, roughly, would have been committed by the other 93 percent of offenders. If we assume that the 93 percent who weren’t the major repeat offenders only committed one crime each (likely a conservative estimate, but one which errs on the side of the right-wing argument by maximizing the potential numbers of black offenders), this would mean that, at most, the 285,000 offenses actually equate to 93 percent of the offenders. If 285,000 represents 93 percent of all black offenders, then the remaining 7 percent of offenders above that number would come to only an additional 20,000 or so offenders — major hardcore criminals who commit about 665,000 crimes each year. This would mean that at most there might be a little more than 300,000 individual black violent offenders each year. As a percentage of the 12 and over black population in 2008, this would represent only about 1 percent of all blacks who will commit a violent crime in a given year, versus 99 percent who will not.
Even if we just restricted the analysis to black males — and even if all these crimes were committed by males, which they were not — it would mean that no more than 2 percent of black males would commit a violent crime in a given year. This alone is an important point to keep in mind, as it suggests that having a generalized fear of black folks, or black men, is the height of statistical irrationality.
But…But…What About the Black-on-White Crime Data? How the Right Distorts Interracial Crime Figures
As for interracial crime data, this is where right-wing statistical stupidity just becomes downright manipulative. On the one hand, yes, according to the tables, there were indeed far more black-on-white violent crimes (B-W) than white-on-black violent crimes (W-B) in 2008: about 429,000 in the first case and only about 91,000 in the other. Meaning that out of about 520,000 single-offender interracial violent crimes that year, 82.5 percent were black-on-white (B-W) while only 17.5 percent were white-on-black (W-B). My goodness! Perhaps Williams has a point.
Well, no, not really. And for someone who is supposedly a reputable scholar, his illogic is particularly glaring. Before explaining why, let us just note at the outset that there is no reason to believe most of these attacks (either the B-W or the W-B) were racially motivated. This data does not refer to hate-related violence, or violence where there has been a discernible racial motivation (as Pat Buchanan recently claimed on Fox), and indeed, the biggest racial disproportion for violent crime, numerically — and year after year — is in the area of robbery, the motivation for which is pecuniary (financial), rather than bigotry.
But more than that, even the basic claim that B-W crime is wildly disproportionate and indicative of some kind of race-based targeting by black offenders against white victims is utter nonsense. Here’s why.
First, relative rates of interracial offending are directly influenced by an important factor, which goes ignored by Williams: namely, the relative rates of criminal offending in general for blacks as opposed to whites. In other words, if the black criminal offending rate in general is 2.5 times higher than the white offending rate, which it was in 2008 (30 per 1000 blacks/12 per 1000 whites), we should logically expect far more black-on-white crimes than white-on-black crimes, simply as a matter of random chance, and having nothing to do with racial targeting.
http://www.timwise.org/2013/08/race...right-manipulates-white-fear-with-bogus-data/
