I do not have the time or inclination to bring in all the (relatively) objective studies which show that blacks are disproportionately sentenced and convicted in the US in comparison with whites. My big problem from the beginning is that black people are thought of as criminals, to which you respond to the effect of "statistically this is true". The reason I say this is getting into dangerous territory is because I do not want to believe that I am arguing why racial profiling is bad with someone who is potentially racist themselves. I will not accuse you of racist behaviour but I am slightly disturbed at the fact that you are trying to justify a fear of black people -- and young black males in particular -- when my entire reason for getting into this dialogue (over two separate threads now) was to point out that this is an unfair stereotype which is also unnecessary. If giving black people the same right to exist as everyone else in America is so unpalatable to you, then I highly doubt any statistics I can bring to bear will sway you to think otherwise. At any rate, it is just as difficult to prove an institutional racism (such as exists in the US criminal justice system) as it is to prove anyone will die of old age, or your other examples. The only thing I ask, and have been asking, is that people stop automatically assuming that black people have no right to exist as US citizens before being stereotyped into a role for which they probably do not belong. I apologize for giving what amounts to a cop-out to your request for more statistical data, but I literally do not have time to dig into things and get into a statistical show-down over this point right now.
If logic says something is more likely than not, it should be considered the more likely than not to be true unless evidence indicates otherwise. I didn't say shit about it being the only possible outcome. To the contrary, I am pointing out that for it not to be true some factor would have to seriously alter the rate of conviction compared to the rate of crime, and it lies on you to suggest and defend what that might be. If you can not do so with a reasonable degree of certainty then most logical inference remains the presumed correct one, or if reasonably challenged but insufficiently, the most likely one. The Big Bang Theory has not been proven, we operate under the assumption it is true.
Well you and the others might be referring to Florida, I was not, I was referring to the US. Now, you fail test number one, you have claimed that crimes committed and conviction rates don't match up well, yet your proof is of arrests. Not crimes committed, not convictions, but arrests. There are crimes, some are never reported, of those some never have enough evidence for an arrest, some do not result in charges, some of those do not pass muster to a grand jury, and of those some never result in a conviction, nor is a conviction absolute proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that the person committed that crime. You're attempting to argue that conviction rate compared to crime rate is a flawed comparison and one flawed by roughly an entire order of magnitude, yet you already jump to the level of arrest.
Now that said - and I can make this argument as I am claiming that crime rates and criminal convictions are strongly correlated - of the 14 years of arrest data you sent me, 1998-2011, where people are broken up by 4 categories, white, black, oriental, and Indian (presumably native American) and presumably Hispanic as White, only in 3 of those 14 years did the arrest by murder have fewer blacks then whites. 1998, 1999, and 2001. And in those cases it was 415-388, 390-347, and 359-345 respectively. Now, again, this was arrest data, what though was the 2000 Census for Florida, the most applicable to those years? Black, 14.6%, White, 78.0%, Indian 0.3%, Asian 1.7%, the other 5.4% being something of a wild card to compare to our criminal data you found. What does this tell us? It tell us that for murder, in those years, an individual black person was rougher 5 times more likely to be arrested for murder. This trend appears to continue, as while black murder arrests have risen, being that majority every year since 2001, the black population now reported at 16.6%, roughly matching to the rise. That's all the data tells us explicitly. Now if you look at all total tracked arrest one finds that the average has blacks at about 1 in 3 of those, roughly double their population representation.
One cannot say, as the data listed does not say, what the percentage of those committed by black males are, themselves safely assumed to be half or 7-8% of the Floridian population, but consider that men trounce women in arrests in every single field, even Prostitution arrests to my surprise, that it probably weight even higher if one is comparing black males to the general population and further younger black males. Note that that is something I am inferring as the data doesn't allow that to be shown directly. You may make the claim that my claim that old white women are rarely arrested for crimes and thus probably don't commit many of them is unproven, racist, sexist, and ageist but there certainly is an impressive amount of data indicating that is very probable.
My claim is very simple, of the reported crimes arrests will loosely, though not perfectly, match up to crimes committed and that there is insufficient evidence to indicate that mismatch could extend to causing 7-8% of the population (probably more like 3% after removing age) to be arrested for roughly 1/3rd of crimes and about half of the violent crimes yet not have committed a disproportionately high number of them. That whites are arrested more often is fairly silly, they are 4 in 5 of the populace, that they aren't ahead across the board by a factor of 4-1 is what is relevant. Asians should not be considered super law-abiding because they make up about .5% of all arrests, they should be viewed only as making up .5% of arrests as 1.7% of the populace.
The data you attached did not, that I saw (it is a Friday and I'm short on coffee so I could be wrong) ever mention the word conviction one, single, solitary time. I am th one arguing that conviction rates roughly match arrests rate and crime rates, not you. If you want to compare arrest rates to conviction rates then you must provide that data, ditto sentencing rates. Especially with me of all people, I'm not exactly known around here for being relaxed about citations and casual interpretation of data.
