Criminality Distributions

Via iSteve, "The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People with Felony Records in the United States":

"We estimate that 3 % of the total U.S. adult population and 15 % of the African American adult male population has ever been to prison; people with felony convictions account for 8 % of all adults and 33 % of the African American adult male population."

Note that given these numbers, and assuming blacks constitute 12% of the U.S. population, the non-black felony conviction rate is 4.6% (arrived at by this formula:(.08 - .33*.12)/(1 - .12)); Likewise, the non-black incarceration rate is 1.4%.

This implies that blacks are 7.2x overrepresented among felony convicts and 11x overrepresented among prisoners.

These data can be explained by a model in which anti-social behavior is normally distributed, with the black mean higher than the non-black mean and a higher threshold for incarceration than felony conviction. We are all familiar with the bell curve:

A few words of explanation: Shown are two normal distributions, each with variance one. The "Group A" mean is zero, as shown on the x-axis; the "Group B" mean is one standard deviation above the Group A mean. The left Y-axis is the probability distribution function (PDF) value. It is meaningless in itself; obtaining percentages requires integration (i.e. the area under the curve). On the right axis is the value of the ratio of the percentages of the two distributions lying above the threshold indicated on the x-axis. For fellow stats geeks, the ratio is (1 - F_B(x))/(1 - F_A(x)), where F(x) is the cumulative density function (CDF) corresponding to each PDF.

For instance, Exactly 50% of the Group A distribution falls above zero, while 84% of the group B distribution does; their ratio is .84/.5 = 1.7. 16% of the Group A distribution falls above 1, while 50% of the Group B distribution does; their ratio is 3.1. 2% of the Group A distribution falls above 2, while 16 % of the Group B distribution does; their ratio is 7. These ratios continue to climb as shown.

The ratios given by the study can be accounted for by a model of anti-social behavior where the black mean of anti-social behavior is 1.3 standard deviations of the non-black distribution above the non-black mean, whereas the non-black standard deviation is .87 of that of the non-black standard deviation:

That the black criminality distribution is narrower than the non-black distribution should not surprise us; the non-black population is by definition more heterogeneous, including Hispanics with higher rates of criminality than the white majority and Asians with lower rates. A more rigrous model would attempt to break these out separately. In the meantime, one of the implications of the narrower black distribution is that at sufficiently high thresholds we see from the graph that the ratio begins (just barely) to level off; however, this is an artifact of combining disparate populations into a non-black category.

This model is useful for predicting outcomes as reported in this Columbus Dispatch article about racial disparities in the juvenile system:

Delinquency filings in county Juvenile Court fell from 6,247 in 2010 to 2,457 in 2020, a 61% drop. The number of youths admitted to the county's juvenile detention center fell from 2,196 in 2010 to 602 in 2020, a 73% decline. . . .

In 2020, Black teens in Franklin County were two-and-a-half times more likely to be charged with a delinquency offense than white teens — in a county where less than 25% of the population is Black. . . .

In Franklin County, the detention numbers are particularly stark. Black juveniles represented 84% of the youths admitted to the county detention center in 2020. That number has grown worse since 2010, when Blacks accounted for 71% of the juveniles detained.

On average, the daily population in the county detention center in 2020 included 47 Blacks and four whites. And the median length of stay in detention — where youths are held before their cases are resolved — was 12 days for Black juveniles and three days for white juveniles. . . .

The 65 Black juveniles who were given an out-of-home placement in 2020 represented a 70% drop from 2014. But the 13 whites youths placed out-of-home last year represented an 89% drop during the same period. . . .

Based on raw numbers, Balis said, Franklin County's Juvenile Court is to be commended for the drop in out-of-home placements for Black teens. The number of such placements stood at 215 in 2014.

Here is the demographic information for Franklin County, Ohio, of which 22.9% is black and 62% is white. As is common in mainstream reporting, the article combines multiple measures; I count "delinquency filings", "charged and detained", "charged", "admitted to county detention", "detained", "daily population", and "out-of-home placement". I kind of get that journalists want to mix up their formulations for stylistic reasons, but it means that I can only guess which terms are supposed to be equivalent. But youths are "charged", where the article claims is a 2.5x black/white rate ratio, far more often than they are "detained", where there is a (47/.229)/(4/.62) = 32x black/white rate ratio, assuming that the ratios of the juvenile population is the same as the overall population, which assumption is almost certainly incorrect, but is the best data we have.

However, it is apparent that Franklin County raised the thresholds at which juveniles are both charged and detained. So it should not suprise us to see that of the two measures for which black numbers are provided in the same context for two different years, we see that the percent black of detentions climbed from 71% to 84% between 2010 and 2020, implying an increase in the black/non-black rate ratio from 8x to 18x, and the black/white ratio of out-of-home placements climbed from 1.8x (i.e. 215//(13/(1-.89)) = 215/118) in 2014 to 5x (65/13); given their percentages of the population, this implies an increase in the black/white rate ratio from 5x to 14x.

That said, these numbers don't necessarily fit the parameters developed from the nationwide conviction and incarceration data shared earlier. For instance, as you can see from the graph, the black/non-black anti-social behavior ratio of 5x occurs right around the median of the black distribution, and obviously somewhat less than half of all black youths in Franklin County received out-of-home placements in 2014. But otherwise we should expect the black/white and black/non-black rate ratios to be at least this high, and higher still as the threshold for punishment increases.

How much atonement?

Ross Douthat cites Rod Dreher’s response to Douthat’s earlier reaction to Obama’s remarks about the Crusades.  All of the articles are required reading.

Dreher:

The New York Times wrote today on a new research report by an organization that has been studying lynching, and has documented almost 4,000 acts of extrajudicial murder by white mobs from the years 1877-1950. Most, but not all, of the deeds took place in the South. Five of the top 10 counties for lynching are in my home state, Louisiana. Here is a summary of the Equal Justice Initiative’s report.

EJI’s contribution was to identify several hundred additional lynching cases.  The previous total from the Tuskegee Institute was 4743, of which some 3446 were of black.  Note that the EJI’s report considers only blacks, and only the South.

Dreher quotes from the summary:

Lynchings Based on Fear of Interracial Sex. Nearly 25 percent of the lynchings of African Americans in the South were based on charges of sexual assault. The mere accusation of rape, even without an identification by the alleged victim, could arouse a lynch mob. The definition of black-on-white “rape” in the South required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman would willingly consent to sex with an African American man.

Dreher concludes:

We all need to know these things, and face down what our ancestors did. These weren’t Crusaders sacking Constantinople. These were our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, doing it to the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers of our black neighbors. Attention must be paid. That may be the only atonement available now, but it’s better than what we have had, which is nothing.

If it needs be stated, I will (again and again):  I am opposed to extrajudicial murder as an inherent violation of the Constitution’s due-process protections.  And I will add to that that I am opposed to torturing people to death in all circumstances.  (As Dreher points out, many of the murders described in the EJI’s summary would do ISIS proud.)

But the problem with Dreher’s call to atonement is that it never specifies exactly when the heirs (if heirs they actually be) of the murderers of century past can be assured that their accounts are settled.  Here Dreher is asking for “attention”.  Yet the inclusion of lynching, and the mistreatment of American blacks in general, is a staple of history curricula at all levels of education across the country.  My own daughter is finally having her first public school class in American history, yet over the last three years consideration of slavery, segregation, and the Civil Rights movement have dominated the assigned (and unassigned) readings in both her Social Studies and her English lessons.  You will fail to find any public figure anywhere who would call for as much nuance in our treatment of lynching as I do here.  How much attention does Dreher think is enough?

EJI and Dreher both want us to generalize from the numbers to characterize lynching as an especially Southern and racist phenomenon.  But I have a generalization of my own:  the majority of lynching victims were accused of heinous crimes that then merited the death penalty.  The EJI summary as quoted above does its best to obscure this – rape is only “sexual assault” is only “fear of interracial sex” – but EJI itself apparently found only a few hundred cases of lynching for mere social protocol violations.

I would also point out that the racial disparity in lynching (73% victimization borne by 13% of the population is a 5.6x overrepresentation) reflects the racial disparity in crime, yet EJI specifically condemns the contemporaneous public figures who pointed this out.

No public figure points this out today, and black violence against white victims isn’t even A Thing in elite discourse, school curricula, or polite conversation.  But that’s kind of the point:  Obama and his followers invoke the crimes of the past to obscure the crimes of the present.

Flophouses: Our Immigrant-driven Future

Via Trumwill, from Slate:

Bring Back Flophouses, Rooming Houses, and Microapartments

Dumb urban policies wiped out the best kinds of housing for the poor, young, and single. But they’re finally making a comeback in smart cities.

. . . .

In the following decade, California began regulating rooming houses and other hotels, setting standards for bathrooms (one per 10 bedrooms), window area per room, floor space per room, and more. Again, some of these rules may have had health benefits, and the rules’ proponents certainly thought they were helping. Yet they knocked the cheapest rooms off the market without providing substitutes.

Mmm . . . government policies that make illegal people’s inexpensive choices, all “for their own good”.  That sounds . . . really familiar!  I wonder what Slate had to say about it.

The rules were not accidents. Real-estate owners eager to minimize risk and maximize property values worked to keep housing for poor people away from their investments.

Without changing the underlying reality, that paragraph could be rewritten thusly:

The rules were not accidents.  Residents eager to minimize crime and maximize quality-of-life worked to keep violent and dysfunctional people away from where their children played.

Kind of puts a different spin on the same set of facts, doesn’t it?

Justice-for-Trayvon 2 (July - Nov 2013)

Happy New Year.

3 teens charged in Pinellas school bus beating

Chilling 911 call details final moments of Melbourne baseballer Chris Lane's life

Three suspects charged in deadly shooting on South Main

Teens face ethnic intimidation charges after brutally beating woman in North Side

Police: 2 Women Gang Raped By Juveniles In Wilmington Park

New York Man Attacked, Left Brain Dead, By Man Shouting ‘I Hate White People’

Prosecutor: 3 Teens Charged In Beating Death Of Homeless Man In N.J.

Greenville Wal-Mart Shooter Picked Victims By Race

Details in slaying of soldier, wife emerge at hearing; suspect seeks transfer to juvenile court

Three black soldiers arrested for stabbing white comrade to death 'called him a cracker' - so why are police now so sure it was NOT a hate crime?

Police: Man murdered after suspects respond to Craigslist ad

Judge calls down defendants for laughing during attempted rape, aggravated assault arraignment from Johnson City home invasion

Teen arrested in bass angler Jimmy Johnson homicide

Third teen charged in J.P. Shelley's murder case

Friends mourn shooting death of Kennesaw State student

Brooklyn group of black youths attack white couple in racial attack

Boston 14-year-old went to movies after killing teacher

4 Teens Charged in Death of WWII Veteran in Greenville

92-year-old WWII vet pistol-whipped, robbed in Fresno home

George Washington University professor assaulted near Dupont Circle

Gruesome details emerge in north side home invasion

Surveillance Vido Captures Flash Mob Robberies at 3 Chicago Area Stores

Teen "Knockout Game" continues to harm innocent people

Three Knockout attacks reported in Philly

Rep. Meng Robbed Near Capital Hill

Could "Knockout Game" be spreading to DC?

Shooting victim's family members hope for justice against Adrian Anthony, other robbers

Brothers arrested in connection with west side murder

Shooting the Messenger

Brooklyn Residents Hold Rally Calling For End To ‘Knockout Game’ Assaults

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Brooklyn residents are taking a stand against the so-called “knockout game,” a violent trend in which youths sucker-punch unsuspecting strangers for kicks.

Community leaders and local residents held a rally in East New York on Friday in the hope of bringing an end to the assaults.

. . . .

Online videos from various cities show young suspects randomly punching innocent victims.

Community activist Tony Herbert from the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network said they are calling on social media companies and their advertisers to stop showing images of these attacks.

“The one thing we do denounce is the opportunity of folks to use social media like World Star Hip Hop and YouTube to proliferate this kind of stupidity,” Herbert said.

Mustn’t let the common people get off-Narrative.  Justice-for-Trayvon Forever!!!

Diversity and Honor

From the Colorado Springs Gazzette, via Military.com, an article describing how law enforcement works, not according to the theoretical niceties of the Constitution, but in real life:

Honor, Deception Amid Air Force's Cadet Spy System

Facing pressure to combat drug use and sexual assault at the Air Force Academy, the Air Force has created a secret system of cadet informants to hunt for misconduct among students.

Cadets who attend the publicly-funded academy near Colorado Springs must pledge never to lie. But the program pushes some to do just that: Informants are told to deceive classmates, professors and commanders while snapping photos, wearing recording devices and filing secret reports.

For one former academy student, becoming a covert government operative meant not only betraying the values he vowed to uphold, it meant being thrown out of the academy as punishment for doing the things the Air Force secretly told him to do.

Eric Thomas, 24, was a confidential informant for the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI — a law enforcement branch of the Air Force. OSI ordered Thomas to infiltrate academy cliques, wearing recorders, setting up drug buys, tailing suspected rapists and feeding information back to OSI. In pursuit of cases, he was regularly directed by agents to break academy rules.

The whole article is a compelling story (Aquilla remarked that it read like an episode of NCIS), but I should also note that USAFA released a response to the article that casts Thomas in a somewhat less favorable light than implied by the Gazzette. (Weird, though, that the response isn't on the USAFA/PA website; while I can vouch for its authenticity, this is apparently the only place on the web where the statement appears in its entirety.)

But what I want to comment on is this:

The records show OSI uses FBI-style tactics to create informants. Agents interrogate cadets for hours without offering access to a lawyer, threaten them with prosecution, then coerce them into helping OSI in exchange for promises of leniency they don’t always keep. OSI then uses informants to infiltrate insular cadet groups, sometimes encouraging them to break rules to do so. When finished with informants, OSI takes steps to hide their existence, directing cadets to delete emails and messages, misleading Air Force commanders and Congress, and withholding documents they are required to release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The program also appears to rely disproportionately on minority cadets like Thomas.

Whatever we might think of "FBI-style tactics", this last part isn't hard to figure out. The article doesn't come out and say so, but I'm betting that "insular cadet cliques" means ethnic minority gangs, against which White informants would be pretty useless. But the issue that goes unaddressed is: how are these students gaining admission to the Air Force Academy in the first place.

The likely answer is that USAFA's long-running pursuit of "!Diversity!" resulted in lower standards, and this is the predictable consequence. If challenged on this, I would predict USAFA would respond that running covert operations against the cadets (and faculty too, apparently) to "separate the wheat from the chaff" is an acceptable price to pay for increased diversity. Kind of like how abrogating the 4th Amendment is an acceptable price to pay for immigration from Muslim countries.

An alternative possibility, though perhaps less likely, is that even facially neutral standards that ignore class and family background are picking up more undesirables, and these are disproportionately minority.

Curtis Sliwa on Trayvon Martin

From the Daily Beast:

Bernhard Goetz on George Zimmerman: ‘The Same Thing Is Happening’

by Harry Siegel, Filipa Ioannou Jul 12, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Thirty years after the shooting that divided New York, the ‘subway vigilante,’ Al Sharpton & Curtis Sliwa talk to Harry Siegel and Filipa Ioannou about the Trayvon Martin case.

. . . .

But Curtis Sliwa—the founder of the Guardian Angels, the multiracial red-beret-wearing urban patrol group whose members were ubiquitous on trains and elsewhere around 1980s New York, and a prominent ally of Goetz at the time—laughed at the comparison.

I was a big fan of Sliwa and his organization back in the 80’s.  He bravely stood up for Goetz and other crime victims who sought the means for their own protection back when it was nigh impossible to legally carry a gun anywhere.  The Angles may have been dramatic, but they were an inspiration to those of us who were tired of hearing that citizens had to rely on the police rather than themselves.  And for his trouble, the likes of Al Sharpton (who, let’s remember, was around back then pimping Tawana Brawley) said the same thing about Sliwa as he now says about Zimmerman.

The point is that Sliwa has earned a respectful hearing.

“Bernie Goetz is Charles Bronson in Death Wish,” said Sliwa. “He had enough, and Darrell Cabey represented every guy who had tried to mug him before. George Zimmerman is Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. He’s a nut. He’s a complete nut job who thinks he’s on a ‘mission,’ and this young black man ended up on his radar screen, and then dead.

“Because I deal with the wannabes who want to join the Guardian Angels, I see right away what this guy Zimmerman is: a self-appointed guardian. It’s him determining who is and is not a threat. Forget laws, forget standards, forget the police. Goetz had already been victimized, thrown thru a plate-glass window (in an attemped day-time robbery on Canal Street in 1981). When the four guys began to surround him on the train, to do that dance that many of us were used to back then, when the predators would sniff you out and maybe they’d rob you but they would empower themselves and you’d be completely emasculated and realize there’s nothing you can do if these guy pounce––but this time he got the jump.”

I need somebody to walk me through the significance of the charge against Zimmerman for being a “wannabe”.  If the point is that Zimmerman didn’t have police training – that, for instance, he didn’t have the skill to keep from losing a fistfight with a 17 year-old – then fine.  But as psychological analysis, the obvious rejoinder is that what is an actual police officer before he becomes a police officer but a wannabe police officer?  I don’t actually know – I’ve read that police officers generally have a high personal (and professional) need to maintain dominance, but otherwise I have no idea why people chose law enforcement over other careers.

Those trying to suggest Martin was likewise some sort of thug who brought on his own death because he smoked marijuana or bragged with friends about fighting, “they should impale themselves," said Sliwa. "Here’s a kid, goes out at half-time to get Skittles and iced tea, puts his hoodie on because it’s starting to rain, doesn’t say anything to anybody, isn’t eye-fornicating anybody, just minding his own business. He doesn’t have a M.O. He doesn’t do home invasions. What the hell are you following this kid for? Goddamn right he fights back. The same law that says you can stand and defend yourself in Florida—Martin is defending himself against a guy approaching him with a gun and confronting him.”

Several things here.  I will stipulate that young Trayvon was not, at the time Zimmerman followed him, in the process of committing a crime.  But Sliwa should admit that if Zimmerman was a wannabe cop, Trayvon was a wannabe gangsta.  He wasn’t actually a gangster:  drugs, petty theft, fistfights and mugging with guns on facebook do not make someone a hardened criminal.  But he went out of his way to look like he “was up to no good.”  Yes, it was mostly an act.  But the act was good enough to fool Zimmerman.

Second, Sliwa is buying uncritically, in the teeth of the evidence, the media’s accusation that Trayvon was “fighting back” instead of the person who initiated the fight.  If Sliwa wants to argue that it is lawful and prudent to physically attack a stranger when he follows you, then he should say that outright.

“Oh no,” Sliwa said when asked if he would stand behind Goetz in the same circumstance now. “Today, 2013, it’s Disneyland in comparison. Imagine you’re going back to a time when this city was out of control, when anarchy prevailed, when the gun that Goetz carried––there were a lot of illegal weapons being carried by law-abiding people who just felt it was their only line of defense.”

Alternately, he said, if Zimmerman had shot Martin in exactly the same circumstances 30 years ago, “he would have been given the benefit of the doubt. People would have said, ‘Yeah, that kid was probably up to no good.’ So, Zimmerman’s mind-set was circa 1977 New York City and that’s not 2013 Sanford… He lives in a fantasy make-believe world where there are enemies, potentially predators, lurking everywhere. He’s what we used to call in the neighborhood a screwball.”

I can relate to this.  It’s not 1977 New York anymore.  It would be easy for someone to accuse me, based on Monday’s post, of cultivating a paranoid worldview.  It would be easy to characterize my house as an armed camp in wild disproportion to the actual threat I face in lily-white Φ-ville.  “Why do you need to own so many guns?”  “Why do you need to carry a gun when you are walking around your house, playing frisbee with your kids, mowing the lawn, going out to dinner?”

My best answer is that stuff happens.  I could probably sell all my guns tomorrow, put the money into landscaping, and live a long and healthy life, kind of like I could cancel my fire insurance once I pay my mortgage.  But I choose to keep both because I cannot afford the consequences of needing them and not having them.  I can’t afford replacing my house or murdered family members, and relatively modest cost I don’t want to pay the psychological cost of being the victim of a home invasion.  Because like Zimmerman’s community, Φ-ville also suffers burglaries fairly routinely, and we’ve had at least one home invasion that I know of.

It may be that fortifying myself against these serves some dark psychological need.  But let me turn the question around and ask Mr. Sliwa:  how much crime am I expected to tolerate before such preparations become defensible in his opinion?

Justice-for-Trayvon

Police: NW Indiana waitress murdered for tip money

Arrest made in NJ nanny cam home invasion

'Someone had taken out my insides and stabbed them': Alleged victim of 2009 homecoming dance...

Street performer assaulted outside Summerfest

Woman killed after confronting men in car about speeding in west Mobile neighborhood

Caught On Camera: Police Say Teen Beaten For Shoes, And Web Notoriety

Cyclist beaten on Metropolitan Branch Trail brings out Guardian Angels

Good Samaritan helps man beaten by teenagers | firstcoastnews.com

Woman recounts assault downtown

Judge to rule on insanity verdict in Midtown shooting trial

Caught on camera: Terrifying moment hooded gunman pointed his weapon at New York taxi driver - just.

Family of slain auto shop owner: 'We are lost'

College student's murder yields $10

3rd teen charged in Beaver Falls slaying

Akron police investigate teen mob attack on family

Witness To Brutal Attack Speaks With WJZ - CBS Baltimore

'Even momma got outta house to loot new shirt': Looters brag on Twitter

Only On Fox: Teenagers Surrender in 12-Year-Old Girl's Murder

Early-morning supermarket shooting: Ex-Marine kills 2 co-workers, then himself in Old Bridge

Mother's horror as she fights to make buses free to all students... and her son is brutally BEATEN

Suspects sought in Laurelhurst Park mob attacks

Police: Man attacked because teens 'were just bored'

Suspect Arrested In Greenville Co. Homicide

Award-winning children's book illustrator beaten in her home by boy, 14, with a SHOVEL

Teen accused of raping elderly KC woman during home burglary - KansasCity.com

3 indicted in assault of elderly Mansfield woman

83-year-old woman raped, beaten and murdered

Elderly Tulsa Attack Victim, Bob Strait, Dies Friday

Pack of women arrested in 6 Train stabbing — after 63-year-old man asked them to be quiet: police

A Walk in the Park: 13-Year-Old McCarren Pool Attack Victim Needed Surgery To Repair Nose

Gunmen rob, kidnap man from Cabbagetown home | ajc.com

Female resident shot in PTC home invasion | The Citizen

Smash mob causes havoc at Walmart

Boy, 15, slashed across chest on walk to school

Knife thug jailed for stabbing Good Samaritan who stood up for fellow bus passengers - Crime - News.

Police: Cook Gunned Down Over Long Wait Times - CBS Los Angeles

11 Arrested After 4th Of July Mob Attack At Dearborn And Huron - CBS Chicago

Woman attacked while ordering lunch at McDonald's drive-thru | wtsp.com

Estranged husband charged in Gatineau, Que., murders | CTV News

Police: Pizza delivery woman stabbed 50 times

Father, 56, in critical condition after being stabbed trying to shield dying son from frenzied attac

Flash Mob Steals From Baltimore 7-Eleven; Beats Store Manager Who Tries To Stop Them - CBS Baltimore

Newark Star-Ledger admits to censoring race in savage mob attacks - Charleston Charleston Conservati

Mob beating goes unreported for two weeks, tweet references Trayvon Martin

Brutal home invasion of Oklahoma couple ends their 65-year romance after first meeting on a blind da

Alton Hayes III | Suspect: I Beat Up White Man Because I Am Mad About Trayvon Martin Case

Man Beaten By Mob, In Critical Condition

And for good measure:

Mother Seeks Trayvon Martin Trademarks

Weekly Standard: Rotten in Denmark?

Elliot Abrams is angry at Denmark:

The latest news out of Denmark bore this headline: "Jews Warned Not to Wear Kipot, Stars of David in Copenhagen."

His link is to the Israeli Nation News, but whatever.

Here is an excerpt:

Israeli and Jewish officials in Denmark on Wednesday warned Jews to avoid openly wearing religious symbols and dress when moving about Copenhagen amid rising anti-Israeli sentiments. "We advise Israelis who come to Denmark and want to go to the synagogue to wait to don their skull caps until they enter the building and not to wear them in the street, irrespective of whether the areas they are visiting are seen as being safe," Israel's ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, told AFP. Avnon added that visitors were also advised not to "speak Hebrew loudly" or demonstrably wear Star of David jewelry, the news agency reported. Denmark's national Jewish Religious Community organization has also advised its members, and those at the private Jewish school in Copenhagen, to exercise caution. Caroline Jewish School headmaster Jan Hansen told daily Jyllands-Posten: "It is not something that we do officially, but if the issue comes up we would say (to our pupils) they should think twice before walking into certain areas of Copenhagen with a skull cap or Star of David."

This is indeed a shame. Denmark's Jews trouble nobody and the fact that it's dangerous for them to wear what they want is tragic. But Abrams then writes:

The Holocaust Museum web site tells us of a different Denmark

• Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940. However, Danish Jews were not persecuted until the autumn of 1943.
• When the German police began searching for and arresting Jews on the night of October 1, 1943, the Danish police refused to cooperate.
• Unlike Jews in other countries under Nazi rule, the Jews of Denmark were never forced to wear the yellow Star of David or any other identifying badge.
• Approximately 500 Jews were deported from Denmark to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Following protests from their government, these Danish inmates were allowed to receive letters and even some care packages. Most of them survived the Holocaust.

It seems, from this information, that a Jew could more safely walk the streets of Denmark's capital and count on the Danish government’s protection in 1942 than today, 70 years later.

This is dishonest on several levels. Most obvious is that if Denmark seems different to Abrams than it once did, he should mention that it's because it is less Danish. Abrams fails to quote the part of the Israeli Nation News article that gives the context:

According to figures from the Jewish Belief Centre, the organization has received 37 reports of anti-Jewish incidents this year, predominantly in the heavily immigrant Noerrebro neighborhood and around the Jewish synagogue in central Copenhagen.

Denmark's Jewish community is estimated at between 6,000 and 8,000 people.

In September, a Jewish rabbinical college in Germany similarly warned its students against wearing kippot in public, after Rabbi Daniel Alter was attacked by four Arab youths in Berlin.

Denmark's real failure is an immigration policy that allows Arabic Muslims to infest its country. But Abrams prefers to criticize Denmark for struggling with the fallout.

I can't help noticing the apples-to-oranges comparison: not persecuting Jews struggling to blend in vs. insufficiently protecting Jews determined to stand out. Again, I don't really care what hats and jewelry Jews choose to wear, but it does betray changing attitudes towards assimilation of Jews themselves.

“Aspiring Actress”

I remember reading about Claudia Hidic, before we knew she was an accomplice in her own death, and thinking that “aspiring actress” was kind of a weird characterization for a Bosnian immigrant to Texas by way of Germany.  Seriously, shouldn’t a seventeen year old have to accomplish something a little more affirmative than just telling people she wants to be an actress in order to qualify as “aspiring”?  Or perhaps they thought “Bosnian immigrant” might be . . . misunderstood?

“Hoodies Up” (not the Onion)

From Stars and Stripes:

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany -- In a show of solidarity for slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, more than 230 students at Ramstein High School wore hooded sweatshirts or jackets to class Tuesday as part of a peaceful demonstration they called "Hoodies Up."

The intent was to show that wearing a hoodie should not make a person appear threatening, said 17-year-old senior Caleb Guerrido, one of five students who came up with the idea of wearing hoodies to school.

Martin's killing also sent ripples outside the U.S., where it triggered discussion in the seminar class of RHS math teacher Phillis Westmoreland-Allen.

Students debated what happened to Martin and why over three classroom periods, she said.

Since wearing a hood is against the school dress code, the students had to get the OK for the event from RHS principal Greg Hatch.

Hatch, who approved the request on condition that they get permission from their classroom teachers, said he told them that hoodies aren't allowed in school for safety and security reasons. If something happens in the hall and a student is wearing a hoodie, it might be hard to figure out who was involved, he said.

I’m pretty sure the writer Gets the Joke.

Headlines of the Times

From the Daily Mail:

'Woman on a Tram' to spend Christmas behind bars 'for her own protection' after court views video of her alleged racist rant

The page has a link to another article

Mulsim girl gang who kicked young woman in the head while yelling 'kill the white slag' escape jail after judge hears 'they weren't used to drinking because of their religion'

Pretty much all you need to know about modern Britain.

What's a Fundamentalist?

The Inductivist points to Add Health study that measures the difference in property crime rates between religious fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. The results are as I would have expected, but what grabbed my attention was the way fundamentalism was measured:

White Add Health respondents (sample size = 3,489) were asked, "Do you agree or disagree that the sacred scriptures of your religion are the word of God and are completely without any mistakes?"

This is a far better question than the one the GSS asks for similar purposes: going from memory, "Do you believe that the Bible is the Word of God and should be taken literally word for word?" Now, any educated Christian knows perfectly well that the Bible contains an abundance of allegory, metaphor, and analogy, none of which was intended to be taken literally; that's what those words are for. So they pick option two: "the Bible is the inspired word of God that should not be taken literally word for word." Which fuels Half Sigma's assertions that "religious" people are less intelligent. That said, and as Inductivist points out, there may be other evidence for the claim. But the GSS question is a poor way to measure it.

Diversity at Work: Cleveland Edition

From FoxNews.com:

School officials in Ohio have launched an investigation after a beating of a student was videotaped and posted online, Fox 8 reports.

The fight was recorded outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Career Campus in Cleveland just before the school let out for spring break, according to the station.

Do we even have to watch the video?

 

Here are the stats on Martin Luther King, Jr. High School.  The “career campus” gets a 2/10 from GreatSchools.net.

Join the Virtual Border Patrol

Have some free time on your hands now that illegal aliens have taken your job? New to the sidebar is BlueServo (H.T.: Inductivist):

[A] public-private partnership with the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition (TBSC) to deploy the Virtual Community Watch, an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime.

The TBSC BlueServoSM Virtual Community WatchSM is a FREE service consisting of a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico border. This network feeds live streaming video FREE-OF-CHARGE to the user's computer, which they can access by creating a FREE account at www.BlueServo.net. Users will log in to the BlueServoSM website and directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fenceSM.

Citizens can sign up as Virtual Texas DeputiesSM to participate in border surveillance through this social network. Virtual Texas DeputiesSM from around the country will monitor the streaming video from these cameras 24/7 and report any suspicious activities directly to the Border Sheriffs via email. All emails regarding suspicious activity will be submitted anonymously.

Another facet of this program is the ability of the public to connect their own cameras to www.BlueServo.net to create local Virtual Neighborhood WatchesSM in order to protect their own homes, neighborhoods, and families from criminal acts. These Virtual Neighborhood WatchesSM can, in turn, be connected to form additional Virtual Community WatchesSM.

The anonymous part worries me. I've been thinking for a while about the possibilities of using volunteers to monitor border camera feeds, but I fear there are enough people eager to betry our country and flood us with immigrants that they could easily overwhelm the reporting system with bogus reports, ultimately destroying its credibility. Better they should tie reporting to specific users; those that file too many unsubstantiated reports would have have their access revoked.

Thoughts?

Have We Gone Soft?

Cold Equations, discussing the Omaha Race Riot, writes:

Nowadays, the crime that inspired this riot would barely be newsworthy. Sites like American Renaissance post six cases like that before breakfast. Nobody cares except for some grumpy racialists. The idea that whites would react like this seems absurd now, but there it was.

A few possibilities:

• “Whites”, in this instance, is misleading.  According to Wikipedia, the rioters were drawn from Irish and Eastern European immigrant communities.  I’m not an expert on the period, but I would speculate that their posture in regards to the WASP establishment (Omaha’s mayor was named Edward Parsons Smith, a WASP name if there ever was one) was not unlike contemporary black attitudes toward whites today.  For instance, WASP industrialists were using blacks as strikebreakers, and the rioters may not have believed that justice would be forthcoming from the establishment.
• We’re richer now, and can afford more morality.  The working class was hard pressed back then in a manner that we can only imagine in the era of the welfare state.  Today we have more to lose by engaging in extrajudicial violence.
• A corollary of the first two is a "woman shortage"; and one potentially more severe than what we face now. Again, I have no specific knowledge of this, but I'm pretty sure that men were overrepresented among turn-of-the-last-century immigrants. Combine poverty with outsider status and I would expect that a great many men in Omaha had neither a wife nor good prospects for obtaining one. Thus, news that one of "them" had forcibly poached one of "our" women would have had a much bigger psychological impact in 1919 than in 2010.
• Whites are in the final stages of decadence, and can no longer be roused to collectively defend ourselves.

Thoughts?

Reflections on Crime Disparities: White vs. Black, Men vs. Women

I left a comment a while back on Mangan’s report of Helmuth Nyborg’s finding that the average male IQ might exceed the the average female IQ by as much as 7 points:

That different standard deviations in intelligence between men and women account for the overrepresentation of men at both the top of highly cognitive professional endeavors and in the criminal underclass strikes me as plausible and likely. That women have a 7 point IQ deficit compared to men is problematic.

Think about it: a 7 point difference, while small compared to the black-white difference, approaches the Hispanic-white difference, which I take to be around 9 points. Yet the Hispanic IQ manifests itself in all kinds of both academic and social indicators, and obviously so. In contrast, I struggle to think of a way in which the female deficit shows up in disparate male-female outcomes among the broad middle of the population.  The entire point of IQ testing is to predict these outcomes.

Commenter rebelliousvanilla replied:

Greek sign poster, women do commit crime, just that not the one you think of. We commit less crime because our ways are manipulative, not coercive. For example, half, if not more of rape allegations are false. A lot of DV allegations are false. We lie and manipulate to reach our goals, we don't bash heads in. So we are underrepresented in crime due to these reasons.

I found this observation interesting for a number of reasons.  That there are both racial and sexual disparities in violent crime rates is undeniable from an empirical point of view.  But as a Calvinist, I am inclined to find the proposition that some races or sexes are inherently more or less virtuous than others to be theologically problematic.  If indeed all of us have “sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, then I would expect evil to be distributed, if not equally, then randomly with respect to other traits.

How, then, do we account for the data?

• RebelliousVanilla appears to be arguing that crime, is “socially constructed”:  the differences in crime rates reflect, not differences in virtue, but differences in the way society views different kinds of bad behavior.  If this is true, then I would reply:  good!  ReligiousVanilla may speak for herself, but personally, having experienced both “manipulation” and “coercion”, I know I prefer the former to the latter.  If this be misandry, then color me misandrist.

  I suppose one could come up with a similar argument for racial disparities in crime:  our laws and sentencing guidelines reflect Anglo-European standards of behavior rather than, say, African standards, and black Americans find themselves on the wrong side of them.  Again I say:  well and good!  As an Anglo-European myself, I’m quite happy that, say, armed robbery is punished more heavily than insider trading.  (Or at least, I hope this is still the case.)

• Whatever the underlying propensities, we inevitably see both racial and sexual specialization.  The argument with respect to race might go something like this:  American blacks do not have a greater propensity to commit violent crime; however, because blacks bring to violent crime greater comparative advantages in size, strength, speed, and extroversion relative to the general population, they are more likely to find violent crime a viable career path.  Furthermore, some criminal tracks – drug trafficking comes to mind – are winner-take-all, and whites undertaking a career in this field quickly find themselves driven out of the profession.  I find this entirely plausible, if for no other reason than this appears to be the experience in Great Britain.  Without a large sub-Saharan African population to monopolize crime, white participation in English crime is much higher than it is here in America, and it should be easy to hypothesize that were American blacks to leave us, the white crime rate here would increase as well.

  Similarly, given the sexual dimorphism in size and strength, most women should find a career in violent crime unconducive for the same reasons.

  What does the evidence look like at the local level?  Although we don’t really have any test cases of all-female communities, we do have examples of all white communities, and I anticipate the objection that such communities do not really show any sign of having larger white crime rates.  However, selection effects are important here.  Racially segregated neighborhoods are also segregated by SES, itself a strong predictor.  White rural areas may not be so segregated, but population density and church attendance may also be confounding factors.

Are there other possible explanations?

Legal Question

Hypothetically speaking, would it be a crime for a blogger to offer, say, a $1000 dollar reward to anyone who burns a public school to the ground?

Just asking.

Hacked!

Oscar Boykin once told me that nobody cares about security unless it can be obtained without inconvenience.

Monday morning around 8:00 a.m., I received a voicemail from my mother-in-law. She had received a “funny email” from me, time-stamped the night before, something about me being stranded in London and needing a money transfer right away. Could I please call her?

Facebook, I immediately thought, having read sometime this year that the usual people were scamming Facebook users with exactly this appeal from hacked accounts. But 30 seconds later, my wife called. My mom had called her to tell me that she had received an email from my Yahoo email address with the exact same appeal. Crap, they’ve got my Yahoo account? “Log on to my account and change the password,” I told her. “It will be a few minutes before I can reach a computer.”

Ten minutes later, I logged onto Yahoo and found . . . nothing. I had saved thousands of emails. I had had an address book with over 400 names. All of it was now gone, and I had no way of alerting anyone that the appeal for funds was fraudulent.

But what was potentially worse was that this email address was the email-of-record for every online service I used. And what was definitely worse was that Yahoo’s login / password combo was the very login / password combo I used with all of my social networking accounts. Google. Facebook. Blogger. LinkedIn. All of these were now wide open. And financial services? Most of them have long since prevented users from choosing dictionary words as passwords . . . but not all of them.

As near as I can figure, the hackers were using my account between 9:00 p.m. Sunday at 3:00 a.m. on Monday. Six hours. It took me longer than that to undo the damage.

First, I logged onto Facebook. Change the password, validate a new email address, and post a newsfeed item to ignore emails from Yahoo. I have about 140 Facebook friends, but they would need to be reading Facebook to see a newsfeed item, so I had to send out a Facebook message to be sure everyone would get the word. Facebook, unfortunately, doesn’t want its messaging system to be used for spam, so it limits each message to 20 recipients, and doesn’t make it easy to grind these out.

But that was only a fraction of the people vulnerable. Fortunately, I had a two-year-old backup of my address book on my laptop. Less fortunately, my new email service also had a limit on the number of recipients that a single email could have. The number was higher - 100 - but it worked out to be 100 per hour, because after each email of 100 recipients I sent out, the service temporarily froze my account.

It’s not fair! I thought. My hackers can churn out email faster than I can as the lawful owner!

Meanwhile, the phone at home was ringing off the hook. Most of the Americans called to say that I had been spoofed; I benefitted from a combination of my own reputation as a writer and the poor spelling of the hackers. But some of the foreigners were at the point of being taken in, although they wondered why I wasn’t calling my wife for help.

During the down time, I turned my attention to the other accounts. I just counted them, and I have at least 27 different services for which this address was the email-of-record. All of these now had to be updated. My favorite experience (intended sarcastically) was a business credit card obtained through my employer. When I logged in, I was greeted with a message that my password had expired; would I please click the button below to obtain a new password? Congratulations! it said afterward. We have emailed your new password to your email-of-record.

I was lucky. Oscar was right: I hadn’t cared enough about security to follow anything close to smart password practices. But my hackers didn’t even take the trouble to change the password to my Yahoo account, let alone examine its contents to see what other opportunities might be there for them. Had they done so, I could have been badly hurt, rather than put out about eight hours of work.

Blogging Status: still busy. I see that my RSS reader has over 400 unread items. Sorry for not keeping up with y'all.

Richmond High School Demographics

Hard on the heals of my article criticising hip-hop culture, a fifteen year old girl in California was gang raped outside a high school dance while dozens of people stood around taking pictures with their cell phones.

Check out the demographics of Richmond High School, where the crime took place.

Watch Larry King and his posse dance around the salient feature.