Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. All Right, So there is a fellow named
Wesley Yang, one of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation.
He is a writer for National Magazine as well as
The New Yorker. He is the author of a book
called The Souls of Yellowfolk. Wesley Yang is his name.
And he took a look at the crime stats and
also some of the psychology behind the promotion of certain
narratives when it comes to crime data. Okay, And as
I was going over in the last hour, right, this
whole reform effort in the criminal justice system, it really
really ramped up in twenty twenty, but it had been
building prior. Right, It's been going on for like the
last decade or so. Michael Brown, the Ferguson effect. You know,
hands up, don't shoot that lie. And so in the
sort of like the mid twenty tens, around twenty fifteen
or so, we started seeing just this constant deluge of
stories of police killing unarmed black men, right. And so
the first thing Wesley Yang points out is that these
are statistically rare events police shootings. No, no, actually he's
talked about black on white, stranger on stranger killings. And
he's talking about this in the immediate aftermath of Arena
Zurutzka's murder on the Charlotte light rail line, when that
video was really because nobody was talking about that story
except us here in the Charlotte area for about two weeks,
and then the video, through I think a freedom of
information act request by local media outlets, got the video.
The video then spread like wildfire on social media. And
I always say this whenever I talk about crime data,
whenever I talk about crime in general, you are way
more likely to be killed by somebody you know, Okay,
Like the vast majority of homicides occur with people that
know each other. It is to satistically, very very rare
that a random stranger is going to come up and
murder you, okay. Number one. Number two, Another key point
here on crime, particularly when you're looking at racial demographics
and violent crime, it is that the vast majority of
violent crime occurs in tra racially. In other words, white
on white, black on black, Hispanic on Hispanic. Right, it's
you're most likely to be victimized by a member of
your own racial group. Okay, So always keep that in
mind because I know a lot of people try to
stir the pod and they want to racialize thing and
like make everything about you know, race, But the vast
majority of the crimes are intra racial, not interracial, and
you are more likely to be victimized by somebody, you know.
So keep that in mind. And so he looking at
this data point of black on white stranger on stranger
killings because that's what we saw in the Zarutzka murder
and that film, right, it accounts. This is the data
he's got is from twenty nineteen. There were four hundred
twenty eight black on white stranger on stranger killings in
twenty nineteen, four hundred and twenty eight. That accounts for
three percent of all murders. That's it. Now, I'm not
minimizing any one of the victims in any one of
those cases, right, But that's simply a look at the
data point. So that's number one, they are statistically rare
events black on white stranger on strangers three percent of
all murders. Number two, they are far more common. Those
like that data point is actually more common than police
killing of unarmed black men. So that's even rarer. And
that was the focus of our national obsession for like
a decade now. There were twelve killings of unarmed black
men in twenty nineteen as the Black Lives Matter movement
ramped up to its crescendo. Twelve four hundred and twenty
eight black on white stranger on stranger killings for twenty
eight versus twelve, that's the comparison. Yet all the attention
was on the police killings, the twelve, not the four
twenty eight. He says, a narrative can easily be fashioned
online by exploiting what's called the availability heuristic, which causes
your subconscious mind to confound the vividness and memorability of
events for their incidents. That is what right wing accounts
focusing on the black on white stranger killings are doing
right now. Okay, So from the right and from the
racialists and stuff, you know, racist people even. You got
a whole bunch of people that are out there promoting
and pushing these the videos, and they are tapping into
this availability heuristic, which is of course what the whole
of the media did from twenty fifteen through twenty twenty
for police killings. Right. So it's the same dynamic, same
thing culminating in the nationwide freakout that put American cities
in flames and resulted in the deaths of thirty people,
Which is pretty amazing when you step back and think
of it, that thirty people died in the social justice
racial reckoning riots, and that was almost three times as
many people that had actually been killed by police. Unarmed
men killed by police there were twelve, but in the
riots there were thirty deaths. He goes on to say
this created a pent up interest in re establishing the
salience of the second point. The second point is that
there are so few police killings, the goal of which
is not a nationwide street freak out, but simply the
changing of prosecutorial policies that allow for the catch and
release of violent repeat offenders. As I documented in the
first hour right. That's what happened, the media promoting this
idea that black men are being murdered all over the
place by white racist cops, when in fact there was
like a four hundred you are, it's like four hundred
percent or four if forty times the data goes the
other way, black on white, stranger on stranger versus white
on black police killing again, four hundred and twenty eight
black on white stranger on stranger killings, twelve police killings
of unarmed black men. But we get every single thing
was about the twelve, not the four twenty eight, which
then allowed organizations, activists and such who, as I went
over with the MacArthur Foundation, wanted quote unquote reforms, and
that's how we have the catch and release system that
we have right now, and people like Arena Zarutzka paid
the price for it. People are paying the price for
this catch and release system that was put in place
using the twelve unarmed deaths per year, using the twelve
and paying no attention to the four hundred and twenty eight.
He says, yes, thirty deaths directly attributed to violence during
the riots and the largest two years spike and murder
deaths in American history, resulting in thousands of excess deaths
above the prior baseline as law enforcement was delegitimized for
several years. Did you know that it was the largest spike,
The largest two year spike in murder deaths in American
history occurred after the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful riots.
Even amidst the spike, the rate remained lower than its
peak in the nineties because crime had been so thoroughly
reduced in the prior thirty years, while instances of police
violence have also declined drastically, a kind of public policy miracle,
nearly unprecedented in modern history. That's what happened before twenty twenty.
That's what was going on. You know, stories are powerful.
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dot com. All right, so this is from the somebody
hang on, somebody did ask me where can this article
be found? Okay, not an article. It was a series
of tweets that Wesley Yang put out back on or
around September eighth. See, but that's see that like, that's
my process. That's my show prep process. I like collect
stuff and then when I build a topic and then
i've I've got stuff from you know, it'll go back
a year or two sometimes and I'll just have all
of this stuff and then I connect it all together.
So that's Wesley Yang, and you can follow him on
Twitter at wes Yang at wes Yang and then just
go search back in like September. I usually link this
up on the show prep page at Patreon as well.
It's free. So here is from FBI crime data from
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Justice Statistics, okay,
their Uniform Crime Reporting Program or the UCR. This throughout
my entire career, this was always pointed to as sort
of the gold standard when doing crime reporting, trying to
figure out crime stats, although it seems like in recent
years some cities have begun juicing these stats as well.
Some cities don't even participate, they don't tell the FBI
this stuff. So this is the best that we have
to go on though, And this is compiled over at
the Global Statistics dot com website, and it's a breakdown
crime stats by race. Okay, So first off, remember whites
make up a majority of the population, so you would
expect to see the total number of whites arrested to
be higher than all other racial categories. That's what you
should expect to see, and that is in fact what
we do see. Okay, The total number of arrests in
America in twenty twenty four was just under five point
eight million arrests. Total arrests of the five point eight
or sorry, three point nine were whites. Then there was
another one million Hispanic and one point six million black arrests.
For violent crimes, there were four hundred seven thousand, So
out of the five point eight million arrests, four hundred
seven thousand of them were for violent crimes. And when
you look at those data points again, whites make up
just a little under half at one hundred ninety six thousand,
Blacks at one thirty four thousand, and Hispanics at seventy
six thousand. However, if you are looking at proportionality, which
is what the left has used in order to foment
all of these quote unquote criminal justice reforms, they would
say that, okay, four hundred and seven thousand violent crime arrests,
whites make up sixty percent of the population, therefore sixty
percent of the arrests should be whites, but it's not.
It's under half. So whites are underrepresented in the total
number of arrests for violent crimes. And what the thinking
on the left goes is that, well, that's proof that
the system is racist, because it's not making the arrest
of the white person for the violent crime. That has
been their argument. Going deeper, this is now the percentage
of the population. As I mentioned, Whites make up fifty
nine percent or sixty percent, roughly fifty nine percent of
the population. Hispanics make up nineteen percent, African Americans make
up thirteen Asian Americans make up six Okay, so white
Americans fifty nine percent of the population. They are victimized
fifty three percent of the time. So there's an underrepresentation
of whites being victimized by crime. But what did I
say earlier? What was one of the first stats I
always give? You are more likely right to suffer violent
crime at the hands of somebody you know, And it's
intraracial white on white, black on black, which is why
you see Also African Americans thirteen percent of the total population,
they are victimized twenty five percent of the crimes. So
they are they are overrepresented in the victimization category, which
means what it means that when you have a black offender,
you have black victims. And the soft on crime time
policies are actually disproportionately harming Black Americans. And yet we're
told that this is the humane thing and the equitable
thing to do, and I just disagree. I think it's
actually inhumane. I think it's pretty atrocious that you're damning
people in neighborhoods or in areas in cities to being
victimized by violent crime repeatedly. They're at greater risk. Why
would you be doing that and then holding yourself up
as some sort of moral standard bearer. It's just it's grotesque.
It's just grotesque. So when I was a kid, my
grandpa died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom
and my dad took care of him as he got worse.
Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much
support for caregivers and family. But things are different today
because of the work of so many people, including the
Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with
all awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter
for twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me.
I participate in the annual Walk to End Alzheimer's and
I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year and it's
called once Again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and
you can join the team and walk with us. It's
on October eighteenth that truest field. Sign up at alz
dot org slash walk and then you can search for
my team name, Pete's Pack. There's also a link at
thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description
of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia
Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make a
team and join that one too, or make a donation
and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars.
If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a
bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can
go to alz dot org slash walk for all the
dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's.
Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me?
For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments.
This is why we walk in going over the FBI
crime data again. This is for twenty twenty four because
obviously we don't have all of the data for twenty
twenty five. Yet they have and this is I remember
every year when they would put out this UCR, the
uniform crime reporting numbers, and Charlotte would show up on
the list, and some publication would do like, here are
the most dangerous cities, and they would rank the cities
based on the UCR data, and the police chief and
city officials would come out and they would do a
press conference with us, and they would say.
Speaker 2: It doesn't look at the totality of all of the factors,
and blah blah blah blah blah, right, trying to tell
us that we can't rank the cities, that it's not
fair to rank the cities based on the violent crime
per capita.
Speaker 1: That's not it doesn't take into account all of the
various factors involved. Okay, of course it can't. It's just
telling you the crime data. And when you have all
of the crime data for all the different cities and
states and you have it broken down on a per
capita basis, then yes, it is entirely appropriate to rank them.
Here is the city with the highest crime per capita,
and here's the city with the lowest. Here's the state
with the highest and the state with the lowest, and
they break down the data in various ways, and this
is per one hundred thousand inhabitants. Okay. The United States
total for violent crime three hundred and fifty nine violent
crimes per one hundred thousand people, three point fifty nine
per hundred thousand. Okay. When you look at what's called
the metropolitan statistical area, which is usually larger than just
the city, you know, you've got like, well, let me
see here, we've got I've got Charlotte's here. Yeah, so
Charlotte's MSA includes Charlotte, Concord, and Gastonia. Used to have
rock Hill in there, but I think they kicked rock
Hill out and they moved Concord in or maybe Gastonia,
I forget, but twenty five years ago it used to
be rock Hill. So for the metropolitan statistical area, the
rate is actually higher. It's not three point fifty nine
per one hundred thousand, it's three seventy six, three hundred
seventy six. All right. Now, if you look at cities
that are outside a metro area, it's actually much lower.
You're down at now three thirty eight, three hundred thirty
eight crimes instead of again US total three point fifty
nine msas or cities three seventy six. Cities that are
outside the MSA three thirty eight. So that's what hmm like,
fifty fewer crimes per hundred thousand violent crimes per one
hundred thousand people simply by being outside of a city.
And this is again based on the same per capita account,
So it's one hundred thousand people, which means you are safer,
in other words, less likely to be the victim of
a violent crime if you live outside of a city.
All things being equal, that's what the data shows in
the non metro counties per hundred thousand people, it's not
at three thirty eight, it's not at three seventy six
as it is in the cities. It's one hundred and
ninety five one ninety five. You are far less likely
to be the victim of a violent crime if you
live in a non metro county in America. Okay, so again,
let's take a look at the UH state numbers again.
US total three point fifty nine, three hundred and fifty
nine violent crimes per hundred thousand North Carolina, not three
fifty nine, three seventy six. That's what North Carolina is,
three seventy six per one hundred thousand. South Carolina four
hundred thirty seven per one hundred thousand. I don't know
what's happening in South Carolina. Obviously a lot of island crime.
I know that's Look, that's the data per one hundred thousand,
four hundred thirty seven per hundred thousand. Now I will
say that North Carolina is lower than the Oh no,
I take it back. We were lower, yeah, not really
for the last that was look at twenty twenty three.
So the crime has dropped from twenty three to twenty four,
but we are still above the regional per capita number
by like fifteen violent crimes per one hundred thousand. So
North Carolina is by and large a pretty dangerous state
based on the FBI crime stats. Now, how about Charlotte.
I'm glad you asked. I have that as well, Charlotte, Concord, Gastonia, MSA.
This includes Anson, Cabaris, Chester, Gaston, Ayerdell, Lancaster, Lincoln, Mecklenburg, Rowan,
Union and York counties as well as Charlotte Mecklenburg. Our
number four hundred and twenty seven violent crimes per one
hundred thousand, four twenty seven. So that's higher than the
state averag it's almost to the South Carolina state average,
and it is way above the US average. Okay, that's
the comparison. So when you hear the local officials say, oh, well,
the crime has dropped in the last year, and although
we did have like four homicides this weekend, we are
still more dangerous. We are more dangerous in the cities
than in the counties. We are more dangerous than the
US per capita number on average. That's what the data is.
Back to the write up at Global statistics dot com,
violent incidents involving white offenders was lower than the share
of white persons in the population. Their representation in violent
crime is proportionally lower than their population percentage, suggesting different
victim is a and defending patterns across racial groups. African
Americans are the primary group arrested for murders, robberies, and
weapons violations. That's the primary group, despite representing only thirteen
percent of the total US population. The share of violent
incidents involving black offenders was greater than the population percentage
of black persons, highlighting disproportionate representation in violent crime statistics.
Why see, that's the rub right Why and what the
left has told us for the last fifteen years is
systemic racism. It's somehow another, not the the attacker's fault,
it's not the criminal's fault or something. It's the system,
it's the society, it's everything else. And that prompted the
types of programs and trainings that the MacArthur Foundation has
embedded throughout the country, including here in Charlotte Mecklimber, which
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So I mentioned in my stack of stuff in my
prepping process, I sometimes accumulate stories. They sit in the
prep stack for a very long time, Like for example,
I have a Google document and I put links into
this Google document, and if I don't get to it,
it just keeps kind of getting pushed down the list,
you know, and sometimes I'll group them together by topic
or something. But I had to archive one Google document
because it became eighty paid long of just links to stories.
And so now on my second Google document and I
saw this morning. I was up to thirty pages. So anyway,
that's how I end up with this story connected to
the crime stats. And this story is from August twenty
twenty three. Okay, but it's connected. Florida State University criminology
professor Eric Stewart was a guru of the claim that
systemic racism infests America's police and American society, and then
they found out that his data was crap and he
was out of a job. The academic was fired after
almost twenty years of his data were found to be
in question. Okay, he had figures that were used in
an explosive study which aimed the legacy of lynchings in
America made white people perceive black people as criminals and
that this problem was worse among conservatives. College authority said
he was being fired for incompetence and false results. Among
the studies he has had to retract were claims that
whites wanted longer sentences for blacks and latinos. To date,
six of Stuart's articles published in major academic journals like
Criminology and Law and Society Review. Between two thousand and
three and twenty nineteen. Six of his major published articles
have been fully retracted after allegations that his data was
fake or so badly flawed it should never have been published.
The professor's termination came four years after his former graduate student, Justinicket,
blew the whistle on his research. Think about that. It's
the only reason why this guy got canned. All these
studies that were supposedly peer reviewed in these respectable publications,
very science and data right. No, it took a grad
student to blow the whistle on his fabricated data. Pickett
said they had worked together in twenty eleven researching whether
the public was demanding longer sentences for black and Hispanic
criminals as those minority populations grew, and the paper that
they put together claimed they did claimed the public was
demanding longer sentences as the minority populations got larger, but
Stuart had fiddled the sample size to deliver that result
when the real research did not. When the investigation into
Stuart began in twenty twenty, he claimed, you want to
think a guest, Yeah, he was the victim. He claimed
to be the victim, and that his grad student that
worked with him, Justin Pickett quote. This is his quote.
Eric Stewart's quote. That Pickett quote essentially lynched me and
my academic character. You know, Justin Pickett didn't do that
to you. After sixteen years as a professor of criminology
at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Provost James Clark formally
notified him that he was being terminated that summer. This guy,
Eric Stewart. According to Google scholar, he and his work
were cited almost nine thousand times by other researchers. This
is the same scandal, like the same thing that James Lindsay,
Peter Burgosi, and Helen Pluckrose did with the Grievance Studies affair,
where they put fake papers into publications in order to
prove that they're not peer reviewing anything and they're just
looking for the headline. They want some research to confirm
their prior opinions and biases. That's what this guy did,
no difference. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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