Cherry pick your statistics and ignore those that undermine your argument.
Present example:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/racial-disparity-drug-use_n_3941346.htmlThe article goes on about the injustice that black people are arrested for drug possession far more often than whites while whites are more likely to have done drugs than blacks.
That seemed to me pretty good evidence of racist policing. Because I don't believe the police to be racist I followed the link to the survey:
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481-0001_allAccording to the study whites are more likely to have responded that they have ever done drugs than blacks. He wasn't lying about that.
The problem for his argument is that metric really says nothing about the likelihood of being caught with drugs in your possession. The question was simply have you ever done these different types of drugs.
So, whites are more likely than blacks to have tried drugs at least once.
If you get into the survey, they also had a metric for number of times used in the past 12 months. Seems to me that might be a better proxy for the likelihood of being caught in possession of drugs than the "have you EVER done drugs?" question.
Unsurprisingly, though whites are more likely to have tried drugs, blacks generally have more days that they used drugs in the past 12 months. (You will have to go into the numbers and look at the drugs individually. For example, whites are far more likely to have multiple days where they used hallucinogens than blacks... but very few use hallucinogens in the first place, so we're talking double a minuscule number. Marijuana, on the other hand, has far greater use, but blacks have a 36% greater response to having used marijuana more than 100 times in the past 12 months- 6.1% to 4.5%)
So, more whites use drugs, but generally use them far more sporadically, while blacks use drugs less but are more likely to be regular users.
Hmmm... so this "evidence" of racism appears to merely be the effects of regular use versus sporadic use.
(
NOTE: I have not gone into the validity of the survey in the first place. I have no idea the controls that they used or how much confidence to place in their accuracy. However, even accepting the survey as valid, the numbers don't necessarily scream "SEE! THE COPS JUST HAVE IT IN FOR BLACK PEOPLE!!1!1!" )
