Let me ask you again: What was your point or motive in posting the stats? This is a very, very easy question, Loran. Can you answer it, or are you afraid? This is not an ad hominem attack at all. It is a simple question regarding your deeply held beliefs and values. Surely you aren't afraid to put your money where your mouth is, eh?
Well, what do you think my point or motive is, in the "Off Topic" forum, of posting a great deal of stuff on AGW, or on the defense of Jedeo/Christian concepts of marriage, family, and sexuality, or on the DDT issue?
I said:
If you ever, ever, come up with a serious empirical refutation of the national FBI crime statistics, or a serious, philosophically mature critique of the causes of the disproportionate social pathology that plagues American blacks in a collective sense, then let me know. [/quote]
I did, on the thread in the Telestial Forum, whereupon you immediately threw in the towel. Remember? There is a story behind the FBI crime statistics which you seem unwilling to reckon with or acknowledge. You need to bear in mind that a "crime" can only be a "crime" if there are arrests and convictions. You also need to bear in mind that there is a significant disparity between the rates of arrests and convictions among Blacks and whites. Why is that, Loran?
Here is your post:
Anyways, I see you are throwing up your hands in defeat yet again. What a big surprise. You claim to like facts, but the real truth is that you only like facts that support your racism. Yes, it is true that Blacks commit more crimes, but it is also true that they are arrested, convicted, and given harsher sentences than whites (thus raising the question of whether it is really true that, as you suggest, they are more crime-prone, or whether it just seems that way due to institutionalized racism). You have to take into account the entire picture for your argument to hold up, Loran. I would advise you to read more Liberal publications on these issues, rather than your standard fare of far right-wing pap, so that you can arrive at a synthesized, better balanced view that draws from the best of both worlds.
Not a single source. Not a single reference. So its my right wing pap against Scratch's left wing pap. So be it. May the best pap win.
Oh, about that right wing pap. Here' some more for your consideration. This is Eli Lehrer from one of the most prestigious think tanks in the nation (and which happens to be conservative), The Heritage Foundation.
Little evidence exists that black criminals face discrimination in the criminal-justice system. Black "overrepresentation" in that system is in the number of criminals arrested. Racist cops aren't responsible for this disparity: Blacks get arrested at the same high rates in cities like Atlanta and Washington where the political establishment is almost entirely African-American and the police forces reflect the population's ethnic makeup. In a study on sentencing disparity commissioned by the Center for Equal Opportunity, former University of Maryland professor Robert Lerner finds that arrested blacks get sent to prison at a lower rate than arrested whites in just about every category that the government measures. Lerner found that blacks were twice as likely to get off on rape charges, around 50 percent more likely to escape punishment when charged with simple assault, and a third more likely to beat the rap on drug dealing. The difference in favor of black offenders existed in 12 out of 14 categories of crime. (The exceptions were traffic felonies and a small category of miscellaneous offenses.)
Black murderers face shorter sentences than their white counterparts and (contrary to leftist dogma) make fewer trips to death row. Even when it comes to the federal law punishing crack possession much more harshly than powder-cocaine possession-a favorite topic of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton-racism doesn't enter the picture. In his 1997 book Race, Crime and the Law, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy shows that the law passed with the enthusiastic support of black congressmen who saw crack becoming the drug of choice in their districts. The use of methamphetamine and heroin-predominantly by whites-has soared in the 1990s, while the penalties for this use have remained stable. Would black Americans be better off if the situation were reversed, and crack dealing went on uninterrupted in American inner cities while police cracked down on rural whites using methamphetamine? If this happened, civil-rights leaders would organize protest marches in favor of stronger drug-enforcement efforts in inner cities-and would be right to do so.
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed100900.cfmWell, there's pap to be had in this argument, but I'm not at all sure that its on my plate.
Here's another analysis of the study from the New York Post for Sept 6, 1996:
Is It Really an In-Justice System?For many, it's an article of faith: The justice system is stacked against African-Americans. Last spring, a holdover Cuomo-era state panel made headlines by charging that black defendants get tougher sentences than similarly situated whites; the Pataki administration repudiated its report.
"Study after study verifies that color makes a difference at every stage of a criminal case", according to law professor and O.J. defense lawyer Gerald Uelmen. "Whites do better at getting charges dropped or reduced to lesser offenses." Do they? On Wednesday, the Center for Equal Opportunity will release figures suggesting that black defendants actually do better than whites at beating criminal charges. Moreover, although the numbers are sketchy, big-city juries may be acquitting blacks at a higher rate than whites.
The Washington-based center, best known for its president Linda Chavez, hired analyst Robert Lerner to assemble numbers from a U.S. Justice Dept. database of 56,000 felony cases filed in state courts in the nation's 75 largest cities in May 1992. The cities account for most of the nation's violent crime and an even bigger share of blacks' encounters with the criminal justice system.
Black defendants, it turns out, were convicted at a higher rate than whites in only two of the fourteen federally designated felony categories. These two categories also happened to be the two smallest: felony traffic offenses and a miscellaneous category of crimes not against persons or property. In the other 12 categories, black defendants escaped conviction at a higher rate than whites.
Many of the differences were modest. Thus, 38 percent of blacks charged with robbery beat the rap compared with 35 percent of whites; burglary, 25 percent vs. 21 percent; assault, 49 percent vs. 43 percent; theft, 27 percent vs. 25 percent. Murder cases showed a mere one-point difference (24 percent of blacks not convicted, 23 percent of whites) with equally tiny disparities for public order offenses and miscellaneous property crimes.
Blacks did significantly better than whites at beating drug and weapons charges. On drug trafficking charges, 24 percent were not convicted versus 14 percent of whites; similar margins were seen for other drug offenses (32 percent vs. 23 percent) and weapons charges (32 percent vs. 22 percent). The other side's obvious rejoinder is that blacks are being overcharged with these offenses in the first place. When DAs find the evidence won't hold up, this side maintains, they have to drop the cases.
Admittedly, the center's numbers can't resolve this challenge, but they do cast doubt on the simple idea that prosecutors and judges are adding their own dose of bias against blacks. (Hispanic defendants, incidentally, fared roughly the same as whites overall.) And this still leaves the study's most explosive finding: Whopping disparities in favor of black defendants accused of rape and other crimes against individuals that fall outside the dominant trio of categories -- murder, robbery and assault.
Other crimes against persons, a catch-all category covering charges from manslaughter to extortion to felony child abuse, showed a wide gap: 48 percent of blacks escaped conviction versus 28 percent of whites. And a startling 51 percent of rape charges against blacks ended in non-conviction compared with 25 percent for whites.
These happened to be the same two categories in which juries showed the most extreme tendency to acquit black defendants. Of cases that made it to trial, juries acquitted 69 percent of black defendants in other-crimes-against-persons cases, as against 29 percent of whites. And they acquitted 83 percent -- yes, I thought it was a misprint too, but Lerner says it's the real number -- of blacks charged with rape, compared with just 24 percent of whites.
Before readers fall off their chairs, they should know there are reasons to view these figures with caution. First, though the overall figures on non-convictions draw from a large set of cases, those on jury acquittals reflect small sample sizes: Most cases end in guilty pleas or dismissals, and only a few percent make it to juries. Second, and consistent with the greater randomness you'd expect given small sample sizes, juries did not show a reliable pattern of racial bias or lenience.
In two big categories, robbery and assault, they actually acquitted blacks at a lower rate than whites (12 vs. 18 and 37 vs. 42 percent respectively). And the low acquittal rates for both races on such charges as burglary and drug trafficking (where fewer than 10 percent of either race won acquittals) don't hint at an indiscriminate turn-'em-loose view.
Moreover, the figures don't necessarily point to a greater willingness to excuse black-on-white crime: in most rape and violent-crime charges accuser and defendant are of the same race. Finally, we can't assume that lower acquittal rates are simply better: Facts can truly be doubtful and defenses or mitigating circumstances real, one reason both races may show high acquittal rates on such charges as assault.
All that having been said, you can bet we'd hear plenty about the figures if they'd come out the other way. And the numbers are sure to fuel the debate about whether some inner-city juries are letting defendants off at the cost of ignoring the law and the evidence. While the nationwide acquittal rate is reported at 17 percent, it's said to exceed 30 percent in some big cities and to be approaching 50 percent for black defendants in The Bronx.
Some actually cheer this trend. In a much-quoted Yale Law Journal article, Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote that "when the criminal justice system discriminates against people who are African-American and poor, black jurors are legally and morally justified in acquitting those persons" -- even though African-Americans are typically the chief victims when freed wrongdoers go on to commit more crimes.
Jury acquittals, even if few, also help drive the entire system because plea bargaining takes place in their shadow. It's suggestive that prosecutors appear to be dropping cases beforehand in much the same general pattern in which those cases run into trouble with juries. The Simpson case may be a year old, but the need for a hard look at the performance of our trial system grows only more urgent.
It appears that your statistics, from wherever you are getting them, are either deep fat fried or you've not understood them. Now, another obsrvation from Reason Magazine:
Do blacks get a fair shake from the courts? According to a study by Robert Lerner on behalf of the Center for Equal Opportunity, juries are more likely to acquit blacks than whites of serious crimes. Using data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Lerner examined 55,512 felony cases from America's 75 largest counties from May 1992.
In murder cases, juries acquitted African Americans 22 percent of the time, as opposed to zero percent for whites. For rape, 83 percent of blacks were found not guilty, but only 24 percent of whites were. Only for robberies (12 percent vs. 18 percent) and assaults (37 percent vs. 42 percent) were blacks acquitted less often than whites.
Jury acquittals only comprised 0.6 percent of all cases, but blacks also fared well by other measures. Including guilty pleas, plea bargains, dismissals, etc., blacks were less likely than whites to be convicted for 12 out of 14 types of felonies, the exceptions being felony traffic offenses and miscellaneous "other felonies."
The study doesn't address whether blacks are unfairly arrested and charged more frequently than whites, but it does suggest that when they reach the court system, blacks do not face longer odds than whites.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/30094.htmlYou're ideological shibboleths may make you
feel morally superior to those who disagree with you, but they provide no positive template for dealing with such societal problems.
I could here post numerous quotes from leading black intellectuals and activists making clear that the social pathologies endemic among American blacks are primarily internal to some key aspects of black culture and have little or nothing to do with white racism, such as it actually still exists at present in any general sense. But you would just dismiss them as "lawn jockeys" and "uncle Toms" and have done with it.
No, I wouldn't. I would say, "Yes, perhaps there are some things which are endemic to Black culture, but the problem has to do with white, institutionalized racism as well." One should not focus on only one source at the expense of the other. For a white person to do that would be, well.... racist.
1. You've already called other leading black intellectuals I've used as sources such names by implication already ("Your reliance on Dr. Williams is just tokenism"). The implication here is, of course, that Williams, by being a conservative and agreeing with me is making himself a token for the Honkey oppressor. In other words, he's my token, which makes him an intellectual house nigger or lawn jockey. I know the Left and its tropes far, far too well to be taken in by this kind of diversionary rhetoric.
2. What evidence is there at this present time of any such phenomena as "institutionalized racism"?
Loran