Talk:Race and crime

Single POV, useless article

This page is POV pushing from beggining to end.

• POV of existence of biological races
• POV of biological determination of crime
• promotion of sociobiology and notoriously racist works as only source
• exclusion of data that does not fit racist genetic determination POV:
• absence of arrest/conviction/sentence rate comparison
• absence of distinction of crime types (which means overstaying a visa = crime = rape)

etc.

This page should not be taken as anything more than white supremacist propaganda, in its present state. Jagiello (talk) 03:31, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Everything is sourced. If you have an opposing view with a reliable source, then please add it to the article.Miradre (talk) 03:32, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

The Handbook of Crime Correlates, a review of 5400 studies is certainly not racist. Violent crimes are differentiated from other crimes. The possibility of bias is discussed. Regarding Rushton, maybe some consider him a racist, but this does not invalidate a simple compilation of INTERPOL data regarding violent crimes published in peer-reviewed journals.Miradre (talk) 03:43, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

I should have said "only source for causal explanation". I should also have mentioned that the article, for some reason, fails to discuss the correlation of "race and crime" on the side of the victims, with the strange exception of "20th century genocide victims" quote. And, also the presentation of IQ tests as a reliable, unbiased measure of intelligence (a concept scientists still struggle to define, let alone measure). Give me some time to research and write the required edits, as this article needs a complete rework, considering it is geared towards the only goal of proving subaltern racial groups inherent criminality. Jagiello (talk) 04:05, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

The validity of race and IQ are discussed in those articles. Not sure what the point is regarding simple crime statistics. Everyone agrees that income and occupations are social constructions, yet everyone agree that there are differences and that one can study different incomes for different occupations.Miradre (talk) 04:10, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

So because they are debated in their respective pages mean that they can (must?) be accepted as unquestioned truths on this page? Yes, a long nose is different from a short nose. Yes you can measure with all sorts of mathematical tools the correlation between nose length and cabbage consumption. That still doesn't make it science. And yet, here we're talking about fairly reliable variables.

Race is the least reliable variable you could imagine: legal and popular classifications vary tremendously across states and regions and change over time, and methods for attribution of race can be very different and quite unreliable too. "Crime" is not a lot more reliable variable. There are stark discrepancies between reporting rate, arrest rate, conviction rate between themselves and across countries, and depending on the offense, and yes, depending on what the race, gender and class of the victim and perpetrator are in the eye of the police and justice system. Jagiello (talk) 04:40, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Obviously we cannot repeat very long articles here. That race is a disputed concept is already mentioned. Regarding race, regardless of how society defines race, geographic ancestry stays the same, which is what racialists often mean with race. Certainly there are differences such as those you mention, but can they explain the consistent racial differences across nations, even when not looking at minorities but at groups of nations like Rushton did? If you have sources giving explanations, including for why East Asians have lower crime rates both when looking at East Asian nations and also when East Asians are minorities, then do include them.Miradre (talk) 04:57, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

I certainly cannot account for a "fact" that is non existent from beginning to end outside the minds of some. "East Asians" have only existed for a few centuries (under different names and delimitations) in the eye of western classifications and those that are derived from them. They are a category, not a group. Even if you accept that the category is analytically valid (and valid as a world category, which only the worst academics will accept), we cannot fail to notice that, to take a random statistics, intentional murder rates are 1.02 for Japan, 5.9 for Thailand and 7.9 for Mongolia, shocking differences for a racialist (not for someone who knows about the incomparable sociology and history of Mongolia, Thailand and Japan, and not as much as Burkina Faso's 0.5 vs. Burundi's 37), which will likely force the said racialist to either ignore data or split East Asians into racial subgroups with different "genes" to preserve the racial superiority narrative. In a US context if you divide the racial "Asians" into ethno/national categories, you end up with very different profiles: "Hmong" as a category correlates with incomparably higher crime rates than "Japanese". I can use whatever correlation I want with whatever categories I want, ignoring whatever data does not fit to construct whatever reality I want.

What this article does is creating the reality that whatever "racial groups" white societies create and ascribe inferiority to are prone to crime, for biological reasons. I could selectively use correlations of "white race" and "white collar crime", make up a nice story about "white genes" and create the reality that "white people" are biologically prone to be fraudsters, embezzlers and tax evaders (and imply that they should not be given managerial/accounting positions). That would be an equally stupid, unscientific claim, that you would have no trouble to disprove. The only difference is that this claim would obviously be extremely unpopular, unlike that of your article, and that everybody would be hell-bent on disproving it. Jagiello (talk) 18:08, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Linkage tree and genetic distance matrix for the 9 main population clusters in the 1994 study The History and Geography of Human Genes by Cavalli-Sforza et al.

Yes, Northeast Asians form a group that is genetically distinct from Southeast Asians. That is from a biological analysis of genes. Not a social construction. Current social groups may be social constructions. Ancestries are biological realities.Miradre (talk) 18:30, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

let us be clear we [...] do not give the clustering obtained in [this and other figures] any "racial" meaning, for reasons discussed in the first chapter. Clusters were formed for reducing the complexity of the data and were given specific names in order to simplify discussion. (p.80). You're misusing the source to promote a view that is not supported by it. Jagiello (talk) 19:39, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, obviously all genetic researchers are very careful to avoid mentioning race. Not surprising considering that a Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of DNA was essentially fired and forced to make a public apology for stating that a lower intelligence in Africa is one explanation for the poverty there. Regardless, others have argued that this research is in fact evidence for the existence of races. See Race differences in intelligence which see the cluster from the book as races.Miradre (talk) 19:47, 4 April 2011 (UTC)