If I tell someone that "Black people are incarcerated at a 3x higher rate for drug crimes they commit at the same rate as white people", and they argue that that is Black people's fault, what should I conclude? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667342)

Is willful ignorance acceptable?

I don’t think the person you were arguing with was expressing, as a value statement, the idea that black and white people should be policed differently purely based on their race. I think you’re jumping to that conclusion a little. And I don’t really want to continue this because I have a hard time trusting that you’re going to listen to me in good faith, either.

> I don’t think the person you were arguing with was expressing, as a value statement, the idea that black and white people should be policed differently purely based on their race.

I agree. But that's not what I asked. The statement I originally made was that

"overpolicing and imprisoning <black people> for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people."

Which I do think is fairly clearly demonstrated. There's a subtle shift, but a relevant one. Creating new systems of oppression based on race is racist, but letting existing systems that treat races unfairly is okay, even though the results would be the same.

I want to reiterate: I don't believe this person claims that black people should be policed different purely based on their race, but it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.

And way back, the statement we started from was "black lives matter". And in general I hold that to mean "black lives matter just as much as any other race".

How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified? I don't see how we can. But again, I'm open to other interpretations.

> it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.

This isn't a very charitable interpretation.

There is no lack of injustice in the world. There are more injustices in the world than any single human can possible wrap their head around much less devote attention to caring about.

Just because someone prioritizes other concerns does not mean they are uncaring about a concern you care about, just as you prioritizing the concern you care about do not imply that you're unconcerning about the injustice the other person is prioritizing.

> How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified?

Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.

Maybe it hasn’t worked out that way, but here we are again arguing how we perceive the situation, not the underlying values we’re trying to optimize for. I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.

> Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.

Sure, and that was the common understanding 20-30 years ago. (see: Dem and black community support for various crime bills, "Superpredator", etc.). But our understanding of the situation has evolved (based on evidence, I should add!).

> I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.

But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".

My point is that there are people who don't accept that. Who insist that nothing should change. The argument goes something like this:

(1) Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime (2) police will naturally interact more with black people so (3) black people will also be arrested more for nonviolent crimes, and therefore (4) nothing needs to change.

This breaks down somewhere between one and two, for a variety of reasons. The amount of violent crime isn't proportional to the amount of overpolicing, a lot of the forms of overpolicing don't actually reduce violent crime, etc. These are the people who I think it's reasonable to have suspicion of. People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things (and I'll note that the person who I linked earlier was in that group).

> therefore (4) nothing needs to change.

Again this isn't very charitable. I've had many of the same discussions and very few people I've debated this with come to the conclusion that things don't need to change. Most agree that things need to change, but they conclude that different changes are warranted than you do.

Many people today focus the change on step 2 ("police will naturally interact more with black people") with policies like defund the police, while others might focus on changes that change the step 1 ("Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime"), while others even still will focus on things the are priors to even step 1.

Disagreement on the change required is perfectly normal and to be expected. Just because people disagree on the change and don't see things exactly as you do doesn't mean they don't care or are bad people.

> But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".

I think community-oriented policing is actually intended to increase police interactions by adding more non-adversarial interactions in order to establish trust.

I don’t think “reduce police interactions with black people” is necessarily desirable if that includes things like ignoring 911 calls from black neighborhoods. In fact, that strikes me as deliberate failure to provide equal protection under the law, and could be even more ruinous to black communities than the status quo.

“Reduce police interactions with black people” is yet another thing that might sound like a good idea at the time, but would ultimately lead, in my opinion, to unintended negative consequences for the very black lives it’s intended to protect. Even if your ideal solution would turn out to have fewer police interactions, setting that as a goal is just begging for Goodhart’s Law to manifest itself.

Also, I think you’re minimizing nonviolent crime. DUI, car theft, burglary, and arson are all “nonviolent crimes”. We can’t just ignore them. A neighborhood where these things happen frequently is made more dangerous and impoverished by them. So when you talk about having more police presence in black neighborhoods resulting in more non-violent criminals behind bars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you drive drunk through a black neighborhood, you might run over a black kid, and that black kid’s life sure as hell matters so I hope the police are around to catch you before that happens.

If you’re talking about drug crimes and arguing that the enforcement of those laws is worse than the offense, then maybe you should just repeal those laws. And if I disagreed with you about drug laws I might argue the point with you.

> People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things

We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.

> We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.

That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.

I think you can believe the status quo is better than the set of changes you are proposing without devaluing the lives of black people.

“Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist.

> noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions

Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.

> But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”

Then I'd reject this on moral grounds:

Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright?

I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.

That’s beside the point though. I wasn’t making the argument that some people choose to trade off between different values in different ways. I was making the argument that, even if you hold those values constant, you will never achieve any of them perfectly.

To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible.

It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.

Sure, but given that it may not be possible to achieve perfect equality, I'm not sure how it follows that we are at a global (or even local) maximum of equality, which seems to be what you shorthand "okay" to mean.

And I think that it's pretty obvious that we aren't at such a maximum.

Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.

> Sure, but given that it may not be possible to achieve perfect equality, I'm not sure how it follows that we are at a global (or even local) maximum of equality, which seems to be what you shorthand "okay" to mean.

The only way to prove that we aren't at a global or local maximum is to make the case for some specific set of changes. If this isn't the best of all possible worlds, show me a possible world that's better. Even if we agree about the values, we can still disagree about factual and counterfactual questions enough that maybe I won't believe your better world is possible, or that your possible world is better.

> Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.

The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives, because your claim is that nobody can possibly support the status quo while believing that black lives as as valuable as white lives. So let's try and stay consistent here--you're the one shifting values on me all of a sudden! :)

I happen to agree with you about cannabis, but as I said before, that's the same as saying that cannabis should be legal irrespective of racial equality. And that's because we agree that cannabis usage is less of a threat to black lives than the enforcement of cannabis prohibition. I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.

> The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives

Wait now hold on! I'm not trying to maximize the value of black lives. My claim is that black lives are currently given less value than white (or broadly, other) lives. The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.

Or in other words, Black Lives Matter is about maximizing equality. I claim that Marijuana legalization is one such change that will reduce inequality, and will have few enough side effects that they don't make it unacceptable to implement.

tl;dr: We were looking to increase the societal value of black lives, but that is done within the lens of achieving equality.

> I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.

I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.

> The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.

Fair. Though they are effectively the same until parity is reached.

> I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.

And here we are back at (hypothetical) differences over our respective understanding of the situation, particularly in comparing the social impacts of drug use and incarceration. I still don’t think any difference in values is necessarily implied.

Being utilitarian is a moral position just like your position and a utilitarian would be justified on rejecting your position on moral grounds as well.

Two people have have a moral position and disagree because they are fundamentally working from different axioms.

It's possible to come to conclusions about that situation that aren't explained by racism. Correlation is not causation.

If I live in a neighborhood that has a greater incidence of violence, it's reasonable to assume that such a neighborhood might experience more policing. A neighborhood that has more policing in inherently one where you're more likely to be caught afoul of any law, violence not withstanding.

I had friends that lived in the boonies that saw a police officer maybe once a month if that. At the time I lived in the suburbs. I saw a cop maybe once a week. Now that I live in a city I see a police officer roughly once a day or every other day. If you see cops more often, it's more likely that you'll commit a crime in their presence and be incarcerated.

To get a more definitive answer on the magnitude of effect racism has, it would be important to control for other factors so you have a more fair comparison.

For example, if you take people of race X, Y and Z that are all of the same socioeconomic status and live in the same neighborhood, what is the likelihood that each are arrested for non-violent crimes?

The meta point here is that policies can disproportionately affect people with certain characteristics without any intent to disproportionately impact people with certain characteristics.

Racism may very well be the cause of the phenomena you've highlighted, but the data presented thus far is mostly inconclusive and at best suggests an amount of racism that explains far less of the discrepancy than accompanying confounding factors.

The sundry multivariate analysis I've seen (example [0]) attempted generally arrive at the conclusion that yes there is some racism, but that the magnitude of the impact of racism on outcomes is greatly overstated relative to other explanations. That doesn't mean that we still shouldn't address that injustice, but it does mean that there may be lower hanging fruit we might want to address first if our goal is a maximal improvement in justice instead of a modest improvement in justice. Not that we should eventually address all injustices, but resources are finite and it's fair to have a discussion about how to prioritize tackling different injustices and come to agreement on criteria we use to prioritize tackling different injustices.

Basically of that 3x rate, what percent is explained by racism and what is explained by other factors? What are those other factors and what is the contribution factor of each towards the 3x discrepancy.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...