I think you missed the point.
no, I do not think I did.
the actual merits of an individual incident are qualified by what goes down during the incident NOT by external factors nor by normalized data regarding similar incidents. yes, you are absolutely right.
if we are talking about 5 or even 50 individual instances of crime and punishment over a few days, i would be hard pressed to suggest that such disparities in treatment could NOT be attributed to factors that are part of the incidents themselves. When, though, we are talking about 100,000's of incidents over decades (at least), a 'leveling' factor reveals demonstrable trends by marginalizing idiosyncratic incidents.
lets reverse my argument for a second and see what comes up.
in division 2 of Big City (pop. est, 20,000) almost all residents are black. in this scenario, a large number of white arrestess would be 'idiosyncratic', a spike,. and tell us essentially nothing.we could assume that looking at the same population over a greater period would 'level' the disparity as such ' idiosyncrasies.' are marginalized.
We can say this because one might reasonably assume that the number of arrestees, when categorized by race, would correlelate to that of the population, idiosyncrasies. aside; that is, that most of the people arrested in Div 2 would be black though not in Big City, itself, (pop est 2.5m), with an 80% white citizenry.
Now, most of the cops on BCPD are white, but most citizens of Big City are white and the proportion of black to white on the police force reasonably reflects the proportion of black to white in the population of Big City as a whole. No, the 'dispropotion' is NOT due to racism. And the disrportion in white arrests? Over the next five years, the number of white arrests in Div 2 returned to the mean, leveling out the anomaly. Turns out, in the year when there was an unusual number of whites arrested in Div 2, a skinhead biker gang tried to move in on the Meth distrubution network in the inner city, one of those 'mitigating factors. Well, you know... homies wasn't goin' fo' dat, no way, them white boys couldn't cope, took it back to the sticks, true dat!
Both black and white citizens of BC use drugs (the swine). Though the proportion of each group of users is proportionate to their numbers within the greater population (eg, approx. 15% of both groups use drugs) we can assume that most drug users are white and we might reasonably assume that the number of arrestees for drug use would be white. If we notice that, in fact, 30% of the black population and 30% of the white, we might want to look for the idiosyncratic factor. if we look back over 5 years and see the same trend, we have to look NOT at this years arrests, but at the pattern of arrests over that entire time. and what we find when we look is unemployment, poverty, gangs, despair. BUT... that may account for the drug use (begs the question of the cause of a proportionate usage among whites, but... nemmine that), but it does NOT account for the DISpropotionate arrest rate. And not only a disproportion in arrests, but in arrestees tried, in tried, convicted and in sentencing? no idiosyncrasy will answer there. cause and effect. we know the effect.
what is the cause?
i very much enjoyed your hypotheticals but you think they actually demonstrate anything? as pure hypotheticals demonstrating a nonvalue based anomaly, you should be able to switch black and white and get the same result. try it. lemme know what you get.
Do you see what I am getting at?
sure. i am not actually as stupid as i may seem. you were getting at showing that black people break into schools with the intent of doing greater harm than white people. I am not convinced.
geo.
