[pertinhower]

I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.

I wanna see the data.

[munificent]

> I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested?

The narrow-mindedness of this is breathtaking. An article about a peer-reviewed paper containing basic survey results asserts something about the entire US and your response is: "Well, that doesn't line up with my circle of friends so it must be bullshit?"

> Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.

Assuming you're in a "high/squeaky-clean socio-economic", then, yes, that class is much larger than yours. If you live in the US and make $100k or more (which is likely true for many HN readers), there are four times as many people who make less than you.

> I wanna see the data.

The article links to the paper (behind a paywall). If you want to see the data, get off your butt and look at the data.

[Fezzik]

The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"? Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested. Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.*

Given the journal, that seems like an odd error to make. I could have that wrong, but it would make sense given that article specifically mentions truancy and underage drinking, two charges which seldom result in arrest.

Maybe that makes the statistic a little less shocking to those surprised by the number? Again, I certainly could be wrong, but it really would be surprising if the 40% refers to people actually having been read Miranda rights, hand cuffed, placed in a police car, etcetera. Even for other common crimes for that age group, like possession (generally marijuana), usually a citation is issued and the drugs are seized but no arrest is made. This is all said from the perspective of a judicial clerk in Portland, Oregon, who works a lot with the dockets related to citations related to minor misdemeanor offenses. Perhaps it is different in other states.

Anecdotally: almost everyone I know well has been convicted of a misdemeanor of some sort for which they could have been arrested but only one person I know has ever been taken in to police custody.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest#United_States_2

[dragonwriter]

> The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"?

No, it uses it to mean arrested.

> Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested.

Legally, a citation issued for a crime is a non-custodial arrest. [1]

> Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.

No, it comports quite exactly with the legal notion of arrest, which can either be non-custodial (the type you report having experienced) or custodial (the type which tends to involve handcuffs.) To the extent the Wikipedia article you cite is inconsistent with that (and you seem to have linked to an irrelevant section of the article, though I do so material earlier which, though it is inaccurate, supports your presentation), it is simply wrong.

[1] See, e.g., http://www.waprosecutors.org/manuals/search/May%202012%20%20.... @ p. 252: "A non-custodial arrest occurs where the defendant is issued a citation for a criminal offense at the scene of a stop."

[akjetma]

I just skimmed the article and found no (re-?)definition of 'arrest'. If it's 40% for the general population and the arrest rate is a function of economic class, the rate for the lower class would have to account for the significantly smaller rate that I perceive in my middle-class peer group.

Either that or my peers are statistical outliers. I don't think there's any other form of selection going on that would prevent them from being a representative sample of their economic class, though.

The article possibly indicated a loose definition of 'arrest' here, though:

> ...arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.

For my definitions of 'arrest' and 'custody', being arrested implies being taken into custody.

[kghose]

I would say you're is the most insightful comment in this thread. I am biased towards thinking you are correct in that when one publishes a paper, there are incentives towards a more dramatic interpretation/presentation of the data. So, a study that said 10% of all males have been arrested, would not have gotten as much notice as the current presentation.

[klochner]

I believe it, most arrests would fall into:

  - truancy (skipping school)
  - petty theft
  - underage drinking
  - DUI
  - drug possession (mostly marijuana)

Now think about how many people you know who have ever done one of those things.

[a_c_s]

Good list, I'd also add:

- trespassing - political protests

[altcognito]

Reckless driving too. (Bill Gates for one)

[megaman22]

Anecdotally, at my Ivy League college that has recently gotten some lovely press in Rolling Stone, I would estimate that at least 40% of male students have been arrested at one point or another for underage drinking. There are a couple of law firms in that town that do a thriving business in defending underage possession and disorderly conduct cases.

[jychang]

Not implausible at all.

I'm probably in the squeaky clean category. On a day of a meteor shower, I went with some friends to take pictures of the sky. A park ranger arrested us, for being in a national park after dark. After arresting us, he spent 5 mins talking on the radio with some other ranger, then spent 5 mins writing a citation. Paid it in the mail a few weeks later, never heard of it again.

It doesn't take much to be arrested. 40% is a bit high, but then again my group of friends at the time was Harvard/Princeton/Stanford/Berkeley students. The socioeconomic status of the population really doesn't matter.

[tedunangst]

Did he arrest you or give you a citation?

[head_stomp]

Receiving a citation is a non-custodial arrest.

edit just to make it clear: This is not my opinion. This is the legal definition. The study includes citations as arrests. This is why they make sure to point out that they do not include minor traffic offenses.

[tptacek]

There is a such thing as a non-custodial address, but that does not make every detention encounter with the police that doesn't result in you being taken into custody a "non-custodial arrest". By way of example: if you're issued a speeding ticket, the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle. But they do have that right if they arrest you.

[head_stomp]

Not every detention encounter with the police results in a citation. If it does result in a citation, they have preformed a non-custodial arrest. If they want to search you, they can perform a full-custody arrest even if it's for a misdemeanor that is only punishable by a fine(Atwater v. Lago Vista).

I very strongly agree with Janice Rogers Brown's opinon here: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1125942214.shtml

edit: Hmmm after reading a few things, I now think it depends on the jurisdiction whether they define receiving a citation as a non-custodial arrest.

[mikecb]

> the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle.

Depends. Just need probable cause. Motor vehicle exception.

>But they do have that right if they arrest you.

Depends. Search incident to arrest exception with automobile caveats. After Gant, if the arrestee no longer has access, or no reason to believe that evidence of the arrest offense will be found, not ok. (But still maybe ok to impound and inventory.)

[tptacek]

"Probable cause" is all an officer needs to arrest you, too.

[tedunangst]

ok, that's a little weird. I got a ticket once for cutting through a park after dark. I would never have considered that being arrested, but hurray, today I learned I'm part of the 40%. I have also received a ticket for speeding, which all things considered, was a more serious offense/penalty. It's weird that the speeding ticket is excluded but not the walking ticket.

[vidarh]

To me the more bizarre thing is that there is such a thing as getting a ticket for walking through a park after dark. WTF...

[steveklabnik]

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-parks-c...

:/

[smackfu]

This survey is based on interviewing people, not on arrest statistics, so if you think you were arrested, it counts as an arrest.

[anigbrowl]

Are you sure you were arrested? It sounds like you were not actually placed into custody, eg cuffed and in the back of a police car. You may have been detained rather than arrested, not withstanding the issuance of a ticket.

[nmrm]

It doesn't sound like you were actually arrested...

[jobu]

I remember tons of people getting arrested for underage drinking in college - much more so than in high school where getting caught by parents was a bigger concern than cops.

[nmrm]

Wow! I had exactly the opposite experience. Although by high school was very working class and my college very white.

[binarymax]

I know plenty who sat in the drunk tank in college, or were busted on minor drug or shoplifting offenses or other teenage nonsense. I feel that the number is plausible.

[mikestew]

> I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested?

The group of people I know is irrelevant. The group of people I currently know is but a small subset of the US population. Upper-middle class, white suburbia. Double income household, with both in the six figures. Yeah, we're just a slice of typical Americana right there. (Though I have been arrested...several times. I was a bad boy once.)

But, hey, if you want to talk anecdotes then we can talk about the group of people I used to know. Lower class, much higher percentage of blacks (I currently have no black friends, and barely a few acquaintances). Though it's been a few decades, there were plenty from that group that had been arrested (some of whom I bailed out). Notice how I mention black folk? Yeah, in Indianapolis at the time that was important because the county prosecutor decided that a car full of young black males was probable cause for a traffic stop (swear to $DEITY, that's all that was needed for a stop). So race might skew those numbers a bit through no fault of the folks involved (other than the fact that they were young, male, and "driving while black").

And hence we render anecdotal data useless, which is why we use peer-reviews studies with much larger data sets. Because when you take data just from a redneck city with a redneck prosecutor, race might just make a teensy bit of difference. Or maybe the environment of that particular city. Or maybe it was just the ne'er-do-well friends I hung out with.

> I wanna see the data.

And you're not looking at those data with your own eyes because...? Platter's not silver enough? Have to hold the spoon yourself?

[baddox]

I grew up in a mostly white, rural, middle class setting, and I would estimate that at least 25% of my male friends have been arrested. There are probably enough "other classes" (e.g. non-white, urban, or poor) that are sufficiently populous with sufficiently higher arrest rates that I don't have much difficulty believing the statistic.

[harrystone]

Offhand I can't think of any of my friends who haven't been arrested.

[PeterisP]

Actually, you should generally expect that ANY statistical analysis will give significantly different results than what you'd see of people around you.

Many of such parameters exhibit clustering; so if 50% people are X; then you'd expect most people to say "hey, that's wrong, that's not what I see" - since there would be many people that would see that 80+% of their friends would be X; and there would be many people that would see that 20-% of their friends are X, but virtually noone would have a circle of friends that would have the "true" 50/50 split.

[steveklabnik]

Hi, I'm a long-time HN user, and I've been arrested.

(I also know lots of others who have.)

[rootedbox]

I have a lot of friends that have been arrested. So for me this number is very believable. It's actually not a very hard thing to get arrested. I had friend go to jail for not neutering his cat.

That being said.. It's always nice to see the data.

[rurban]

I aligns to previously known data and studies that >50% of all black men in the age group 18-60 were in US prisons.

I didn't know about the rates of young whites and hispanics. But given the enormous prisoner numbers in the US it also sounds plausible.

[pyrrhotech]

I agree. I come from a nice area, but I know maybe 10 people out of 2000 who have ever been arrested. And it was just underage drinking for them. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but this is suspiciously high

[furyofantares]

While it is suspiciously high to me too, I am also skeptical that you know 2000 people well enough to know if they have ever been arrested

[jqm]

Yes, but there are vasts swaths of the country were arrest rates are much much higher than 10 out of 2000 people (not that they would all tell you anyway).

I understand living in a bubble.... but you are not at least aware of the vast scale of these areas? If not, you should drive around more in my opinion.