Framed

It can be difficult to win a debate (or, for that matter, an argument) if one starts out with buying into a hostile framing.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have seen and heard (one in print, and other other in a podcast) a couple of journalists sparring with people over whether Black Americans were disproportionately targeted by the American criminal justice system. And in both cases, the person being interviewed fell back on the "who commits the most crimes" canard.

Here's the problem with that. It only known who committed a crime in situations where the crime was recorded by something. It's understood that eyewitness, and even victim, testimony isn't 100% reliable. People have been exonerated after other people swore that they were the perpetrator.

So the answer to "who commits the most crimes" is almost always "We don't know." Especially in situations where the clearance rate (let alone the reporting rate) is low. Across the board, the clearance rate in the United States for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, the single best category of those tracked, is just under 62 percent. And note that the FBI considers a case "cleared" if someone is arrested, charged and turned over for prosecution. By this standard, every acquittal is still a cleared case. Presumably there is some way for departments to report that a case previously considered cleared had become un-cleared, but it's already understood that departments are lax about (if not outright opposed to) deleting the arrest records of people who aren't later convicted of a crime. Why should we expect that they would report to the FBI that a case should no longer be considered cleared?

But a potentially bigger problem with attempting to deflect charges of racial bias among police agencies with "who commits the most crimes" is that it's police records that people are falling back on. So the argument becomes circular. The records of who police arrest across demographics is assumed to be representative of the population of people committing crimes, because it matches the demographics of those arrests. It's a tautology.

And so rather than attempt to argue with supporters of generally understood police practice, journalists and others should reject the framing, because that framing presupposes that police have never acted with any biases, something we understand to not be true.