Steve Marmel posts this infographic he apparently got from Mother Jones magazine that purports to show institutionalized racism in Ferguson, Missouri:
[Image reads: Institutional racism by the numbers. In 2013 in Ferguson: 483 black people were arrested, 36 white people were arrested, 92% of searches and 86% of car stops involved blacks.]
I wonder if either Marmel or MJ realize that these numbers don’t prove a thing about racism. They don’t even hint at racism. Not by themselves. Without knowing the racial makeup of Ferguson, we can’t tell if police stops, searches, and arrests of black people are disproportionately high or disproportionately low. If Ferguson is 93% black, then police are arresting white and black people equally as a proportion of the population.
Now as it turns out, according to 2010 census data, Ferguson is about 70% black and 30% white. (I’m leaving out the 3.3% of the population that identify as some other race, including mixed races.) This means that in 2013 Ferguson police arrested 0.6% of white residents and 3.4% of black residents, which means the relative risk of arrest for black people was about 5.8 times that for white people. The relative risk was about 5 times higher for being searched and about 2.6 times higher for having their car stopped.
Now that doesn’t prove that Ferguson police are racists — you’d have to rule out confounding factors such as age, you’d have to find out what fraction of the arrested are from out-of-town, and you’d have to figure out whether the arrests were justified by differential crime rates — but it does strongly suggest that something is going on that merits further investigation.
And it really wouldn’t have been hard to add that information to the infographic.
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