Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23 • Hacker News Board

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#161

Post by josho » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:07 PM UTC

cyorir wrote: post #130

agwa wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been dubbed the "school-to-prison pipeline." It's exacerbated by the fact that many schools now have police officers permanently stationed at the school, which leads to a "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. It also contributes to the racial disparity because predominantly black schools are more likely to have a police officer than predominantly white schools.

This was a sensitive topic while I was in high school in Colorado. I don't think the school had a majority, but the largest groups were white and hispanic groups. We always had at least 1 permanent police officer heading a group of a couple of people who could be either police or security. Nominally this was a response to incidents throughout the rest of the state such as Columbine, but in reality the purpose was to…

As an outsider that seems incredibly wrong. The answer to youth gangs is not more security. Perform a root cause analysis and go back to the fact that kids often fall into gangs because parents are not around (working double jobs), they are stuck in poverty with an easy out (crime).

It saddens me to read about solving youth problems by attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. Though I understand why, fixing the cause takes time, is unpopular to those on the political right, while fixing the symptom seems can achieve immediate results (though not long term).

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#162

Post by _delirium » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:08 PM UTC

mynewwork wrote: post #93

silverbax88 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as a gray zone at all. There is a public record for a reason, as well as libel/slander laws in the U.S. The search engines and the Internet just think those don't matter. They are wrong, and the courts will continue to tweak the verbiage and hand down rulings until they adhere to them. - If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, a…

Do you have any sort of citation or reference to back up your claim that a newspaper would be liable for a murder due to printing an address in the US? Wouldn't everyone be liable for everything if "someone used a fact you published to commit a crime" was the standard? In the US, libel and slander laws can't be used to prevent people from saying things which they can prove to be true or factual.

The most famous case is probably Neal Horsley, who was found liable (though only civilly) for publishing the home addresses of abortion doctors, some of whom were later harmed. He was sued for contributing to the attacks and lost. These were correct addresses and it was true that they were abortion doctors, but a court nonetheless considered their publication to constitute an implied threat of harm to the doctors in question. There are some less dramatic cases involving the "public disclosure of private facts" tort, against which truth is not a defense (though an address would not usually be considered a private fact).

In the traditional (pre-automation) era intent played a large role. This worked out okay in most cases, because harmful things (like Horsley's site) tended to only show up as a result of malevolent intent. Sites with lists of abortion doctors' home addresses didn't just show up innocently, so if nobody had malevolent intent, they wouldn't show up. Now if algorithms are just throwing up lots of things, there is probably not malevolent intent on the part of the algorithms, but the same harms can result. So different legal systems are trying to figure out what to do about it.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#163

Post by tzs » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:09 PM UTC

ddlatham wrote: post #83

Most striking are the race differences revealed in the study, Brame says. In particular, the research points to a higher prevalence of arrest among black males and little race variation in arrest rates among females. ... By age 23, 49 percent of black males, 44 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of white males have been arrested. ... By age 23, arrest rates were 20 percent for white females and 18 percent and 1…

Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males. If the police completely ignored race, we would expect black males to be arrested at a higher rate than white males.

The most troubling possibility that the black male vs white male rate suggests to me is that police might not be taking black victims as seriously as white victims.

Blacks die by homicide at a rate that is around 16 times the rate whites die from homicide, for instance. I haven't analyzed this to make sure I'm not running into something like Simpson's Paradox or something similar that makes it easy to mess up when looking at cross group statistics, but my first impression is that if police were working as diligently to solve crimes against black people as they do to solve crimes against white people, they would be arresting a lot more black criminals than they do.

The female data is interesting. I don't even have a guess as to why white females might be arrested at a higher rate than black females.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#164

Post by pyre » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:10 PM UTC

silverbax88 wrote: post #56

pavanky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right to be forgotten lies in a gray zone. Who is going to be the judge of what needs to be forgotten and what can stay public ?

I don't see it as a gray zone at all. There is a public record for a reason, as well as libel/slander laws in the U.S. The search engines and the Internet just think those don't matter. They are wrong, and the courts will continue to tweak the verbiage and hand down rulings until they adhere to them. - If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, a…

The 'right to be forgotten' has more to do with the fact that in the past there was a barrier to entry to gain access to this information. Let's say that (e.g.) you were arrested at a peaceful protest in your teenage years. The Internet makes it easy to gain access to this information with minimal effort and/or cost. In 'the old days,' someone could find this information about you (public record and all), but they would have to be very motivated to look into it.

It's the same thing with the move from manned helicopters => unmanned drones for local law enforcement. Unmanned drones significantly lower the upper bound on what local law enforcement can do with air surveillance. Society didn't care too much about reining in local law enforcement on these issues in the past because it was too costly (to law enforcement) to be a problem to society at large.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#165

Post by nilved » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

albemuth wrote: post #94

opendais wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, stuff like that is why we need a right to be forgotten in the US. People tend to see an arrest and leap to conclusions. I say this as a person who has never been arrested. :/

Your comment has been noted for posterity as "arrested criminal sympathiser"

Can you note mine too?

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#166

Post by Crito » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #88

JSno wrote: post #72

No Asian mentioned. Do we exist????????

Only 160 of the 8904 survey respondents are Asian or Pacific Islander. That's probably too small a sample to get valid data.

4.8% of Americans are Asian Americans, but only 1.7% of their respondents are Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders?

I wonder what went wrong with their surveying method.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#167

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

NhanH wrote: post #124

giberson wrote: post #105

Laws in the US are far too strict. I am one of the people that are covered by this statistic, I was arrested around age 16. For curfew. Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time. Absolutely ridiculous. For what it is worth--my record has been "expunged" and this arrest has not affected my adult life at all.

I'm not sure, but does this have anything to do with being common law rather than civil law? To be more specific, it's not a matter of the law being "too strict", but rather it's too vague and have to be interpreted by a judge. So until someone actually fight a case, the interpretation could be too broad and can be used easily. In civil law, you pretty much have to iterate everything. Disclaimer: I have no idea what…

The vagueness of the laws are a different problem. If the laws were just vague then you could have judges interpreting them in favor of defendants as often as prosecutors.

If you had to point to one thing as the cause of all this, it is likely to be the privatization of criminal justice. As soon as you have a private prison or a defense contractor selling military-grade equipment to civilian police forces, you create the incentive for those organizations to lobby for more "customers" through broader prohibitions, tougher enforcement and harsher penalties.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#168

Post by john_other_john » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:14 PM UTC

josu wrote: post #79

john_other_john wrote: post #24

If you are just arrested in the UK, without any charge or caution, you become ineligible for the Visa Waiver program for entry into the United States. Interesting statistic, therefore, from this side of the pond, having strong links family, business and social in the US. It has often been a double standard in many fields. The trademark laws are highly favorable to US companies versus Madrid Treaty Protocol countries,…

Are you a bot?

What's the fascination?

Edit: genuinely curious

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#169

Post by watwut » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:15 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167

NhanH wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but does this have anything to do with being common law rather than civil law? To be more specific, it's not a matter of the law being "too strict", but rather it's too vague and have to be interpreted by a judge. So until someone actually fight a case, the interpretation could be too broad and can be used easily. In civil law, you pretty much have to iterate everything. Disclaimer: I have no idea what…

The vagueness of the laws are a different problem. If the laws were just vague then you could have judges interpreting them in favor of defendants as often as prosecutors. If you had to point to one thing as the cause of all this, it is likely to be the privatization of criminal justice. As soon as you have a private prison or a defense contractor selling military-grade equipment to civilian police forces, you create…

Only 6% of american prisons are private.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#170

Post by im3w1l » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 10:15 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #54

Sounds bad, but assuming an arrest under 23 can happen any time between the ages of, say, 7 and 22, that's actually 2.7% in any given year, or roughly 1 in every 40 male children. It almost certainly points to police officers arresting children en masse in order to discover the real perpetrator rather than any child criminality epidemic.

It is probably higher than 2.7%. The 40% statistic concerns probability of arrest, not expected number of arrests. In plain english, if a kid got arrested twice, he'd just show up once in the 40% figure.