>It has been shown time and time again that black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced.
And you also conveniently ignore that blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.
Such discussions cannot be productive until we are willing to admit to both sides of the problem.
I do not deny that there are inequities in our justice system. However, disproportionate police presence in low income communities is not a symptom of racist targeting. The blackness of these individuals is incidental to the fact that low income communities have higher rates of all types of crime, especially violent offenses, and in any other context it would be obviously prudent to assign additional police forces to target high crime areas.
But this discussion has far surpassed the boundaries of what is acceptable on HN, and I will not comment in this thread further.
If a correlation is completely explained by controlling for a third factor, that doesn't make the original correlation a lie. If black people are poorer than average and poor people commit disproportionately more crimes, blacks committing disproportionately more crimes is just what you'd expect.
What knowing the controlling variable does is give you additional information about what interventions are likely to change the situation. If you thought the reason for more crimes committed by blacks were their skin color, you might think that vitamin D deficiency is the culprit and attempt to provide them with supplements. Knowing the influence of economic factors makes that suggestion appear silly, and crime-prevention efforts would be better focused on improving the economic standing of blacks.
>If a correlation is completely explained by controlling for a third factor, that doesn't make the original correlation a lie.
The implication of "black people commit more crimes" is that there is something about being black that involves a degree of criminality. It is a very poor way of describing the issue. A much better framing is "black people in the US are disempowered socially, politically and economically and black communities are ignored by US social policy." Another, far more useful framing of the issue, that I hardly ever hear is that black people are more often the victims of crimes.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site rules and we ban accounts that do it; we have to, or this place will go up in flames.
And you also conveniently ignore that blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.
Such discussions cannot be productive until we are willing to admit to both sides of the problem.
I do not deny that there are inequities in our justice system. However, disproportionate police presence in low income communities is not a symptom of racist targeting. The blackness of these individuals is incidental to the fact that low income communities have higher rates of all types of crime, especially violent offenses, and in any other context it would be obviously prudent to assign additional police forces to target high crime areas.
But this discussion has far surpassed the boundaries of what is acceptable on HN, and I will not comment in this thread further.