Racism - yeah, it's real (Des Moines: violent crime, how much, college)

[Lodestar]

Blacks in Iowa arrested at rates higher than other races

Read this story for one possible explanation. Many of the AAs arrested in the high arrest counties live outside that jurisdiction.

Iowa is close to Chicago and to Omaha which both have high populations of African American criminals. When there is a warrant issued for their arrest it isn't uncommon for them to spend some time in IA.

If you look at the counties in which the majority of the arrests take place you will see they are either on the east border of IA, close to Chicago, or on the West, close to Omaha.

It is also common for Black gangs to temporarily move to areas of the Midwest that are heavily populated with White people to commit crimes. While this is changing, it wasn't so long ago that the Midwest and its law enforcement were unfamiliar with how Black gangs operate and so it may have been easier to avoid detection among the "hicks." Diversity is still low in the Midwest also and people tend to be especially friendly to newcomers and susceptible to the quick hustle.

Postscript: I noticed no mention of the study being only about marijuana arrests in the OP also. Somewhat misleading.

It's a safe conjecture that criminals are more apt to be busted for possession than people who otherwise follow the laws. Less chance to have interaction with police.

[tollfree]

It's a discussion that a majority white state like Iowa will never have.

The general sentiment is that racism still only exists in small towns in Mississippi, or that reverse racism is a bigger problem, or that Obama is president, so there's no such thing as racism anymore.

[MaxFromPhilly]

Best way for their to be no racism is to have the place be homogenous, if everyone is white there is no one to discriminate against right?


Maybe blacks are getting arrested because they commit more crime and they stick out in such a white state.


Maybe they should go to Atlanta.

[atler8]

Maybe my friends & former co-workers that I recall &/or am still in touch with in Iowa are a special breed, but they were not at all the type of people that are portrayed in the post at 7:56 here tonight. Nor are they at all reflective of the gist of this thread.
Perhaps I was lucky to have been isolated from seeing or hearing racist behavior manifested on a wide scale while living for 20 plus years in Iowa but, aside from a small handful of nasty incidents at ISU & the nasty, racist utterances of a really stupid & publicly racist kid one class ahead of me in my home town who nobody could stand, I just didn't see Iowans dwell on race nor generally get ugly about it.
Additionally, I have never seen the suggestion on Iowa CD threads that there is no racism in Iowa. Only a fool would believe that to be the case & I have never denied that it exists when I have written on the topic here in previous threads. I have however denied that Iowa has a reputation for racism that precedes it. It has no such national reputation, period.
I'm not at all directing here at you Mr. Jonez, but I find that for people to come to the Iowa forum & point accusatory fingers about racism for a variety of motivations, some of them seemingly of a suspect nature, is not helpful. For as I have also written on threads before, racism exists everywhere in the U.S. & anyone who denies that is falling into a foolish trap of denial. All one has to do to know that this is true for "everywhere" is look at The Southern Poverty Law Center web site out of Montgomery, Al. & examine their list of states with active hate groups. As of 2013, Iowa had 5 such groups., one of the lowest numbers in the U.S., a number that is strikingly low especially for a state of over 3 million residents.
I can safely say that I never knew how overwhelmingly consumed with racial matters & extensively & obsessively full of racial hatred vast numbers of a local population could be until I lived outside of Iowa. Now I've seen it & have experienced it both in it's blatant & less overt manifestations.
After 35 plus years of exile outside of Iowa, the degree of racism where I now live has worn me down to the extent that I have gradually had to jettison long time friendships that too often & too nastily crossed the line with racist utterances for me to rationalize a continuing basis of friendship.
Given that I have relatives & friends that I communicate with all over the U.S., with some of them specifically in locations that have been offered up as being cool & "welcoming", I'm in the know from them as to the racist problems that do exist in those places as well & have found documentation, after the fact of such discussions, that support their claims.
That is how I operate... In fact, not in innuendo or rumor-mongering.
I would like to ask what anyone has done in the way of searching out or confronting the racist problems that exist where they live? Have you joined a community outreach program or joined a volunteer program or even admitted that racism exists in your back yard to whatever degree that it does? Have you created a soul-searching thread for your own city here on CD that seeks to discuss the problem? If not, do you still come to this forum & hold Iowa to a different standard for some reason? If so, why given that that behavior doesn't pass muster for fairness & deserves to be called out?
Given that this is a topic that is fast-emerging as a national dialogue of the times in view of recent deaths involving law enforcement & people in custody or in confrontations in such locations as Ferguson, Mo. & in Staten Island, New York, I think that I have raised valid questions here.

[Mathguy]

Originally Posted by lurtsman

Hater's gonna hate. They're gonna hate minorities, hate me for pointing it out, and hate everyone that disagrees with them.

In a recent article highlighting the country by pointing out one of the worst facets of each state, it was pointed out that Iowa has the highest racial disparity in arrest rates of any state.

What every US state is the worst at

The article is not even primarily about Iowa. The racial disparity did not get its own article, it was simply taken as part of the way things were.

An article specifically about the racism can be seen here:
Iowa ranked worst in nation in new study | Local News - KCCI Home

From the article:
"'The numbers are very alarming. We are eight times more likely to arrest someone who is black for an offense,' said Randall Wilson, legal director for ACLU of Iowa."


Since I've had several people attempt to shout me down when I mention to people that I saw racism while living in Iowa, it seemed worth bringing out another news source that found racism to be a problem.

Please keep this thread clear of any and all personal attacks. Any OT or Ad-Hom posts will be reported.

Let's make this a constructive thread. What can Iowa do to combat the history of racism that has revealed itself in the largest racial disparity in arrest rates of any state?

The director of the ACLU is making an incorrect statement. It's not 8x more likely, it's 8x more frequent. The likelihood would be dependent upon other factors that involve policing, socio-economics and much much more.

It's a pet peeve of mine when people start playing with statistics and drawing conclusions using what is clearly a woeful lack of knowledge.

Now to be clear, there may be biased policing going on etc. but the citations by the ACLU guy are garbage.

To give another example, Sherpas are 1000x more likely to be killed by avalanches than black people. Clearly, massive blocks of ice and snow love black people and hate sherpas? No, Sherpas are 1000x more frequently killed by avalanches due to their exposure to the threat. Trying to equate that to likelihood is....well, clearly nuts.

[Jjury15]

Originally Posted by johnrex62

Go back and reread please. Nowhere do I recommend ignoring anything.

You have picked the extreme end of the behavior scale and wish to equate all racist behavior to that extreme. This is a prime example of how racism persists. You have decided to escalate the issue from rude behaviorisms to violent attacks on a persons health and well being. This is the least common form of racism, yet it is the only one you wish to contemplate.

It is attitudes like this that keep the memory of past hate alive and raw in the minds of the young who may have yet to experience it, thus perpetuating the response cycle of victimology. People expect to the mistreated, so they become a magnet for mistreatment.

Allow people to grow up expecting equality and they will be more likely to demand equality.

It was my assumption that by saying to "forget it" and to "let it fade" was essentially saying to ignore it -- what on earth could that mean? Don't ignore it? Tackle it head on?

Replace "ignore" with "forget" or "fade away" and my message remains the same. Maybe you haven't been a victim of racism, but those extremes aren't that extreme and happen every day, and I will not forgo this fact because it's an extreme to you and you, oh Mr. Privileged, felt like it shouldn't have been included. Tell that to those who live it every single day almost every waking moment of their lives and those who lost loved ones because of these "extremes" that apparently are so rare they're suddenly a non factor.

Also, by past do you mean.. the past year? When a rash of racial crimes were highlighted amongst a variety of other racial crimes that never see the light of public news stations?

[lurtsman]

Originally Posted by fezzador

Yep. Again, I'm not sure there's even 80 black people in Adair County, and even if there was, you would think there'd be some consistency. Maybe someone involved with ACLU has a beef against Iowa and wants to make it look like a racist backwater no black person would ever want to visit, let alone live. That's the thing about statistics, folks tend to cherry-pick them to match their view points, while conveniently leaving all the others out so they're not contradicting themselves.

I really don't think the ACLU has such a huge beef with Iowa. The conspiracy theory is a little bit off the wall. If a member of the ACLU with such clout in the organization and hatred of Iowa was able to bias the rankings, wouldn't he want to do something with it? I doubt this perceived mastermind would create the statistics so they could be published and buried in a report that most people won't read.

[fezzador]

Regardless of what happened, something's not right. When the stats keep jumping from year-to-year like that, something's amiss. They should have done a better job of checking their numbers before publishing them, even if their intended audience is a tiny fraction of the population.

[atler8]

I agree w/ fezzador that generally-speaking, stats that jump drastically from year to year are indeed suspect & should raise an eyebrow over their veracity and use in whatever report they are used in. Often times such variabilty speaks to the use of a small sample or poorly screened/interpreted data.
At my office, we would react by crunching & crunching the data until the cows came home.
Perhaps that's why the original data came off of a rather junky web site. A more reputable site or organization would be likely to thoroughly research the stats veracity.

.

[Mathguy]

Originally Posted by fezzador

Regardless of what happened, something's not right. When the stats keep jumping from year-to-year like that, something's amiss. They should have done a better job of checking their numbers before publishing them, even if their intended audience is a tiny fraction of the population.

Yep, the stats jump around because of sample size.

The state is 2.9% black or about 90k people.

When you have crime rates that are on the order of 30 per 100,000 for something like burglary that

http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime...City-Iowa.html

There was no statistical analysis done here. Just some joker threw together some data and made some "conclusions" based upon their extensive study of nothing mathematical while attending college.