Happy New Year, Reality Denial Edition
/On the last post a few days ago, several commenters raised the subject of the popular and long-running TV series Law & Order, particularly as to the race of the perpetrators of the crimes. The show purports to be based on actual incidents, and tries to give an impression of basis in reality. On the episodes of that show that I have watched — admittedly not a large sample — the perpetrator of the violent crime has seemed almost always to turn out to be white and, for that matter, rich. But are the show’s producers intentionally skewing the reality of the race of perpetrators of violent crimes? And if so, by a little, or by a lot?
I decided to look around to see if I could find some relevant statistics. It turns out that several researchers (if you want to call them that) have gone through collections of these shows to compare races of crime perpetrators to actual crime data. As suspected, the difference is staggering.
Here is a July 2015 piece with the title “Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order,” from a journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The authors reviewed several seasons of L&O, and compared the races of the perpetrators of the crimes in the episodes in those seasons with actual New York City police data for the same years. Stripping out a lot of social science mumbo jumbo, here are the results for two of the years:
1992. In New York City, there were 51,490 arrests for violent felonies, of which 5,567 (10.8%) were white, 27,976 (54.3%) black, 16,096 (31.3%) Hispanic, and 1,851 (3.6%) Asian/other. On L&O season 3, covering the same year, the perps were 15 (65%) white, 2 (9%) black, and 6 (26%) Hispanic.
1995. In real NYC data, there were 49,549 violent felony arrests, of which 5,332 (10.8%) were white, 27,405 (55.3%) black, 15,169 (30.6%) Hispanic, and 1,643 (3.4%) Asian/other. On L&O season 6, the percentages were 26 (79%) white, 3 (9%) black, and 4 (12%) Hispanic.
Other years showed virtually identical patterns. To summarize, on L&O whites are over-represented (compared to real-world data) among perpetrators of violent crime by a factor of around 6 to 8, while blacks are under-represented by also a factor of around 6 to 8. This is not some small random mismatch, but rather a very intentional effort to paint a wildly distorted view of reality.
In other news from the world of reality denial, you may have read about an incident first reported in the New York Post of a gang of teen-age bicycle riders on Tuesday violently attacking an occupied automobile on Fifth Avenue at 21st Street in Manhattan. (Yes, it’s not far from where I live, about one mile.). There is video of the incident at the link. While I credit the Post for reporting the story, the text of their piece follows what appears to be an absolute taboo of never mentioning the race of the perpetrators. If you watch the video, you will see that many of the perpetrators have obscured their faces, but you can see many faces, and all the ones you can see are black.
I can find other reporting on this story at the New York Daily News, and at the UK’s Daily Mail. Both of these also honor the taboo of never mentioning the race of the perpetrators. But at least they reported on the story. At the New York Times, I can’t find any mention of this incident at all. I guess it would be too upsetting to the readers.
Sorry, but I don’t think we are going to make much if any progress on racial healing in this country before we are able to have an honest discussion about rates of commission of violent crime.
And with that, Happy New Year to all!