Proof That Law Enforcement Does Not Discriminate Against Blacks

In May 2020, the world was turned upside down when a massively-overdosed George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street while waiting for an ambulance that could have saved his life. The narrative that Minnesota’s criminal justice system was biased against blacks immediately took hold, encouraged by Minnesota’s own state and local officials.

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{snip} The fact that blacks are over-represented in the system–indisputably true–was taken as irrefutable evidence that our criminal justice system is racist.

There is, of course, another obvious possibility–that blacks are over-represented as criminal defendants and prison inmates precisely because they are over-represented as perpetrators of serious crimes. Over the years, Heather Mac Donald has been especially prominent in pointing out this inconvenient truth.

Here in Minnesota, ground zero when it comes to anti-law enforcement propaganda, there was a breakthrough when the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began publishing data on offenders in each criminal category by race. When we look at the percentage of blacks (or any other group) who are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, etc., the relevant comparison is not between those individuals and the percentage of that group in the general population, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding. Rather, the relevant comparison is the percentage who become involved in the criminal justice system vs. the percentage in the offender population. The BCA’s new data set allowed us to make this comparison.

Enter David Zimmer. David is a veteran of 33 years in the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office, from which he retired as a Captain. {snip}

The BCA offender data show that blacks commit serious crimes at a per capita rate ten times that of whites. That proportion is followed from arrests through incarceration, except that David’s analysis finds that Minnesota’s criminal justice system discriminates–in a statistical sense–against whites, as compared with blacks.

The report is here. {snip}

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