I know it's a controversial point, but that doesn't make it a false one.
The problem is the point you're trying to make is vague and you're just stating numbers without any actual exploration of them. It is true that minorities are arrested more than whites, but in spite of this you're still trying to argue that it's situational rather than systemic. Basically, that even though they have poor living conditions, minorities are still more likely to be criminals. I dispute this claim, as the numbers I crunched don't add up.
According
to the 2012 census abstract (See: People Below Poverty Level by Selected Characteristics: 2009), the following are numbers and percentages of three main races below poverty line:
White: 30,888,000 or 15.7% of 196.8 million
Black: 10,575,000 or 28.06% of 37.7 million
Hispanic: 12,350,000 or 24.47% of 50.5 million
Of note, each of those is the percentage of poverty within their own population, rather than the aggregate. IE White is percent of whites in poverty, not how many whites make up the total.
Now just from those numbers, you can see evidence of a systemic imbalance.
But, once you enter in the
FBI records on Arrests, you can get some interesting insight:
Of the 10.7 million arrests in 2009, 7.39 million were white, 3.03 were Black, and the rest were American Indian and Asian Pacific.
As a percentage of their overall population:
3.75% of Whites were arrested
8.03% of Blacks were arrested
That's a pretty staggering difference in arrests, with blacks, at 12.2% of the population, being arrested at more than double the amount of whites, who make up 63.8% of the population. If whites were arrested at the same rate, there would be 15,745,404 arrests of whites. That's a pretty staggering number. Even more staggering when you consider that for the purposes of this document, the FBI is counting Whites and Hispanics as the same*. If I did the same, that puts the White population at 247,295,146 and bumps the rate down to 2.99%. Even crazier! And that bumps the number of Whites who should be arrested up to 19.8 million.
Now, Shinra posited that a lot of crime was poverty based. So let's take a look at the rates of arrests vs the rate of poverty. For the purposes of this exercises, let's assume that ALL crime is the result of poverty.
If you compare the amount of whites in poverty with the amount arrested, you find that 23.9% of impoverished whites have been arrested.
For blacks, you find that 28.6% of impoverished blacks have been arrested.
Again, you're starting to see the systemic bias.
BUT, if you compare the White + Hispanic total of 43,238,000 you find that only 17.1% of Whites are arrested. Staggeringly lower, that's more than 10 points difference.
So while the data shows, empirically, that Blacks are
arrested for more crimes at a higher rate than other ethnic groups, even in just their poverty, it's impossible to tell the WHY of that situation. And personal factors like economics, disposition, welfare and race cannot alone explain the discrepancy. If they did, the rate of arrests among the impoverished would be nearly equal. I chose arrests because I sought to show the systemic problem, namely that for some reason blacks are more likely to be arrested for a crime than a white. Go figure.
The reason I bring all of this information up is become this number is often cited as to why minorities (blacks especially) are The Thugs. But, it more highlights how little insight this gives us to the relation of race and crime. For one thing, we actually no very little about how many of a particular race COMMITs a crime. This only tells me how many are arrested for crimes, but in the abstract doesn't tell me how many were bad or incorrect arrests. If I had more resources, I could probably find and crunch the numbers on the percent that go to trial and get arrested. That's more interesting.
That said, this information IS pertinent to societal assumptions about race and crime. As the Martin shooting was starting to gather steam in the national press, there were supporters from Zimmerman's neighborhood who came out to defend him by stating that Zimmerman was trying to stop a series of burglaries. Nearly everyone who stated this information also backed it up by saying the perpetrators were also black. What's significant is that this assumption went unchallenged (remember: If people were getting away with break-ins and nobody could catch them, how did they know they were all black?).
It plays nicely into the longstanding American myth that the black man is just a violent thug, barely restrained by society. And while this myth still exists, things like increased police patrols of black neighborhoods will happen. You also get things like police just stopping black men on the street to inspect them, which helps to up the arrest numbers.
Hope all of this made sense. For a more eloquent take on what I'm trying to say, read
Chauncey DeVega's piece on Alternet
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