Many poor folks need to invest in at least some 8th grade homework. And here’s a great place to start - the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

“As for interracial violence, Black males disproportionately commit it. Between 2012-2015, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations, between Blacks and Whites.

Black males, who make up 7% of the US population, committed 85% of those victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on Whites. While White males, 35% of the population, committed 14%, or 91,470 felonious assaults on Blacks.

Regarding threats to Blacks from the police?

“A police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a Black male, than an unarmed Black male is to be killed by a police officer.”

You won’t hear any of this on CNN, or pretty much any news media. They hate the truth because it destroys their vapid argument that “racism” is at the core of Black consternation.

Any suspect who argues and wrestles with police; says he has a knife; leans into a car reaching down to the floor (where there was indeed a knife) - stands a really good chance of being shot - no matter WHAT color he is. And for the record, police shoot far more White folks than Black folks - every month of every year.

The reality is very, very easy to find.

You just have to have a functional moral compass - and the intestinal fortitude - to look the truth in the eye.

“What is the deal with the 13/50 homicide rate? Is it true or not true or just racist stats?”

I will assume you mean that African-Americans are 13% of the population, but commit, and are victims of, 50% of the homicides.

If so, that is roughly true. As true as any proposition in the social sciences can ever be.

Because we allow people to “self-identify”, you could argue that there are either more or fewer African-Americans than 13%. Your definition isn’t the same as their self-identifications. Most surveys and censuses are pretty close to 13%, say in the range of 12%-15%.

Murder statistics are collected by the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. The FBI collects submissions from State and local police agencies, in a standard format. When you get right down to it, the race of criminals and victims is whichever box was checked by the officer who wrote the original incident report. I suppose you could argue that millions of officers falsely checked boxes so as to make African-Americans look bad, but it strains credulity. Those reports are written to help catch criminals - inaccurate reports are self-defeating.

Based on the UCR, around 50% of murder victims are African-American. The exact figure varies from year to year, but 50% is a fair rough average. The race of murderers is harder to know, because 1/3 are never caught. But the ones who are caught are around 50% African-American, again with variations.

For example:

shows arrests for murder in 2019. Out of 7964 total arrested, 4078 were African-American.

Crime statistics is a big subject. You shouldn’t pick one number, out of the huge mass of numbers, and claim that it proves anything. Especially if you searched for the “best” number - i.e. the one that best supports what you already want to believe.

Nobody wants criminals. There is some White guy that kills a bunch of people and the immediate reaction by Whites is that he is not one of us, that he is a nut job.

We should make that a rule! We have white folks, black folks, and criminals. Looking at the race of criminals should be reserved for some special uses.

One such use is to refute other bad statistics. When Yamiche Alcindor (who was really good pre-Trump. LOL, may still be really good) tells us that cops kill black folks at 2.6 times the rate they kill white folks, that is wrong, even though accurate. Cops kill criminals at a far greater rate than they kill folks and the rate of black violent crime is 3 times that of white violent crime. Bottom line, the Chauvins of the world are rare enough to not even show up statistically. But to show that I had to use the race of those in that third “race,” the criminal race.

The other valid use would be to figure out how to fix things. Noticing a difference based on race one can identify that a problem exists and how to fix it. Me? I want to blame big city schools for the higher crime rates there (I vote Dem but they still spin me up more than Reps and Dems are the ones against fixing our schools). Jobs, jobs, jobs. {{{Other less PC causes … perhaps low expectations due to Dem rhetoric??? Why would you study if everybody is telling you that it won’t do any good, that white people will thwart you at every turn no matter how accomplished you are? }}}

At any rate, the stat is fine but you have to be careful. Use it to help people, not to disparage them.

Yes it is 100% factually true.

Factual and accurate statistics cannot be “racist". A point or statement made because of the statistics or the way they are used to implement policy can be racist.

The reasons for it are many. Some cultural, low-income high-crime neighborhoods the main problem is systemic racism. Allow me to explain =

If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day if you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime. If you do whatever you can to make sure that you are the only place he can get fish, you can control that man.

If you tell that man should someone else come to power then they will starve to death because they no longer will have a supply of fish you have a voter for life.

If you make sure education in the inner city and areas black people live in absolutely sucks, then you can ensure they do not become educated enough to realize what it is you have done to them.

If you write up a law that targets the black community for incarceration like the 1994 crime Bill where black people get longer prison sentences than white people for the same drug, you can break up families and leave people even more Reliant and dependent on government.

It isn't a coincidence that all the cities with multi-generational black poverty have been run by the same people for decades, It Is by Design.

People today talk about institutional racism, all we have to do is look who has being in charge of the cities and education systems where the majority of black people living and multi-generational poverty live. It's pretty obvious who is responsible for the institutional / systemic racism. The Democrats who are running the goddamn institutions and system.

Letter: Democrats are the racists by replacing dad with welfare checks

Posted Apr 4, 2020 at 12:02 AM

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. [FILE PHOTO/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS]▲

Every election cycle the Democrats play the race card, saying those terrible Republicans are racists. Of course, this lie is spread by the left bias mainstream media, which is 92% negative against President Donald Trump.

Since when is it racist to want to get minorities jobs, a good education and a good family structure. Why is it that black lives matter to Democrats only when a white kills a black, but when blacks kill blacks, Democrats are silent because it doesn't meet their race baiting agenda.

Another weapon of the Democrats is welfare. New York Times reporter Nicholas Lemann says public housing projects treat the symptoms of poverty, not the problem, and it is not the taxpayers' concern to raise other people's children born out of irresponsibility. The fact is all the government help can never be an adequate substitute for responsible parents.

Democrats know full well that if people have good educations, jobs and a good family structures, they wouldn't need the Democrat Party. This is why the Democrats continue dividing the country by keeping people dependent on the government, so they will continue to vote Democrat. Democrats are the racists by replacing dad with welfare checks.

But of course people don't like to believe that. To quote Joe Biden's hero:

thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

It is not racist.

Black people committing more crime is a fact. How do you define crime? By what gets officially recorded. And if you look at official police records, Black people commit more crime. Black people are also disproportionately likely to be involved in violent crime in the US. This statement is also a statistic and not racism.

The part that adds discomfort may be the implications of the statement. Perhaps you want to argue against it: “Police should treat everybody equally” or “Police are racist and are more likely to arrest black people”. Or people hear it as, ‘You’re saying, black people are bad, or that black people are criminals’.

No, I did not say that.

What does that have to do with the original statement? The statement is not racist, it is a statistic. Plenty of other statistics are thrown out there everyday. No number is completely unbiased.

Why does this one make you uncomfortable?

Any feelings of bother are due to societal pressure to virtue signal about equality. Perhaps you could follow up with an argument the way the data collected is discriminatory. If you want to interpret the statistic, so be it. But that’s different thread than the previous statement.

But why argue against a statistic? The number is not going to change just because it offends.

We judge other people based on a whole myriad of factors they cannot change. Race is just another factor among those.

No. It is actually quite easy to tell what race commits each crime of violence. Because the victim will tell us. Based on the report of the crime, black males commit 40% of crimes of violence despite being less than 7% of the population. Since 80 to 90% of the victims are also black, it would be ludicrous to consider this stat to be effected by racism.

What is more interesting is that while blacks are shot by cops more than whites per capita, if we track it per encounter, which is based on cops stopping people that meet the description of a suspect, blacks are less likely to be shot than whites. Though they are more likely to be stopped. Because they are more likely to match the description of the suspect. Which again is given by the victims. Most of whom are black.

If you check the FBI website you will find crime statistics by race. Some crimes are disproportionately white, others disproportionately black. Murder, for example, is something like 51% black. Those are the raw facts It is not racist to cite facts. My (black) parishioners scold me if I work at the church alone with the doors unlocked. They know I'm at greater risk of violent robbery than in some church in the suburbs. Are they racist?

BTW, just because most embezzlement is committed by whites (disproportionately) doesn't make me an embezzler. And just because most murders are committed by blacks doesn't make my parishioners murderers, or even more prone to violence than I.

There are multiple causes, but the main one is the “tribal” mindset of the Black community.

Having lived in the projects, I’ve seen it in action. They had exactly the same opportunities as I did to get out of the projects. Instead of taking them, they take the easy way and go to gangs, selling drugs, and any easy way to make money. The girls even bragged about having babies to get more welfare. That isn’t something made up by the “privileged” white. It is a reality, where their kids may have a different father.

The woman who lived next to me had 5 children. Only two had the same father. She lived on welfare and had no intention of ever going to work and asked why I was working.

This is what you are dealing with. And it isn’t just one or two—it is generations who are using the system to remain in a ghetto so they can have a guaranteed income and supplement that with illegal dealings. It is big business. Drugs and prostitution is easy, profitable, and those who are controlling it will protect their areas.

What is sad is that they don’t see education as a way out of the ghettos since that means hard work, and less pay. You get more with the gangs than working a job. And this is the culture that has been in existence since they formed their own communities and yes, the whites didn’t help any.

There was a whole area in the Carolinas where there were free Blacks who were prosperous. They were elected to the state legislatures and had a say in the government and also served in Congress and the Senate in the 1870s. Then the Democrat whites came in and took over the towns and pushed there leaders into the background. And yes—it was the DEMOCRAT whites, those who formed the KKK and who still support it today. There was a reason a lot of the Blacks moved north where there was less discrimination, and they could get jobs.

Today, many of the Blacks culturally eschew education and work for the easy gangs and the money they get. Those who move out of the ghettos have discovered a whole different world where they can earn good money and have the dream of their own homes and acceptance in the communities.

Then there are those who tend to not integrate and end up isolating and building a community of Blacks, which ends up with the gangsters taking over in a repeating cycle.

So it is a mindset, a tribal culture that they embrace that is helping to keep them in that cycle of murdering their own to be top dog in the area.

I recall reading an interview with a young black man who was in custody after he shot a rival.

He felt he had to shoot him, as in it was necessary, required, imperative. The reason? He had been disrespected, and the only way to reclaim that respect was murder.

That tracks with the cultural analysis I’ve seen, which ironically traces it’s way back to the culture of the antebellum South and is known as honor culture. Thomas Sowell goes into considerable detail on this subject (he traces it back to the English midlands…).

So I thought about this a lot and had to rhetorically ask myself what I would do in this situation and why. I would not be shooting anyone, in fact I might not ever think about what some random dude called me or said to me ever again.

Why is that?

His opinion is at odds with what I know about myself and also that everyone else treats me with considerable respect.

Why do I get the respect?

I expect to be respected and I expect to offer respect as a default. Disrespect is an exceptional occurrence.

Yes, but why do people show you respect?

I am well-spoken, well-groomed, polite and importantly, show them respect, but thinking a little deeper, it’s because I am useful to others. The “interest” people have in me has a lot to do with my skill set. Over a lifetime, I have acquired a lot of diverse skills. I speak several languages and can speak authoritatively on a number of subjects. People seek me out for advice. I feel respected beyond simply the normal culture affections and because of who I have made myself into. I feel the same way about my friends, who are all impressive individuals with significant accomplishments, knowledge and wisdom. They are admirable and useful.

So who get’s disrespected?

People without skills (particularly men). Men who aren’t useful and thus “unsuccessful”.

This is where I made the connection. Black men caught up in this cycle of violence generally have no skills, nothing they can offer to others to be useful. Nothing in which they can feel pride of accomplishment. All men, specifically men, need to feel respected, by women, by other men. If they have nothing sophisticated to offer (e.g., carpentry skills), they default to violence. A man who can physically dominate another man still manages to get the respect that everyone requires. In a primitive environment, this creates an equilibrium, with the strongest and/or most violent at the top of the hierarchy. Everyone knows their place.

Now you introduce a gun into that situation. Size, strength, speed and violence become irrelevant. The lowest man on the totem can attempt to regain respect through the use of a firearm.

You remove the gun and you go back to the physical skill equilibrium, but that is still an inherently violent culture. What is necessary to transform the culture to a non-violent form?

A transition to a dynamic that respects more sophisticated skill sets over physical prowess. Are black American surgeons violent? I don’t have statistics, but I would bet that the incidence of violence is negligible.

Anyways, that’s my analysis.

Being both a cop and an African American I believe I may be able to offer somewhat of a more objective opinion as to your question.

As a 12-year law enforcement veteran, I have never examined any particular driving habits (illegal or otherwise) that are unique to any particular culture. I'm scratching my brain as I wonder whether this is even a real question. Culture-related driving habits? Seriously? So the simplest answer to your question is that African Americans being pulled over disproportionately to European Americans is not an indicator of culture-related driving habits simply because "culture-related driving habits" is not a thing. Nonsensical.

But to address the larger, more serious part of your question (why African Americans have a higher chance of being stopped by cops is an indication of racism), I must first disagree with your suggestion that the statistics are an indication of "racism" in the most widely accepted definition of the term. Instead, I believe this phenomenon should be more accurately attributed to implicit racial bias rather than pure racism.

Implicit racial bias, in the most simplest of terms, refers to our subconscious prejudices and preconceptions as related to our own race and that of others. Basically, it refers to thoughts about people that you didn't know you had. Empirical evidence shows that implicit or subconscious racial bias extends far beyond Black vs White. Studies have shown that implicit racial biases have been discovered to be just as prevalent in White vs Black scenarios as they are in Black vs Black and White vs White scenarios. This would partly explain why Black cops (myself included) are also more likely to stop an African American driver than a driver of another race. We, too, have been subconsciously groomed to view Black as bad. But, of course, the causes are much more far-reaching than that.

Here are a few reasons (and brief explanations) as to why Blacks are more likely to be stopped than Whites; none of which are indicative of any type of "culture-related driving habits". Sorry.

• Implicit racial bias. Through mass media (tv shows, movies, music, news, etc.) Blacks have been historically portrayed as brutes, large muscular beings of little intelligence and lacking basic social decencies and decorum. More largely, throughout the first couple hundred years of Blacks' existence in America, Blacks were treated and viewed as being less than fully human: a Black vote counted as 3/5 that of a White vote; the American constitution reads that all men are created equal, yet Blacks were treated as animals and traded as property; in order for Blacks to attempt to trace their lineage, they must explore property records as opposed to birth and death records. As such, White America was conditioned to view Blacks as being big, dumb, and violent. And of course, this perception was passed along through generational upbringing in accordance with societal norms.
• The War on Drugs. The war on drugs coincided with the crack epidemic of the 1980's. Through means beyond my knowledge or comprehension, crack was quickly deemed as a "black drug". This labeling is largely the reason crack cocaine, which is pharmacologically identical to powder cocaine, carries a higher "schedule" than its powdered version; thus also carrying larger criminal penalties. Any objective view of American drug war policies will easily reveal that the war on drugs could easily have been termed as the "War on Poor Blacks".
  
  Empirical data shows that White and Black drug usage is largely identical. Furthermore, Whites have been discovered to experiment with drugs at much younger ages and with more frequency than their Black counterparts. Even more damning, Whites have been found to be more likely to possess illicit narcotics and paraphernalia during traffic stops. Yet, Whites are stopped and searched at a fraction of the rates of Blacks. I believe this to be directly related to the love affair between law enforcement agencies and the financial windfalls associated with the drug war. Modern police department budgets are supplemented by the fruits of the war on drugs. More damning, the federal government provides billions in grants and military-style weapons and equipment to civilian police departments that maintain certain levels of drug stats. To that effect, the drug war became a cash cow for you local police departments. Therefore, law officers are pressured to produce "results" (read: arrests). Each check in the "drug offense" box on an arrest affidavit positions a police department one step closer to qualifying for more federal dollars and equipment. So ordinarily, when pressured to produce unrealistic results, patrol officers head for the low-hanging fruit of the inner-city street corners. Most drug arrests come from random, unwarranted (and unconstitutional) stop-and-frisk detainments. Remember, I am a cop in a major US city. I was once guilty of perpetuating these same gross practices of civil rights violations for the simple sake of meeting a "quota".
• Residential segregation and White Flight. Through residential segregation, poor Blacks have been relegated to certain neighborhoods with poor investments in infrastructure and a lack of economically impactful projects. Evidence shows that housing lenders commonly used a tactic called "redlining" to identify these particular areas where they would not lend money for homes and construction; thus effectively ensuring the perpetually dire state of America's ghettos. With little economic opportunity, under-funded and poorly staffed schools, banks' refusal to lend, and hosts of other methods of systematic disenfranchisement, poor Blacks were effectively relegated to ghettos comprised of thousands upon thousands of poor, undereducated persons of limited (read: no) resources. As such, whenever your cram thousands upon thousands of poor people (regardless of race) into close quarters with limited educational and economic opportunities, you effectively create the "crabs in a barrel" paradigm; thus creating an area of high crime and social nonperformance. Criminality is not bred through Black culture, it is the direct result of a lack of education and a lack of economic opportunities compounded by overpopulated residential environments. So, with areas of high crime, police officers patrol those areas more heavily. The more heavily those areas are patrolled the greater the likelihood of law officers associating black skin with criminality and drugs. Yes, even Black officers exhibit this bias against Black citizens. So now, when that officer is on traffic watch, his implicit bias kicks in and forces him to pay more attention to the Black driver than to the White drivers because he has been conditioned to associate black skin with criminal behavior.
  
• Pretextual stops. A large portion of traffic stops in highly populated inner cities are conducted as a pretext to further examine a vehicle for drugs or other illicit activities. As stated above, police departments eat from the fruits of the drug war. The drug war pays for our uniforms, cars, equipment, building upgrades, etc. With major cities facing tighter and tighter budgets, police look to the drug war in order to "make up the difference" in any budget constraints. By design, law enforcement (local, state, and federal) effectively control the drug market. That's another topic for another post; I've digressed. Since cops are almost always searching for the "big bust" and we've been conditioned through implicit bias to associate Black with criminality, we often key in on Black motorists more keenly than Whites. So even though a cop's stated reason for stopping someone may be for minor traffic violations such as a faulty taillight, often the traffic violations merely serve as a pretext to further investigate unrelated criminal activity. As such, cops practice their ability to coerce motorists into consenting to vehicle searches; though they've often exhibited no reasonable behavior indicative of any form of criminal activity. Again, statistics show that Whites are more likely to transport drugs and related paraphernalia, yet cops are seemingly powerless against their own implicit biases.
• Basic human tendency. On a more simple scale, it is human behavior to spot changes in regular patterns. For example, say you're watching a video of a line of red dots moving horizontally from right to left across the screen. After several seconds of tens of little red dots traveling across the screen, that pattern is interrupted by one little blue dot followed by another string of little red dots. Our human tendency is to pay much closer attention to the blue dot. Since Blacks are a large minority (12-15% vs 65-70%) in this country, if the cop is on a major highway monitoring traffic, the minority driver will attract more of the officer's attention. Basic human behavior.
  

Because this post is becoming incredibly long and I'm aware of the limitations of the American attention span, I'll stop it here. Those were merely a few of the reasons behind the statistics. In practice, neither stands alone. It is a combination of these things and a multitude of other compounding issues that create the de facto second-class citizen condition of the Black American.

The greatest challenge is for us all to recognize that we have implicit biases and to recognize its effects in our decision-making process. Studies conducted with several police departments show that when officers were made aware of their implicit biases through dedicated training sessions, their patrol stats began to reflect a more balanced policing approach. It is through understanding (of self and others) that we grow as a people.

I have personally seen around 10-12 attempts of crimes like purse snatching, phone snatching, etc. And in all of those events, it is unfortunate that all attempts were done by black people. I am not racist and as a brown myself, I aspire for equality for all people regardless of their race, religion and color . However, in my experience, I have seen more crimes done by black people than the whites.

I don’t think it is racist. Black neighborhoods are generally poorer than white ones. Due to lack of education and employment, they end up engaging in petty crimes and drugs. And in this vicious cycle, they commit more crimes and the statistics says it all. The solution would be to provide more education, health facilities and employment opportunities to the black neighborhoods so that they also get equal chance of living a better life.

“How do I debunk the allegation that black people make up 13% of the US population but commit 50% of all crimes?”

You want to ‘debunk” a statistical reality?

Would you also like to “debunk the allegation” that magic doesn’t exist, that Santa isn’t real…? Or maybe you’d like to debunk the allegation that fish live in the ocean, or camels in the desert?

Grow the fuck up, Sunshine.

EDIT: This is important, so I have to revise my answer. The whole 13/50 thing that’s referenced by the OP (and others), refers to the percentage of the population that is black, committing the majority of violent crimes in the US. Now, that 13% IS the percentage of the population comprised of blacks, but it should be 7/50 due to that 7% being black males, who make up the overwhelming majority of those committing violent crimes (among blacks). So the question should reference violent crimes, not “all crimes.” And to be even more accurate, it really should reference murder, specifically.

I should have corrected this in my initial answer, and I do apologize for any confusion that this error/omission on my part might have caused.

If you look hard enough you will find it everywhere. It is NOT as prevalent as people would have you believe. The first “proof” they will give you is the amount of Black males incarcerated. I would bet my life there are some of those guys who got railroaded, but not many. When someone looks a inequality you cannot simply say “Black make up only 14% of the population so what so many in jail. You also have to look at the crimes committed. While only 14% of the population they also make up 55% of the homicides, there is racial inequality swinging towards the other side of the pendulum.

There will be no racial equality in the criminal justice system and there never will be. Are we supposed to say “ok in 2020 there were x amount of murders, so we since we solve 70% we need to take that 70% and only have 14% caused by blacks, 35% caused by whites 22% caused by Hispanics etc etc. the world does not work that way.

Former South Carolina Senator Trey Goudy during a congressional hearing about the very same subject completely tore apart a very liberal professor from Mass. Her position was that the Black Community does not receive the same quality law enforcement with apathy and racism being the biggest factors.

Goudy advised that one of his top Sheriffs who happened to be Black for years complained about the same issues. What Goudys’ Sheriff stated was the biggest problem facing law enforcement in the primarily black areas is witnesses. Unlike other communities witnesses come forward but in the black community they don’t. Goudy gave the example of a drive by shooting, where an 8 year old girl was killed, hundreds of people in the street for a block party and not one person stepped up.

This seems like race-bating to me, but this is the FBI data for 2019:

By the 2023 Census:

The White population is 5.55 times larger than the Black population. Thus, the white murder rate needs to rise from 6,008 to 33,788.4 to equal the Black murder rate. That is a big jump.

This is one of many unpleasant statistics we might discuss. So, I do think we need to keep this in perspective, but the Black murder rate is a consequential social issue.

As to the question, people get mad when the evidence does not match their agenda—this is an inconvenient fact. Attacking the presented and questioning motives are common responses. Sometimes, fake facts get a better reception.

No, that’s just an unpalatable answer like crime stats often are. The FBI gathers data from every police and sheriff’s department across the country and unlike many data sets, the primary color of the skin of those arrested is difficult to get wrong (except for the many multi-race folks.) The majority of murder victims are also young dark-skinned males. Crimes committed as well as victimization don’t match up proportionately on the basis of skin color, religion, gender, age, location, education, family backgrounds/structures, intelligence, work history, or any other factors although that’s an implicit assumption. Look at the US DoJ’s Crime Victimization Surveys going back into the 1960’s and how much it varies by who does what and who suffers what in very long patterns across the country.

So a black teenage male commits crimes more than any other type of person in America while an elderly black woman is the least likely crime victim in America, Asians commit very few crimes, senior citizens of all races and locations are the least common crime victims while teenagers are the most common crime victims, children are 2/3rds of the total rape victims, poor single mothers are the most frequent burglary victims, and most shootings are between rival criminals.

The media does a terrible job of reporting crime even with this information readily available for over 50 years and knowing what’s actually going on allows much more effective crime reduction strategies that get 20–40% reductions quickly and permanently.

According to a seminal paper on crime and punishment written in 1968 by Gary Becker, people commit crime because the reward is greater than taking the legal approach. If you are starving, waiting to find a job doesn’t serve your immediate need. If you can’t pay your bills and can’t find a job, you may resort to crime with its risk of jail over the threat of homelessness.

Now, let’s look at blacks. If you are stuck in the projects, watching only a few exceptions who are able to overcome their meager beginnings to escape; do you take the legal approach and hope you are one of the exceptions or do you pursue something more lucrative but illegal?

Drugs have served as both a short-term escape from their troubles and a source of profit for people in the projects. However, there is a limit to the amount of misery there is to take advantage of leading to turf wars, violence and murder.

Whites forced blacks into projects. Whites engaged in systemic racism to keep them there. Is it any surprise that hopelessness has led to crime? It has zero to do with the color of their skin and everything to do with the circumstances that put them where they are.

No, it isn’t.

One common argument that you’ll hear a lot when discussing systemic racism and police brutality is that “black people are 13% of the population, yet commit 50% of all crimes.” This argument, in additionally to being completely incorrect, has become a favorite of racists on the interent. So, without further ado, I’ll debunk that claim.

Firstly, the “13/50” statistic actually refers to arrests, not crimes. It’s true that black people are more likely to be arrested by the police than white people. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, many members of the police force are overtly racist

The Compton Executioners, which did not allow women or black people to join, award the above Nazi tatoo to members who commit acts of violence

Secondly, there’s higher police presence in traditionally black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods. Police simply watch black communities more than white communities, either due to subconscious racial biases or because overtly racist police chiefs in the past established police presences in black communities.

Studies back up these claims. For example, a black person is five times as likely to be stopped by a police officer without just cause

Additionally, we should note that crime is correlated with poverty. People in poverty, for a variety of reasons, are more likely to commit crimes. Black people have had generational wealth stolen from them via centuries of slavery, segregation, and bigotry. Even now, the capitalist system breeds racism and discrimination, exacerbating ancestral differences in wealth by shoving the worst economic burdens on the black minority, thereby alleviating economic pressure on the white majority.

In conclusion, the assertion that black people represent 13% of the population yet commit half of all crimes is racist bullcrap. Be very wary of anyone who pushes that statistic, as they’re usually out to claim that black people are biologically inferior, a racist claim that is of course awful and wrong. In fact, it is systemic and overt racism, combined with our capitalist system, that has caused serious disparities in our criminal “justice” system.

Stay safe,

-Ben

Feel free to copy and paste parts of this answer when discussing the 13/50 statistic

*I should also note that there is no biological backing behind the concept of race. Sadly, people with darker skin colors are treated worse than those with lighter skin colors, meaning that the concept of race is still relevant today, despite the fact it has no biological basis. The usage of terms “white” and “black” is not meant to assert the concept of race is biologically valid.

Footnotes

Covert corruption? Absolutely. Covert racism? Possibly. Racism has a much higher burden of proof; especially in today's society in order for the masses to see it.

What I mean by that is that most people born from Generation X and those that followed it don't have much experiential context with overt racism, and it's also difficult for them to see systematic racism in disparate sentencing and imprisonment for people of color versus whites.

I honestly cannot blame them when I think about it, because they associate "racism" with hatred, dogs being turned loose on peaceful protestors, lynching, and slavery. It's much harder to see racism in white flight, disproportionately funded schools, redlining minority neighborhoods, heavy handed police presence in said neighborhoods, and economic disparity.

Since the 80s, we were taught that everyone has the same opportunity to have a shot at the American Dream. Unfortunately, a dream that lacks measurable progress is simply a wish.

During our most recent recession, The Black unemployment rate was more than twice the rate of Whites, and that figure was eerily similar to the numbers during the Great Depression. There have been Ivy League studies that have revealed that "Black sounding" names will get called for interviews for 4-6 weeks later than European names when both parties have the same qualifications.

Although studies like these have been telling, there's little that people can do to prove that they've been discriminated against.

I took a somewhat circuitous route to put it like this; it's easy to show malfeasance on the part of the prosecutor, but racism would be hard to prove because it exists in the mind.

If government crime statistics were our only source of information, you might have a point. However, the lived experiences of many people (of all backgrounds) agree with the statistics.

Furthermore, black crime rates are very high ALL OVER THE WORLD. London, Johannesburg and New York all share similar black violent crime rates. Unless there's a vast international conspiracy to make blacks look bad, we must conclude that they do commit more violent crime…

And lastly, it makes no sense to accuse the FBI of slandering blacks, through false crime statistics, when we've seen it bend over backwards to make blacks look BETTER than they actually are. US government agencies are Afrophilic to the extreme, as is the media and corporate America.

Because the justice system is composed of real people, and real people have a statistical likelihood of being racist. Anywhere in the chain if there is bias, the bias affects events up the chain inevitably, even if there is no bias at those higher levels.

For instance, if there is such a thing as “driving when black” (which there is), more black people are going to end up having legal consequences. Judges rule on who is brought before them. That’s not to say judges can’t be biased, but this is something that is out of their control. As it was for the DA below that, etc etc. Anywhere that racism is introduced creates disparate impact as the end result.

I think Bill Stein and Rass Bariaw provided the best answers on this topic, and I couldn't add much grandiloquence to their passionate and seminal thoughts.

What I will say is that Rass produced some concrete, compelling, and irrefutable statistics to explain why Blacks are disproportionately stopped in their vehicles. His answer was much like a class lecture, or a textbook from 200 years in the future that is posed to a much more progressive society to get them to understand just how pervasive, pathological, and illogical racism has been throughout American history.

And almost like a gift, we get a hologram of a real-live police officer in those days in the form of Bill Stein who turns the pages of the textbook into flesh, and places a face and a name to the newest version of America's slightly more sophisticated face of racism.

Bill believes in the Constitution, which should mean that he favors equal protection under, and equal accountability to the law, yet his principle is hijacked by an even greater idea. That idea is the inferiority of Black people. He pontificates about a subculture that only affects people with high levels of melanin; a "subculture" that is responsible for a propensity for crime, lawlessness, murder, drug distribution, consumption, a lack of moral compunction, and the resulting lack of family values thereof.

Mr. Stein is a remarkable specimen because not only does he believe that Blacks are a monolith that are worthy of being grouped by their race, the fortitude of his ego absolutely depends upon it as well. Why would you ask? It is because White males like Bill Stein typically have achieved nothing of dramatic significance in their lives, and that would be tragic, if it weren't for those miscreant Blacks that he can feel superior to at any given time. He isn't among the upper echelon of income earners in this country, he doesn't hold a high level of intelligence or IQ, and he hasn't improved the lives of a great or small number of people around him.

This ideology would be egregious in and of itself, but he has to embark on the self-fulfilling prophecy of patrolling the streets every day looking for examples of those inferior Blacks that he can cite, search, and sometimes arrest to sate the beast of confirmation bias. Now even this would be terrible if it weren't for the fact that he works within a subculture of his own; a police subculure, where violence toward citizens, domestic violence, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, obstruction of justice, racketeering, and falsifying records and planting evidence are the norm.

He basks in the approbation of a culture of malfeasance that is above reproach because he and his colleagues can go to the nearest minority neighborhood and act as an occupying military force with impunity. In the shadows of 9/11, police officers have been able to frame their vocations in the subsequent hero worship as above reproach, and they are very careful to appeal to the proper demographics so as not to fall in disgrace. They have learned how to be friendly and helpful in suburbia and caustic and inflexible in the "hood." They are a relief to be seen on the streets of a White neighborhood, and strike non-verbal terror when they appear in the rear view mirrors of a Hispanic driver.

They've been able to carefully and consistently balance their altruism and malice over disparate communities until dashcams, body cameras, smartphones, and comment sections of social media exposed the fetid and grotesque duality of their consciousness.

This, class, is what a 21st Century racist with marginal power, housed in a vehicle built for systematic injustice and inequality looks like. Be sure to take notes and be prepared to write a 10 page essay on his willful ignorance and how the pathology of White Privilege and White Supremacy created hundreds of thousands just like him and vitiated the country's growth domestically and internationally for another half century by week's end.

Any questions?

Black people are uneducated. They drop out of school. They are undisciplined.

Black people live in projects where they commit crimes and do drugs.

Black people don't have jobs. So they have no money. White people work.

Black people want the things that white people have. So they steal them.

Sometimes black people are caught. They go to jail. Jails are filled with black people for a reason.

Robin Steinberg runs a public advocates office called the Bronx Defenders.

Steinberg was recently interviewed on NPR for a segment called "Ferguson: The Hard Realities of Race & Justice."

Steinberg argues that people of color are being arrested "for conduct that's not being policed in other communities."

Steinberg recalls that 25 years ago, cops patrolled neighborhoods in search of criminals. Think Starsky and Hutch. Miami Vice. Hawaii Five-O. Book 'em, Danno.

Today, things are different. Police patrol low income neighborhoods looking for perps. They catch people committing minor infractions which they treat "as though they were serious offenses."

Trespassing.

Graffiti.

Riding a bicycle in the road.

Walking down the street with a bottle of beer.

Cops search people who are standing around and catch them with small amounts of marijuana.

Can you say STOP AND FRISK?

How about that uproar a few years back over "driving while black?" Remember that?

Affluent white people do these things, too. But when they do them, police don't pay attention. People who do the same things in poor black neighborhoods find that there, police enforce the letter of the law.

Let me ask you: How many times have you been stopped for a traffic infraction and you drove away without a ticket?

Are you White, or are you Black?

Steinberg sees a "perceived suspicion" by police about those who live in poor neighborhoods.

Living under constant surveillance, those people develop a resentment about being watched as they walk down the street to mail a letter. Police presence becomes a threat.

Can you blame them?

"The problem is that nothing happens to the police officers when they overstep their bounds," says Steinberg. We end up "shoveling" black people into the justice system.

Data from a Pew Research Group study found that black males are 6 times more likely to be arrested than white males for the same crime: Incarceration gap widens between whites and blacks.

Federal Bureau of Justice statistics on traffic stops in 2008 found that black drivers were 3 times as likely as white drivers and twice as likely as Hispanic drivers to be searched. Quoran Ingrid A. Hansen in her answer to this question points out that red light cameras are deployed around poor neighborhoods.

WHY?

We ALL know -- how can you not? -- that this country has a fundamental problem with the way people who are not white are treated by law enforcement.

I have lived in New York all my life. The first time I heard the term "jungle bunny" was my cousin Jayjay, who was working as a cop in the NYPD Vice Squad. Years later, when I heard what they did to Abner Louima in the men's room, I remembered Jayjay's description of what they used to do in his precinct when stuck with a perp they were tired of.

In the White World that I live in, most people think it's obvious that a person who is arrested must have asked for it.

When this person is acquitted, therefore, they simply "beat the rap."

Where is John Howard Griffin when we need him?

A friend of mine, trying to find out how to get his own criminal police report on a case dismissed years ago, asked for help on Quora. One response was from a critic: She wanted to know why "you put yourself in this position".

This blaming of victims for false arrests reflects the deeper WHITE view that people who are arrested are the cause of their own problems. It's their own fault they are in handcuffs because "you put yourself in this position."

In other words:

Innocent until proven is guilty is a myth. Innocent after proven innocent is also a myth.

I live in a house in zip code 11577. I work in zip code 10005. I grew up in 11542 and 11560. I used to live in 11215.

I have never been handcuffed.

I have argued, sometimes vigorously, with cops.

No cop has ever hit me over the head with a blackjack, dragged me on the ground to the paddywagon, or sprayed teargas in my face. God help them if they try.

Why?

Simple. I'm white.

So: Why do black people get thrown in jail more than other people?

Simple. They're black.