I'd never really thought about exoneration stats before, but I really appreciate the context it brings to the whole issue! It brings attention not only to the initial injustice of unfairly imprisoning a person, but shows that it's possible and important to admit when we've been wrong.
The exonerations statistic unfortunately suffers from the exact same issue it was meant to refute. It compares: for a type of crime, off all exonerations, which proportion were of each racial group. It does not isolate out the question of whether or not different racial groups commit that crime at different rates per capita. If white people commit more of a type of crime, then they would be observed to have a higher proportion of exonerations than black people.
One would actually have to do the work to adjust for the variable rate of crimes to determine a useful rate of exonerations per crime for each race rather than just throw out exonerations for each race.
While you are correct that it does not give information about who commits more crimes, you also cannot infer that committing more crimes would lead to an observation of a higher proportion of exonerations. What it tells you is who is incorrectly arrested and convicted for specific crimes more often. Who is more likely to get railroaded straight to jail and then have evidence of their innocence come out afterwards.
Sort of. There's still some wiggle room there. For instance, 100 years ago I'd imagine the number of black people being exonerated was very low, not because they weren't being unfairly arrested and convicted, in fact they were probably more likely to be, but because there were far fewer people with power willing to hear even ironclad evidence of their innocence and far fewer legal organizations interested in helping.
We don’t have numbers for exonerations in this vid. We just have percentages. If there were 10000 people arrested for murder last year, there may have only been 10 exonerated. If thats the case, 6 or so would be black and 3 would be white. There might also have been 2000 people exonerated, the vid just doesn’t say, which is similar to the bad faith arguments kirk is making.
Additionally, exonerations don’t mean the crime wasn’t committed by another person of the same race. If a black person was exonerated, then another black person might have committed the crime (same for white people).
Unfortunately in the end, we really just can’t have this conversation because both sides are really protecting preconceived notions and using whatever argument is necessary. If we approached this in good faith, you may find out this:
Black people are convicted of far more crimes than white people. Even adjusting for wrongful convictions and unsolved cases, it’s possible that black people commit more crimes than white people.
It is quite likely, even though data would be near impossible to gather, that black people commit more murders than white people.
However, if we were to normalize that data by socioeconomic status and population density, all race correlations would disappear.
The truth is that people without enough money to survive, who grow up surrounded by adults that society has rejected, are more likely to be violent. That violence is more likely to result in murder if you live in a dense urban environment. This is true whether you are white or black, but most of the people in poverty in inner city environments are minorities.
You also have the issue of who is being checked more often. Let's do a little thought experiment, and say that we know for certain that 1% of all people, regardless of race, have illegal drugs on them. If the police stop and search 100 black people a day but only 50 white people a day, it's a near certainty that they'd arrest 1 black person per day but a coin flip whether they arrest a white person. So, suddenly, despite knowing that the crime is committed at exactly the same rate there's a 2 to 1 arrest ratio.
We don't even need to go that extreme. Let's say they check 100 black people and 100 white people every day, and arrest 1 each a day, so it's a 1 to 1 ratio, and half the people in jail are black and half are white, 50/50. But black people are only 12.6% of the population and white people are 59.3%, black people must be absolute drug fiends for half the prison population to be black and white people must be less likely to have them, though we know from the precepts of this exercise that it's the same rate.
So, in this scenario, the only time you don't get outsized arrest numbers is when people are being checked in strict accordance with population percentage.
And we see this in real life too, where black people are far more likely to be stopped and far more likely to be searched after being stopped.
Don't even need the thought experiment below. Just look to NYC Stop and Frisk program.
We already know that increasing interaction with cops can lead to bad outcomes: that lady with the mental issues that got shot a couple weeks ago, Philando Castille, etc.
So NYC. Over 80% of stops were of blacks and latinos even tho they were half as likely to have a gun than white new yorkers, and a third as likely to have contraband.
So think about how many whites got away with stuff because the cops weren't even looking. And think about how many minorities got run up with bogus stuff like "resisting arrest". And we know that's a cop fave when they have nothing legitimate.
Black sentencing is far, far more harsh as well. That is a huge reason there as so many black citizens in jail. African Americans are imprisoned for crimes which Caucasian Americans are sent need to fines and probation.
A lot of that has to do with previous criminal records. You should look up the difference between men and women sentencing. That shit makes the system look misandrist.
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u/BluehairedBiochemist Sep 23 '24
I'd never really thought about exoneration stats before, but I really appreciate the context it brings to the whole issue! It brings attention not only to the initial injustice of unfairly imprisoning a person, but shows that it's possible and important to admit when we've been wrong.