| > 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? |