But who really expects columnists to understand the real world...
OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today
BY JAMES TARANTO Tuesday
What Crime Problem?USA Today's DeWayne Wickham weighs in on the Bill Bennett kerfuffle with a column that tries to minimize the crime problem among black Americans:
"He talked, hypothetically, about aborting all black babies as a way of cutting the crime rate. While he hasn't said as much, I suspect Bennett did so because he knows that blacks make up a disproportionately high percentage of the inmates in our jails and prisons.
Of the men and women behind bars last year, 910,200 were black; 777,500 were white and 395,400 were Hispanic, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. To the casual observer--and anyone who is looking for some data to back up racist views--this might suggest that Bennett used an apt example. . . .
The Bureau of Justice Statistics' figures represent only those who were jailed for a crime. But according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, more than twice as many whites as blacks (6.7 million to 2.6 million) were arrested in 2003 for committing a crime. Whites made up 70.6% of all people arrested that year-- and 60.5% of those arrested for violent crime. Blacks totaled 27.0% of all arrests and accounted for 37.2% of the people arrested for committing a violent crime. . . ."
Wickham assumes that arrest statistics are a better proxy for the crime rate than incarceration statistics, and concludes from the disparity between the two sets of statistics that the real problem is a justice system biased against blacks.
But Wickham's interpretation of the statistics is either misguided or disingenuous. For one thing, blacks are a small minority of the total population (12.9% as of 2000, vs. 69.1% non-Hispanic whites). Wickham doesn't adjust for this when he asserts that "more" whites are arrested than blacks.
If we adjust Wickham's figures to account for overall proportion of the population, we find that the average black person was 6.3 times as likely as the average white person to be behind bars in 2004 and 3.3 times as likely to be arrested for a violent crime in 2003. Either way you measure it, blacks have a far higher crime rate than whites.
Boys, boys, no need to argue, you're both wrong. Committing a crime? What crime? Being hauled into court for not paying a dog license? Speeding? Driving under the influence?
How's about rape? Armed robbery? Murder? Selling illegal drugs? Um, ya think that certain lesser crimes can be pled out while heinous ones require some jail time? Not even suggesting that caucasians are angels, but anyone who is not aware of black crime in the United States needs to spend an evening in Harlem. And don't hand me the "poor people commit violent crimes" bullshit, either. There was this little thing called the Depresssion and you can look it up online if there isn't a decent public library nearby. The poor back then didn't rape and rob and murder at anywhere NEAR the rate of today's black population.
The rest of yesterdays Best of the Web focuses upon the Bushie & Harriet show with none of the linked essays having a clue as to what they're talking about. It doesn't matter HOW sweet Harriet is to children and small animals, what matters is the irrefutable fact that she is unqualified for the job. She will ALWAYS be unqualified for the job because she did not spend her professional life becoming a constitutional scholar and there's TONs of cool old lady's out there but relatively damn few respected conservative jurists.
The Supreme court is not an entry level position, nor is it something you can learn about as you go, so she either listens to Scalia and Thomas or sits there twiddling her thumbs. My guess is she'll do just fine aping the republican line, but it would have been FAR better to give the job to one of the highly qualified geniuses who would have made us proud.
Yes, Mz Harriet will eventually help to overturn Roe, but we all wanted substance not just yes-sir, anything you say, sir, I'm on it sir...
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