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sundin13 said:
JWeinCom said:

your problem is not how I found the figures, but that they do not serve your views and that you cannot find counter data to prove them wrong

No... the problem is that you post things without knowing they're true, and then continue to do so even when this is demonstrated to you.

I'll just post two example because this is wasting too much time.

First off offenders=/= convictions.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/offender#:~:text=offender,See%3A%20defendant%2C%20accused)

It can be used for either defendants or convicted.  You don't know which.  

The number of murder cases where someone has been arrested and charged is 61.5.  So, the number of cases that have not ended in conviction is at least 38.5%.  I literally gave you this data a post ago.  The number of "unknown cases" is 31%.  These don't match up... Somehow after pointing that out, you're still insisting unknown=unresolved.  

Now, let's put all of this together.

The FBI figures show that 61.5% of murders lead to arrests, and the defendant being charged in court. (This 61.5% figure also includes cases where there is enough evidence for arrest and prosecution but the defendant could not be arrested due to extraordinary circumstances). Despite 38.5% of murder cases not leading to criminal charges, there are somehow 2,500 more convictions than there are arrests O_O!  

This is a garbage conclusion.  This is what happens when you have garbage data, you get garbage conclusions. 

If you're going to accuse me of bias, at this point I'm going to either have to ask for evidence or consider it trolling.  Show me examples of other people I've interacted with who have posted inaccurate statistics with no source that I've let slide.  

This conversation has been infinitely frustrating to watch.

As per the FBI:

" In the UCR Program, the term known offender does not imply that the suspect’s identity is known; rather, the term indicates that some aspect of the suspect was identified, thus distinguishing the suspect from an unknown offender. "

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018/topic-pages/offenders

It actually applies to neither defendants nor convictions. It applies solely to information obtained by the police. This is obviously susceptible to biases and issues with eyewitness reports. This means the "unknowns" are generally when there is no information about a suspect.

That said, there is no question that black people commit far more crime than whites (including homicide) when controlling for population size (which you seem to be failing to account for in many posts). There is virtually no doubt about this fact in the scientific community. Even if you were to assume that every homicide where the police have no information regarding race was committed by a white person, and half of homicides with black suspects were misreported, you would still have the black population accounting for a disproportionate amount of homicides. Both of those assumptions are inherently ridiculous, but when you have to go beyond ridiculous to erase these racial disparities it is usually pretty safe to say that they are quite real.

I agree with you on most points here J, but you are getting so bogged down in pedantic retorts that I feel you are losing the forest for the trees. There is a lot to talk about regarding the original point, but focusing so heavily on a bad stat used to prove something that is clearly true, prevents any of that discussion from happening.

At no point did I say that black people did not commit crimes commit crimes at a rate that is disproportionate rate to their population size..

However, if you want to say that "it must be the case" that racism is caused by the murder rate, as was done, then you need to actually know what the murder rate is, and how other indicators of racism vary along with it.  In that context a ten percent difference can be very significant.  

If you want to draw a conclusion, being able to collect data is step one.  If you're not getting your data from proper sources, and don't see the problem with that, or if you're claiming the data shows something which it does not show instead of actually checking its methodology, that's a problem.  If you haven't gotten step 1 right, then you can't move on.

Admittedly I probably should have just quit trying a while ago.  I can be stubborn sometimes. So if you think there's something worth discussing, you can go for it. I'm out.

Last edited by JWeinCom - on 17 June 2020