Reddit reviews The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy)

That's an extremely complicated question, and the answer depends who you ask. There was a nationwide decline in crime during the same period of NYC's decline, so there seems to be some kind of larger social trend that can't be explained through policing strategies. This book by a Berkeley criminologist found that it had less to do with broken windows and stop and frisk and more to do with simple things like keeping a database of when/where crimes were happening and assigning cops to those times and locations.

It’s incredibly easy to add citations to the “Pro-Colin” side of my argument.

I’ll go ahead and do so for the first line now, where I said:

>“African-Americans are shot by police at rates above 13%. But they’re 13% of the U.S. population. This implies discrimination.”

Here’s the ACLU providing its definition of “racial profiling:” “… the New York City Police Department's Street Crimes Unit used aggressive "stop and frisk" tactics against African Americans at a rate double that group's population percentage … A community coalition, the Cincinnati Black United Front and the ACLU of Ohio filed suit against the city and the Fraternal Order of Police, citing a pattern and practice of discrimination by police, including issuing the type of traffic citations Thomas received to African Americans at twice their population percentage. … Blacks comprise 25.6 percent of the City's population, yet 50.6 percent of all persons "stopped" during the period were black. …”

Here’s Vox reporting on another ACLU report: “The ACLU report found that 63 percent of Boston stop-and-frisk encounters involved black people between 2007 and 2010, when the city's black population was 24 percent.“

WBUR on the same report: “According to the analysis, between 2007 and 2010, more than 60 percent of those encounters were with African-Americans — in a city that's only 24 percent black.”

Not once do these sources ask if the percentage of crime committed by the black population of these cities is identical to the percentage of the population they comprised.

Not once do they acknowledge that it is the amount of crime committed by a group, and not simply its raw numbers, that determine how often we rightly ought to expect police to interact with members of that group.

They stop the argument at highlighting disparities between arrests, stops, etc., and population rates as if this is all the proof one would need to show that unjust racial bias was driving the entire gap between the two.

So … it’s clear that I don’t think that this side of the argument is correct, but that doesn’t mean I’m not characterizing the argument made by its proponents accurately. Sources no less academic than the ACLU (lawyers who want this to hold up in court!) make this exact argument in their professional reports.

If you need me to find examples of this argument being used outside the ACLU and on topics other than stop & frisk, I could easily keep supplying them all day, because this argument really is ubiquitous. If I was asked to EBS on the belief that evolution isn’t true or that the Earth is flat, I could summarize arguments that proponents of those views make, but I wouldn’t be able to offer sound arguments because the position just isn’t empirically true.

By the way, with stop and frisk in particular, we actually had a perfect control group to test empirically whether crime rates or unjustified racial bias was driving stop rates. Brownsville is a borough of Brooklyn that’s 76% black and <3% white. Kensington, a borough of Buffalo, was 82% black and 11% white.

Despite having nearly identical demographics, Kensington has the lowest crime rate in New York while Brownsville has the highest. So do Kensingtonians get stopped more because their city is slightly more black?

Actually, no. The stop and frisk rate in Kensington was 2%—Brownsville? 29%. So a city that was just 3% white and over three-quarters black had one of the lowest stop and frisk rates in all of New York—because it had the lowest crime rate. When majority-black parts of New York had low crime rates, they weren’t subjected to stop and frisk. That’s huge!

While on this subject, it’s worth keeping in mind who benefits from reducing minority crime: other minorities. That’s because most violence committed by whites is against other whites, and most violence committed by blacks is against other blacks. As Heather MacDonald notes, while blacks were 78% of all shooting suspects in New York City (despite being 23% of its population), they were also 74% of all shooting victims.

Whites committed just over 2% of the city’s shootings, but were also under 3% of the victims of shootings.

Taking a broad historical view, minorities make up nearly 80% of the drop in homicide in New York’s record-breaking crime decline from insane highs in the 1960’s down to today’s historical lows. Thus the point I make in my conclusion: minorities are the ones who benefit most from an active police presence in violent minority neighborhoods.

A white person who lives in Kensington really doesn’t have any sort of meaningful selfish interest to gain from paying taxes to police Brownsville. They’re paying in limited time and resources as well as police lives to benefit the primary victims of minority violence—other minorities themselves.

One final note: I did have the “Pro-Colin” side say: “Yeah, but that [the fact that cops are more likely to pursue when a white person commits a crime than they are when a black one does] is just because most victims of black violence are other blacks and most victims of white violence are other whites and cops care more when a white person is the victim.” I didn’t provide a specific counter-argument against this point, and I would indeed suspect this is the reason why cops pursue white suspects they’re alerted to at a higher rate than black ones.

However, to remedy this police would have to pursue and therefore arrest an even larger proportion of black suspects. See the Catch 22? If cops pursue fewer blacks, it’s because they don’t care about black victims. If they pursue more blacks, it’s because of racist bias and has nothing to do with actual crime rates at all. In some sense there is no way to win this because there literally is a way to spin the scenario into racism no matter what happens.

There is nothing I could say here that couldn't be explained better and in far more detail in "The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control (Studies in Crime and Public Policy)" by Franklin Zimring. Great book!

http://www.amazon.com/The-City-That-Became-Safe/dp/0199324166
https://tpav.org.au/_documents/Communications/Book%20Reviews/bb3972a7-6455-41cf-927c-ce3245196bfc/The_City_That_Became_Safe_Sep2012.pdf