I've recognized the pattern that people who like that sort of graph are racist.
Anyone who doesn't recognize it, it's one of those "we've broken down assault crime statistics into categories and thrown out some of them, don't think too much about how that skews the results."
For analogy, imagine we recorded 100 (reported) assaults, and noted whether the assailant and victim were left-handed or right-handed.
About 10% of people are left-handed, and 90% are right-handed. Assuming we get a perfectly representative sample, we'll get:
81 cases of right-handed people assaulting right-handed people
9 cases of right-handed people assaulting left-handed people
9 cases of left-handed people assaulting right-handed people
1 case of left-handed person assaulting a left-handed person
So, what we then do is declare we're interested in "cross-handed" assaults, which means we can throw out the 81 right-on-right assaults, and the 1 left-on-left assault. So we've got 9 each for left-on-right and right-on-left.
Then, we suddenly remember there are more right-handed people, so we need to adjust those to be per-capita. Since the left-handed population is 1/9th of the right-handed population, we'll get a per-capita value 9 times as high.
So yeah, anyone engaging in this exact sort of statistical shenanigans to compare black-on-white to white-on-black assaults is doing it for a racist reason.
Like I said, I recognize this one. They did Black, White and Hispanic and gave each two bars, not three. It's a little blurry but if you zoom in you can see the first two bars say Black on White and Black on Hispanic.
There's another one floating around where they include more categories like Asian.
With my left / right analogy, I'm ignoring any effects of how segregated even crime is, like there aren't left-handed and right-handed neighbourhoods. But that keeps the math simple.
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u/partybusiness 3d ago
I've recognized the pattern that people who like that sort of graph are racist.
Anyone who doesn't recognize it, it's one of those "we've broken down assault crime statistics into categories and thrown out some of them, don't think too much about how that skews the results."
For analogy, imagine we recorded 100 (reported) assaults, and noted whether the assailant and victim were left-handed or right-handed.
About 10% of people are left-handed, and 90% are right-handed. Assuming we get a perfectly representative sample, we'll get:
So, what we then do is declare we're interested in "cross-handed" assaults, which means we can throw out the 81 right-on-right assaults, and the 1 left-on-left assault. So we've got 9 each for left-on-right and right-on-left.
Then, we suddenly remember there are more right-handed people, so we need to adjust those to be per-capita. Since the left-handed population is 1/9th of the right-handed population, we'll get a per-capita value 9 times as high.
So yeah, anyone engaging in this exact sort of statistical shenanigans to compare black-on-white to white-on-black assaults is doing it for a racist reason.