[benlivengood]

> Communities which experience more crime tend to interact more with law enforcement. The perpetrators of those crimes, who generally come from the same communities as their victims, tend to get arrested and incarcerated in proportion to their rate of criminality.

Over-policing and racial profiling is a large cause of the increased criminality. The base rate of illegal drug use is fairly similar for all races but arrests and convictions have been much higher for Blacks and other minorities for quite some time [0][1].

> The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence.

Actually, traffic stops are biased against minorities despite a similar base rate of infraction [2] yet this increases the rate at which Black people interact with police which compounds the harm caused by statistically harsher reaction to infractions. Further, sentencing is influenced by race in complex ways for which there is unfortunately limited data [3] but Blacks tend to receive longer sentences and be at risk of minimum sentences [4].

The root causes of violent offenses are even more complex and although income disparity, childhood trauma/abuse/neglect, and oppression are all potential causes I haven't found good sources with solid statistics to dig into that.

[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf [1] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2019.3054... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/suspect-citizens/A399F1... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228718440_Reassessi... preprint; 2013 publication is behind a paywall. [4] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Fartic...