A Quick Debunking of the Comment by “R S”
I have a simple question for the mysterious “R S”: How does the black percentage of hate crimes being AT LEAST 26.1% and 21.3% of hate crime offenders in consecutive years not make blacks over-represented in hate crimes? They’re 13% of the population. There’s a large % of “unknown” to sprinkle on top of those percentages, too. Full stop.
Additionally, “white” includes a majority of “Hispanics” added to them, so roughly 77–80% of the population is part of that total. I explain how those government stats work here, as it’s a common mistake by activist commentators like Sally Kohn.
Even when you analyze the “ethnicity” section of hate crime offenders, you have to break out the “unknown” from the “known” to get an accurate percentage. So 8% “Hispanic” out of 36.3% of offenders with a “known” ethnicity is 22% (divide 8 by 36), indicating an over-representation for Hispanics who are 17% of the population. Like the example in my article where only 5% of outcomes were “known” in the Buzzfeed analysis, you have to analyze the data in that small pond, not the large lake of “known” and “unknown” together.
Thus, my claim is correct.
Dishonest Actors in Activism
OK, R S, I don’t think you know how to process “representation,” do you? Or are you intentionally doing this, recognizing that you defend Black Lives Matter arguments of disproportionate outcomes at hands of police while using those exact same percentages to say something different and just don’t care? I’ve seen it before in numerous encounters with social justice folks with blinders, I’m sorry to say, who are completely inconsistent and ignorant of how statistics work. The mainstream outlets like Vox are just as dumb and dishonest, because they don’t contextualize crime suspect or police encounter rates. They’re certainly not going to point out that the 13% of the population that’s responsible for more than 50% of murders (and nearly as high a percentage of violent encounters with the public and police) are 25% of those killed by police, and the 61% of the population that’s responsible for 25% of murders is 50% of those killed by police. The media can’t state inconvenient facts that disprove their narrative.
Let me know what you think, but I made the above statistics clear in this recent piece about two more hoaxes that caught America’s attention.
Addendum: I note that you clap for a comment to me that didn’t address my arguments honestly that links to Shaun King, one of the most dishonest activists with a high profile out there. So maybe you all have something in common: Bad math skills. If you didn’t know already he’s a fraud, I doubt you’d have the capacity to process his fabrications and dishonest statistics. King literally does what you do: Sees “more” whites killing cops (or more whites committing hate crimes) and claims that’s a problem, yet the fact whites are 50% of people killed by cops and blacks are 25% — nearly the exact same breakdown of hate crime offenders — doesn’t register as an inconsistent use of data to him. Basically, he’s not dumb, he’s a manipulative liar who furthers our racial divide.
For example, here’s an October 4, 2018 Tweet where King starts caring about cops being killed when they’re black and brown and fudges his numbers:
“This is Officer Terrence Carraway — a 30 year veteran of the Florence, South Carolina Police Department, who was shot and killed yesterday. In fact, nearly 50% of cops who are killed in the United States are Black & Latino. And the majority of cops are killed by white men.”
Yes, well, a “majority” of people killed by cops are white, twice as many as blacks. Nice consistency, Shaun King. You truly are … well, just read my title:
Excerpt:
This leads us to the one other hate crime statistic that’s almost entirely unreported: Hate crime offenders. That might be because blacks were at least 26.1 percent of offenders in 2016 and 21.6 percent in 2017. There’s also an “unknown” race percentage that can push those numbers up a few points. Blacks are 13 percent of the population. Even the book “Race and Racism in the United States: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic” writes that blacks are “surprisingly” overrepresented in committing hate crimes, mirroring their percentage of overall arrests. The media doesn’t call attention to it. One can only speculate as to why.
Indeed, a cursory search for “hate crime offenders 2017” brings up no news stories except for a single November 2017 Washington Post article that speciously states the following based on 2016 data: “The FBI report, which collects information on the offenders in the hate crimes tallied in the previous year, found that the largest share — 46 percent — were white. [emphasis added]About a quarter of the people who carried out hate crimes were black.” Note their editorial decision to add “largest share” for whites, as if to hype how whites commit twice as many hate crimes as blacks. The Washington Postlacks the same consistency when reporting similar percentages when it comes to victims of police killings. There, they alert readers to the implied racism in that gap: “Black males accounted for 22 percent of all people shot and killed in 2017, yet they are 6 percent of the total population. White males accounted for 44 percent of all fatal police shootings.” Criminal context is omitted, such as black males being responsible for more than half of all murder and robbery arrests. Since 2015 when they started this database, they reported in the same manner, winning the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 2016. The data is useful. Their willfully misleading narrative and inconsistency in reporting statistics around crime and race is not.
Clearly, the evidence that could upend these near-weekly parables of white supremacy and Trump’s America flexing its muscle against minorities is out there and searchable.
And as if it needs reminding, as stated before there is the broadest context in these social realities spring from that legacy — the blood-drenched history — of slavery and Jim Crow. Americans experience a uniquely nasty, persistent socioeconomic hangover compared to Europeans, or even Canadians. The continued realities of segregation (50 years removed from the supposed legal liberation from the Fair Housing Act), a dearth of job opportunities, and lack of infrastructure investment make criminal elements spring into public and increasingly vulnerable environments, killing little boys and girls far too often. (Of note, some of the previous hyperlinks are potential paths forward to get past this national impasse of continued urban violence and human suffering.)