Knife Culture

[Alan2]

No matter which way I look at this problem, the same little word keeps cropping up.... "BLACK" ... call me what you wish, I am only stating the facts

[admarlow]

KAGS - so these factors DO amke it ok/understandable to stab someone

[kags]

absolutely not, I am not defending anyone who commits violent crime - you are misunderstanding my point which is that the factors that lead to criminality are many and varied, and cannot be pinned down to race alone.

[admarlow]

so like me you agree with Alan 2?

[noxlumos]

no-one has said it's ok to stab someone, just some of us appreciate that there are a huge numbers of factors involved in the statistical analysis of anything, you can't just say that a black person is more likely to stab someone because they are black, it's just absurd.

[admarlow]

nobody said the cause, and this thread is not about that, its about Alan 2's statement...

[joko]

thanks maxximus. never heard of him before.

so thats one.

i see no-one else answered.

so therefore all serial killers must be white and therefore white men are a lot more dangerous and evil than 'blackies'.

I assume, alan2, that you are a white male, so you are therefore a sicko serial killer....what... i am only stating the facts!

murderer!

lets get him!

[kags]

I think that some people find comfort in believing that crime is commited for reasons over which we have no control, ie race. This relieves them, as members of society, from any responsibility. We are all responsible for ensuring that we make our society fair for everyone, even if this just means changing our attitudes slightly, and becoming willing to address our prejudices and look at what lies beneath them.

[admarlow]

p.s the washington sniper was black

[Booldawg]

I'd like to thank admarlow for the stats. I asked for them, he provided them - simple as that. They do make for alarming reading and pose all sort of questions in the readers mind.

[admarlow]

Thank you Booldawg.

[newtron]

Wow! This thread was hard to read. I must hand it to kags and waldomcfroog for their patients. I agree with everythng those two said.

It's very common though for people to misunderstand statistics. Statistics are misused and missunderstood every day.

Admarlow stated that there are poor white people also, and that is true. But I bet if you check the statistics about the percentage of blacks who are poor versus the percentage of whites who are poor, you might see why you can't interpret statistics in such a black and white manner (no pun intended). So, if you took a representative sample of all poor people, it would probably look like the blacks are "over represented". Now, I'm not saying being poor is an excuse for committing crimes, but living in severe poverty can cause people to behave in ways that we just can't understand. Also, as stated previously, poverty is not the only factor that should be considered.

[newtron]

It also appears that Alan2 and admarlow are assuming that statistics and fact are one and the same. That's not necessarily the case. If the data are collected in the proper manner, statistics should say something about reality (it's not alwasy obvious exactly what), but one should alway check to see who collected the data and how it was collected.

[admarlow]

Newtron, I agree with you that you must have had a problem reading the posts as you have got it all wrong. The statistics prove that a poor black person is MORE likley to stab someone than a poor person from other race (in London)

[admarlow]

it was from the Metropolitan Police, (I would guess that their method was looking at the people they arrested and therefore not a statistic but an undeniable fact)

[newtron]

I meant "patience" in my first post.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Oh, so you *do* have access to the ethnicity/income figures then. May we all see them?

[joko]

thats two then.

[WaldoMcFroog]

That's not two, Joko - it's the same bloke!

[admarlow]

http://www.london.gov.uk/gangs/docs/guns-weapons-report.rtf

[noxlumos]

Oh well if it's police statistics why didn't you say so? Must be right then, I mean they've never been known to arrest an innocent black person have they?

Firstly there are hundreds if not thousands of unsolved knife crimes in the UK the culprits racial identity is not known in theses cases so there's a huge chunk that your statistics won't cover and secondly you've still totally missed the point about other factors that contribute.

Where I grew up violence of all sorts was very normalised ( I am not black) and I saw white men committing acts of the grossest violence against one another for what would seem to you very unimportant reasons, yet that was the situation where I lived and it's a social rather than a racial thing, and yes to me as a child and young man THAT was normal ( and not a black person in sight).