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ELGORDO
Joined: 12 Jul 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 2:46 pm Post subject: Diversity Is Strength! It�s Also�Homicide-Prone Minorities I |
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Viva Diversity. I know this upsets all of the brainwashed waygooks packin' their BA in liberal arts (i.e. a high school diploma)
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100207_diversity.htm
The hubbub over whether the late Michael Jackson�s personal physician will turn himself into the Los Angeles Police Department on a charge of involuntary manslaughter is reminiscent of all those celebrated L.A. homicides of fact (for example, the O.J. Simpson and Phil Spector cases) and fiction (Chinatown and The Big Sleep).
Yet the typical Los Angeles County homicide isn�t much at all like the glamorous murder mysteries seen on screen. Few killings take place in the Hollywood Hills or at the beach. Instead, homicides are concentrated in the vast urban plain south of Wilshire Boulevard.
An impressive journalistic endeavor by the Los Angeles Times to maintain a database of all 2,600+ homicide victims in L.A. County since the beginning of 2007�the Los Angeles Homicide Report�allows the public (me) to study in detail who exactly is killing and getting killed.
And that�s worth knowing because:
L.A. County, in and of itself, is huge (with ten million residents, it�s by far the most populous county in America).
It�s long been a forerunner of demographic and social change in the rest of America.
Much of the recent mortgage meltdown occurred in the exurbs of Los Angeles due in part to a multiethnic version of white flight from L.A. crime.
The good news: homicides in L.A. County have been declining. The bad news: the racial disparities in homicide victimization rates remain very large, partly due to gang wars.
The Census Bureau reported that in 2006-2008 the population of L.A. County was 47 percent Hispanic, 29 percent non-Hispanic white, 13 percent Asian, and 9 percent black.
About two-fifths of the population of L.A. County lives in L.A. City, while almost six million people live in unincorporated areas or independent municipalities, ranging from Malibu in the West, to Compton and Long Beach in the south, to Pomona in the east, to exurban Lancaster and Palmdale in the High Desert of the north.
Racial differences in crime rates are one of those facts that everybody is acutely aware of when looking for a place to live, but that you aren�t supposed to discuss in print. To its great credit, the Homicide Report violates the media taboo on reporting ethnicity of victims and suspects. As its Frequently Asked Questions list states:
�� newspapers and other media outlets stopped mentioning suspects' or victims' race or ethnicity because of public criticism. Newspapers came to embrace the idea that such information is irrelevant to the reporting of crimes and may unfairly stigmatize racial groups.
�The Homicide Report departs from this rule in the interest of presenting the most complete and accurate demographic picture of who is dying in homicides in Los Angeles County.�
Homicides provide the most reliable of crime statistics because attention must be paid to a dead body. Although reporting on lesser crimes has improved due to the revolution in data-driven police department management introduced by William Bratton during his terms as chief of police in Boston, New York City, and L.A., they are still open to inconsistency and manipulation. (For a recent discussion, see New York Times article: Retired Officials Question Integrity of Crime Reports)[By William K. Rashbaum, February 6, 2010].
Unfortunately, we can be more certain about the identities of the victims than of their killers. The Homicide Report includes information on the ethnicities of suspects, but it�s not complete or fully reliable.
The sizable age differences between populations�the median white victim in L.A. County was 40, Asian 37, black 26, and Latino 24�complicates the job of making apples-to-apples comparisons. Are apparent differences in crime rates merely the result of boys being boys? Or are there in fact large ethnic differences in crime proclivity among males of the same age?
And there are always questions about how to classify individuals of mixed heritage. For example, perhaps the most brutal leader of any L.A. street gang in recent years was Timothy McGhee, boss of the Toonerville Mexican gang, now on death row for three of the dozen or more murders attributed to him. McGhee, whose charismatic hold on his underlings was compared to Charles Manson�s, has the eagle and snake from the Mexican flag tattooed on the back of his head (the most painful spot). He is said to have killed one young man just because he felt there wasn�t room in his Atwater Village neighborhood for two people with the same nickname: "Guero" for "fair-skinned."
Generally, government agencies try to maximize the number of Latinos�except when it comes to crime statistics. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, for instance, doesn�t even report "Hispanic" as a category. (Wonder why?)
One way of getting around these various methodological problems in thinking about racial differences in crime: look closely at homicide victimization rates of 15-29 year-old males. This approach can seem unkind because it assumes there is some correlation between the odds of getting killed and the odds of causing trouble. But among young men, unfortunately, that assumption has some validity.
Over the last two weeks, I�ve read the LA Times� write-ups on hundreds of young male victims, and tracked down additional details on many of them elsewhere on the Internet, such as from their MySpace pages. It�s depressing work, but it puts human faces on the statistics.
Many of the victims were wholly innocent, such as the Long Beach engineer who chased teenaged thieves stealing his iPod into an alley, where they shot him down. Some, such as black high school football star Jamiel Shaw Jr., were apparently murdered at random due to their race as part of the low-intensity ethnic cleansing struggle in South Central L.A.
On the other hand, more than a few of the 1,257 male 15-29-year-old homicide victims appear to have been knuckleheads shot down by cops during crimes or by rival gangs as payback, or who lost their lives in fights they started.
Most killings in L.A. County involve acquaintances rather than strangers. Perhaps due to the spread of pervasive video surveillance in stores, robbery killings are now down to a small fraction of the total number of victims, and a very small sliver of young male victims.
This means that victimization rates of young men can give us some clue about crime rates.
Among 15-29 year-old males killed since the beginning of 2007, I count:
Hispanics: 794 victims out of 611,789 young men in the 2006-2008 Census estimates
Blacks: 380 victims out of 96,676 young men
Non-Hispanic Caucasians: 47 out of 247,173
Asians: 28 out of 129,716
Pacific Islanders: 8 out of 3,510
American Indians: 0 out of 6,088
Total L.A. County: 15-29 year old males: 1,257 out of 1,108,268
A few technical notes: I�m counting 22 Spanish-surnamed victims as Hispanic even though the county coroner listed them as white, plus four others where there is evidence that they identified ethnically as Latino.
Not surprisingly to anybody who follows the local police blotter, 14 of the 47 Caucasian victims were of West Asian descent, and nine of those 14 Armenians. Only 1.7 percent of the population of Los Angeles County is Armenian, but some of them are a bit lively, rather like Sicilians in a Scorsese movie: enterprising and affluent, but with an Old World code of honor. Suspects in killings of Armenians are often described as vanishing into the night in BMWs or Lexuses. Judging by the Old Country first names of the Armenian victims, most were immigrants or the children of immigrants rather than from the pre-1924 wave of Armenian immigrants.
Using the Census Bureau�s estimates of the numbers of 15-29-year-old males in L.A. County in 2006-2008, we can calculate�relative to non-Hispanic whites�the homicide victimization rates among young men:
Whites: 1.0 times the white rate (by Census definition)
Asians: 1.1x the white rate
Latinos: 6.8x
Pacific Islanders: 12.0x
African-American: 20.7x
Total L.A. County: 6.0x
These are also large racial gaps in homicide victimization.
The disparities in homicide offence rates in L.A. County might well be even worse. Of the 33 European whites who died, 5 are reported to have been killed by cops, 9 by Latinos, 5.5 by other whites, 2.5 by blacks, and 2 by Asians. (Fractions represent multiple suspects of different races). Still, in nine of the 33 cases there is no identified suspect, so it�s difficult to generalize confidently from the Homicide Report about offending rates.
Nationally, the ethnic gaps in crime probably aren�t as huge as they are in L.A. County. The Color of Crime 2005 [PDF] report from American Renaissance looked at national incarceration figures and came up with (for all ages):
"In total, blacks had the highest incarceration rate at 7.2 times the [nonHispanic] white rate, followed by Hispanics, at 2.9 times the white rate. [American] Indians and Pacific Islanders were imprisoned at about twice the white rate, and Asians at only 22 percent of the white rate."
Why are the racial disparities so bad in Southern California?
First, L.A. County has particularly law-abiding young white men.
The high cost of living, the poor public schools, and the low wages have driven out much of the white working class. The per capita income of white households in L.A. County is more than twice that of Hispanic households.
Second, L.A. County has a notorious street gang culture that is endemic among the lower ranks of all ethnic groups in Los Angeles, except European-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and American Indians.
For example, one industrious researcher claims there are 137 Asian street gangs in L.A. County. The Homicide Report map shows the largest concentration of gang-related Asian deaths (typically Southeast Asians) on the East Side of Long Beach, just north of where the highest density of Samoans and other Pacific Islanders were killed.
The density of diversity in L.A. County provides a critical mass that allows the bad apples to find each other. In most of the U.S., for instance, Armenians are well-behaved. In Southern California, however, there are 170,000 Armenians, enough to furnish an Armenian street gang, Armenian Power, as well as transnational mafias with roots in the old Soviet Union.
In contrast, a review of the Homicide Report suggests that there are virtually no white youth gangs seriously active in Los Angeles County, even though the county extends well up into biker and meth lab territory in the High Desert.
I could only find reports of one white victim of a gang slaying who had white prison gang tattoos. And even he was strenuously defended in the Homicide Report�s comments against posthumous imputations of racism by a black friend, who pointed out in his defense that he had half-Latino and half-black children. Indeed, victims listed as white in the Homicide Report appear to be more likely to be involved with Latino gangs than with white gangs.
Will L.A.�s street gang culture take root in more recently diversifying regions of the country as American-born sons of immigrants grow up on the mean streets?
That�s hard to say. It�s possible that street gangs will become pass� as young males spend less time out on the streets engaging in Grand Theft Auto and more time indoors playing Grand Theft Auto.
On the other hand, I wouldn�t want to bet the country on that without being allowed to talk it over in public first.
Moreover, in assessing the recent drop in homicides in LA County, it should be noted that parents took huge financial risks to get their sons farther away from the killing fields of South Central�risks that we�re all paying off.
The rational urge to move contributed to a centrifugal movement outward into the Southern California exurbs (which then spilled over into Nevada and Arizona) that was central to the Housing Bubble of the last decade. By 2006, a large majority of mortgage dollars in the Southern California exurbs were going to minorities.
White flight was not just for whites anymore.
Murder, however, is for whites, and for anyone else who gets in the way of minorities that are clearly systematically prone to criminality.
One of the many advantages of an immigration moratorium is that fewer Americans will have to face the risk that has become a fact of life in my hometown.
[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA�S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA�S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.] |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:06 pm Post subject: Re: Diversity Is Strength! It�s Also�Homicide-Prone Minoriti |
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ELGORDO wrote: |
Viva Diversity. I know this upsets all of the brainwashed waygooks packin' their BA in liberal arts (i.e. a high school diploma) |
Nah, nothing really controversial about this:
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The per capita income of white households in L.A. County is more than twice that of Hispanic households. |
The writer could have just stopped there. You don't see too many financially secure suburban Blacks or Hispanics involved in violent crime. Any correlation of minorities with crime can be pretty well explained by the correlation of sub-par wages and living conditions with crime. |
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ELGORDO
Joined: 12 Jul 2009
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ELGORDO
Joined: 12 Jul 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:25 pm Post subject: Re: Diversity Is Strength! It�s Also�Homicide-Prone Minoriti |
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Street Magic wrote: |
ELGORDO wrote: |
Viva Diversity. I know this upsets all of the brainwashed waygooks packin' their BA in liberal arts (i.e. a high school diploma) |
Nah, nothing really controversial about this:
Quote: |
The per capita income of white households in L.A. County is more than twice that of Hispanic households. |
The writer could have just stopped there. You don't see too many financially secure suburban Blacks or Hispanics involved in violent crime. Any correlation of minorities with crime can be pretty well explained by the correlation of sub-par wages and living conditions with crime. |
You are smoking crack, right? Blacks and Africans have a higher crime rate wherever they live.
http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:36 pm Post subject: Re: Diversity Is Strength! It�s Also�Homicide-Prone Minoriti |
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ELGORDO wrote: |
Street Magic wrote: |
ELGORDO wrote: |
Viva Diversity. I know this upsets all of the brainwashed waygooks packin' their BA in liberal arts (i.e. a high school diploma) |
Nah, nothing really controversial about this:
Quote: |
The per capita income of white households in L.A. County is more than twice that of Hispanic households. |
The writer could have just stopped there. You don't see too many financially secure suburban Blacks or Hispanics involved in violent crime. Any correlation of minorities with crime can be pretty well explained by the correlation of sub-par wages and living conditions with crime. |
You are smoking crack, right? Blacks and Africans have a higher crime rate wherever they live.
http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html |
I guess because of all that crack I'm smoking, I can't find the part of that linked site that mentions the region of the US where "Blacks and Africans" have comparable incomes to Whites and yet still commit the same amount of crime. Care to quote the part that says that?
Incidentally, the site you linked to doesn't even claim they have a "higher crime rate" wherever they live, just that they have an overall "higher crime rate," which they would be expected to have if they were to also have an overall higher rate of poverty, which they do, which brings us back to the original confounding variable here. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:41 pm Post subject: |
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And i'm sure there are neighborhoods that have improved since the 80s. There is less violence in LA now than there used to be. SoCal might be going downhill, but more so in the Inland Empire, which was crushed by the real estate bubble, than LA, OC, and San Diego. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 3:42 pm Post subject: |
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BTW, you're breaking TOS. Might want to edit your first post, and just cut it down to a few key quotes. I'm assuming it can be read in its entirety at the link you provided. |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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I knew I was right, but wow...
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For the years 1976 to 2005, the correlation between the black poverty rate and the black violent crime victimization rate is 0.92. Author's analysis of Census poverty rates for all people and Bureau of Justice Statistics victimization rates. |
(In case you're not up on your statistics, that coefficient represents about as close as you can get to a naturally occurring absolute correlation between Black poverty and crime) |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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but correlation does not always equal causation. Gotta remember that too. And how does that correlation measure up to other races?
BTW, I agree for you the most part, just saying... |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 6:50 pm Post subject: |
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bucheon bum wrote: |
but correlation does not always equal causation. :D Gotta remember that too. |
Yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable point to bring up. If you want to be bulletproof in the semantics here, you could say that I'm not necessarily offering the definitive interpretation of why blacks are disproportionately represented in violent crime statistics so much as a far, far more likely interpretation than the one the OP is suggesting-- especially given that the evidence he cited is in the same exact terms my article used (victimization rates correlated with one other variable-- race in his argument vs. poverty in mine):
ELGORDO's article wrote: |
Most killings in L.A. County involve acquaintances rather than strangers...
This means that victimization rates of young men can give us some clue about crime rates. |
More specifically, the incredibly strong correlation between poverty and crime blatantly shuts down the following ELGORDO post, wherein he asserted that "Blacks and Africans" have higher crime rates regardless of poverty levels:
ELGORDO wrote: |
Street Magic wrote: |
The writer could have just stopped there. You don't see too many financially secure suburban Blacks or Hispanics involved in violent crime. Any correlation of minorities with crime can be pretty well explained by the correlation of sub-par wages and living conditions with crime. |
You are smoking crack, right? Blacks and Africans have a higher crime rate wherever they live.
http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html |
One could try to argue that Blacks are both poor and prone to crime because of their ethnicity, but (as demonstrated above) that wasn't the argument ELGORDO was making.
bucheon bum wrote: |
And how does that correlation measure up to other races?
BTW, I agree for you the most part, just saying... |
There's an unsurprisingly strong correlation between poverty and crime regardless of race, and, given that ethnic minorities such as Blacks are disproportionately overrepresented in poverty statistics, it's equally unsurprising that they'd be overrepresented in crime statistics.
I can't find any sites that provide a poverty-crime correlation coefficient for other races or for US citizens in general, but there are a number of sites available through basic Google-ing that back up the above assertion through the raw numbers.
Anyway, I believe I could at least confidently claim that poverty is a glaring confounding variable which makes any attempt to link crime to race without thoroughly accounting for it a fairly ridiculous endeavor. |
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rocket_scientist
Joined: 23 Nov 2009 Location: Prague
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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Hi - This poverty explanation is loaded in my opinion. What really is the answer to the poverty response? Street Magic, why are USA Blacks poor? |
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kabrams

Joined: 15 Mar 2008 Location: your Dad's house
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 8:49 pm Post subject: |
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Yet another thread where the mods show they actually don't care how "professional" Dave's members are.
Seriously, say "****" and a Mod will come in and edit, talk about Korean women and they'll say "keep it civil". But make comments bordering on outright racism (and they're almost always about black and Latino people) and it's business as usual. |
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rocket_scientist
Joined: 23 Nov 2009 Location: Prague
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 9:45 pm Post subject: |
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kabrams wrote: |
Yet another thread where the mods show they actually don't care how "professional" Dave's members are.
Seriously, say "****" and a Mod will come in and edit, talk about Korean women and they'll say "keep it civil". But make comments bordering on outright racism (and they're almost always about black and Latino people) and it's business as usual. |
I always talk about Jews. |
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Street Magic
Joined: 23 Sep 2009
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 10:18 pm Post subject: |
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rocket_scientist wrote: |
Hi - This poverty explanation is loaded in my opinion. What really is the answer to the poverty response? Street Magic, why are USA Blacks poor? |
I have no solid statistics to back up my opinion on that question, but I personally believe black poverty is a lasting consequence of segregation and the Jim Crow culture that dominated race relations all the way up until the 60s. Far from this just being a liberal racial sensitivity rationalization, the impact of racism on the justice system has been openly recognized in major Supreme Court cases covering issues you'd think wouldn't even have anything to do with the topic (the Furman v. Georgia case I brought up in the recent retarded woman murder thread is a good example of this-- the death penalty was actually abolished for a time in the US in large party because it was determined that blacks were selected for it in greatly disproportionate numbers over whites for equivalent crimes).
What's more, it was a well known practice following emancipation to simply arrest blacks for vague "vagrancy" or "loitering" charges so they could use their labor in chain gangs as a substitute for slave labor. A similar practice took place in share cropping, where blacks would be intentionally placed into insurmountable debt through contracts mandating payments for the use of land far greater than the payments they would receive for their crops. Once in debt, blacks would be at the mercy of their employers and legally obligated to participate in a de facto return to slavery.
On top of those practices, lynchings portrayed as vigilante justice were committed against blacks for violating ideas of racial etiquette (anything from suspected theft, to contact with a white woman, to acting too educated) and were attended en masse as though they were modern day organized sporting events with spectators literally having postcards made to commemorate the occasion. Needless to say, law enforcement officers were complicit in these lynchings as they were never broken up during that era and blacks were often enough led away to be lynched directly from the courthouse or prison where they were being held for whatever imagined crime had the town riled up over.
More towards what you and the OP might be getting at, it is likely that blacks have also been influenced by a collective culture that's learned over time not to trust the legal establishment. Rather than call for legal assistance to handle a crime, someone whose family was so wrongly neglected if not abused by law enforcement in the past might be more inclined to personally retaliate, while others in the community might be inclined to look the other way rather than to draw unwanted law enforcement attention. It's still my opinion though that whatever factor such a culture of mistrust might play is likely secondary to the factor of poverty. You simply wouldn't expect to see wealthy suburban blacks committing violent crimes in a nice gated community. Even if I were to grant that blacks are somehow more prone to poverty because of their race, this wouldn't change the likelihood that their disproportionate representation in crime is a consequence of poverty rather than a stat that would hold regardless of economic status. There's such a strong correlation between poverty and crime and it's just such a clear absurdity to entertain the idea of wealthy suburban residents committing violent gang type violence in comparable amounts to an inner city that I find it easy to come to the conclusion that I do. |
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nautilus

Joined: 26 Nov 2005 Location: Je jump, Tu jump, oui jump!
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Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 11:36 pm Post subject: |
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America has these problems because it is so racially segregated compared to other western nations. |
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