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

#211

Post by icantthinkofone » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:34 PM UTC

I find it interesting that I know no one in any of my immediate or extended family who has ever been arrested and I'm 62 years old. The closest I ever had that happening to me is when I was 20 and didn't know I was breaking a law* .

I'm no preacher's kid. I just live my life and try to enjoy myself. I don't bother anyone even when others bother me. I just don't get it.

* I was working at a place that went on strike. Picketers took our picture when we walked into the building so they could show who was crossing their line. To be funny, one morning I took their picture. They called the police to say I was harassing them. One young, rookie cop came in ready to haul me off until his sergeant showed up and had a conference with my boss.

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

#212

Post by dougmccune » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:34 PM UTC

If you'd like to download the raw data that this study is based on, I think you can grab it here: https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator/pages/search.jsp?s=NLSY...

It's a fairly convoluted set of forms you have to work your way through, but in the end you can download a CSV that includes the arrest counts (or a ton of other variables) for all of the nearly 9k people in the study (although not all of them continued to submit data to the survey through the years).

More about the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97): http://www.nlsinfo.org/content/cohorts/nlsy97

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

#213

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:38 PM UTC

opendais wrote: post #5

_delirium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, no, but it's getting common for employers to Google-background-investigate potential hires, and arrest notices can come up in such searches, which employers may or may not put unofficial weight on. Though you might be better off in a big city. In smaller towns, this kind of administrative stuff ends up published: local papers, or even the sheriff's office directly, often put out an arrest blotter with the na…

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. :/

This example doesn't need a right to be forgotten, it needs a right to not be noted in the first place.

For arrests w/o conviction, the person has done nothing that would justify a violation of his privacy - what right or excuse could there be to allow the police to publish their names or other personally identifiable info in the first place? Especially for minors (as for the curfew issues)?

You need to keep the private info private, that's it.

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

#214

Post by cyorir » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:41 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #163

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 a…

As mentioned elsewhere, the journal article on which this is based specifically found that the difference in rates among women was not significant enough to make a statement about women arrest rates based on race. So the data provided in this article are based on a restricted sample size and it is challenging to make statements about the overall population saying that "white females are arrested at a higher rate than black females". That might be true but we simply can't be confident in saying that that is true unless more data is gathered. Speculation on why such a difference could occur is harder still.

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

#215

Post by cbsmith » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:46 PM UTC

jakethedog wrote: post #146

cbsmith wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the author is bad at interpreting statistics and doesn't recognize that a 4% difference when the average rate is closer to 18% is a way bigger difference than a 5 or even 6% difference when the average rate is closer to 40%.

The manuscript highlights the differences among the male populations are significant while those among the female populations are within the estimated confidence intervals.

Yes, but the correct interpretation of that is not that the variance is too small, but that the population is too small.

The correct conclusion to reach here (and appears to match what the study says) is that there is a huge gender gap, amongst males there is a statistically significant racial gap, and amongst females the sample size was too small to detect if a similar gap exists.

The female racial gap may not be statistically significant, so you can't say for sure if it is there, but it is possible that it is actually much more significant than the male racial gap. The article says there is "little race variation in arrest rates among females", which is not true. There is more variation than amongst the male population --it just might not be statistically significant.

At best you can say, "despite even bigger variance between races in the female arrest data, the sample of female arrests was too small for it to be conclusive".

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

#216

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:48 PM UTC

Crito wrote: post #166

smackfu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their surveying method is perfectly fine. The study is based on a cohort of kids who were born between 1980 and 1984 (in USA); and in 1980 Asian Americans were only 1.6% of USA population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_de...).

It does disregard (relatively) recent immigrants in that regard, though; but if it's to be used as analysis of gov't policy/parenting/schooling/etc circumstances, then you'd want to look at people who grew up in USA policies and environment.

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

#217

Post by DanBC » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:50 PM UTC

byoung2 wrote: post #2

Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the U.S. are arrested by age 23, which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities. An arrest by itself, without an accompanying conviction, cannot be used to deny employment. 1. http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/arrest_conviction.cfm#I

An arrest by itself, without an accompanying conviction, can be used to deny non-US citizens entry to the US. UK citizens who've been arrested need to apply for a visa and can't use the visa waiver / esta system.

https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q683.htm

http://london.usembassy.gov/niv/add_crime.html

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

#218

Post by pyre » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:52 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #204

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.

> Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time. We had curfew laws in my country too. Mostly during German occupation, under World War II. I'm amazed people in the "land of the free" even have such a law...

Curfew laws are mostly aimed at children and don't apply to adults.

Would you draw parallels between the government legislating that 'school-aged' children must go to school and the US decreeing that all Japanese people on the west coast must go to internment camps? Probably not.

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

#219

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:55 PM UTC

pertinhower wrote: post #19

I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical…

Actually, you should generally expect that ANY statistical analysis will give significantly different results than what you'd see of people around you.

Many of such parameters exhibit clustering; so if 50% people are X; then you'd expect most people to say "hey, that's wrong, that's not what I see" - since there would be many people that would see that 80+% of their friends would be X; and there would be many people that would see that 20-% of their friends are X, but virtually noone would have a circle of friends that would have the "true" 50/50 split.

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

#220

Post by Eliezer » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 12:04 AM UTC

Steer wrote: post #139

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…

Strange, but coming from an European background while taking in a lot of American culture, I was (pleasantly, I guess) surprised that the discrepancy between white and black males wasn't larger. I am more or less shocked about he percentages overall, but really thought the gap was much larger. Sorry if this doesn't add anything substantial, but I honestly would have have guessed that it was about 3 times more black m…

As tzs points out above, this could be because police take crimes against black victims less seriously.