The thing about suits is its a signal that can be faked, if you have enough money. Perhaps that is why the mafia wear suits (source: TV), so it can help give the impression of being legitimate businessmen.
Sure, in extreme cases such as wearing gang colours or tats that gives a lot of information. But some gangsters wear suits, and not all crime is organised crime, and I’m sure that perfectly ordinary businessmen who have no gang affiliations whatsoever commit crimes sometimes.
In many circumstances race does give comparitivly little knowledge. Asian women commit violent crimes far less then black men, but if an Asian woman’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon, then its her that the police should investigate.
On that note, there are also large differences between men and women. I am a man, but I concede that while it may be sexist for a woman to be far more worried about male assailants than female assailants, this behaviour is also perfectly rational. WRT domestic violence the police do automatically assume that the man is the perpetrator, which is more likely than not the case, but also leaves the system open to abuse if being male is considered sufficent grounds for arrest in absence of any supporting evidence.
The interesting thing about comparing the black/asian difference and male/female difference is that the side which supports discrimination based upon the difference is the left in one case and the right in the other, so its interesting to see whether people have a consistent opinion across both cases. One debate tactic is to counter “all men are potential rapists” and “men should be taught not to rape” is to compare with statements replacing sex with race, like “teach black people not to steal” in an attempt to expose underlying hypocrisy. Of course, these two cases are not exactly symmetrical.
For anyone approximating a Baysian reasoner, for more information to move you away from the truth is absurd. However, I do acknowledge that any discrimination on group based differences is open to abuse by those ‘reasoning’ in bad faith.
The children’s cartoon Dora the Explorer which is heavily oriented towards Hispanics has a resident character named Swiper who tends to steal stuff. In a lot of episodes Dora and friends stand around loudly yelling “Swiper, no swiping!” X-D
WRT domestic violence the police do automatically assume that the man is the perpetrator, which is more likely than not the case, but also leaves the system open to abuse if being male is considered sufficent grounds for arrest in absence of any supporting evidence.
This police assumption likely increases the number of falsely accused and convicted men, and of wrongly non-accused or acquited women. The justice system sometimes has very high conviction rates (i.e. persons convicted out of those brought to trial): above 90% for federal cases in 2001-2012 (random Google link to a PDF link from 2012). Therefore, one must ask what independent evidence we have about how much more likely men are to be the perpetrator in domestic violence cases.
This is a good point. Given that men commit more violence in general, it seems likely that they commit more domestic violence. However, I’m not sure that there is much evidence as to how large this difference is. One could look at the rates of domestic violence in male and female gay relationships, as this removes the ‘the man is always arrested’ bias, but there is evidence of differences in violence behaviour between gay and straight people, so this wouldn’t help all that much.
Perhaps look at the rates of mothers vs fathers beating children?
Different kinds of domestic violence (against children, spouses, parents, etc.) have significant psychological or behavioral differences. I don’t want to generalize from “parents of gender X more likely to beat their children” to “people of gender X more likely to beat their spouse” without evidence.
In any case, how do you propose to look at the rates of any kind of violence? If we don’t trust data from the justice system, or from the police, and we obviously can’t trust self-reporting and surveys, then what do we do?
All data is relative to a definition of what constitutes domestic violence. Fifty or a hundred years ago, men raping their wives wasn’t violence. Today, some surveyors (or police or judges) sometimes consider a wife hitting or raping her husband not to be violence, but the husband hitting his wife to be violence. We need to agree on a definition of violence, and then to find a reliable data source that uses the same definition.
Well, this is one of the many problems with sociology. There are some obvious approaches to use, such as finding crimes which are solved far beyond doubt, such as where there are many witnesses or DNA evidence, and hope this generalises to crimes which are harder to solve, such as domestic violence.
Of course, as you point out, these different kinds of violence might not generalise, as different people commit different crimes for different reasons. So I really don’t know what to do about crimes that happen in private where there are no witnesses, short of putting cameras in every room of every house.
The thing about suits is its a signal that can be faked, if you have enough money. Perhaps that is why the mafia wear suits (source: TV), so it can help give the impression of being legitimate businessmen.
Sure, in extreme cases such as wearing gang colours or tats that gives a lot of information. But some gangsters wear suits, and not all crime is organised crime, and I’m sure that perfectly ordinary businessmen who have no gang affiliations whatsoever commit crimes sometimes.
In many circumstances race does give comparitivly little knowledge. Asian women commit violent crimes far less then black men, but if an Asian woman’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon, then its her that the police should investigate.
On that note, there are also large differences between men and women. I am a man, but I concede that while it may be sexist for a woman to be far more worried about male assailants than female assailants, this behaviour is also perfectly rational. WRT domestic violence the police do automatically assume that the man is the perpetrator, which is more likely than not the case, but also leaves the system open to abuse if being male is considered sufficent grounds for arrest in absence of any supporting evidence.
The interesting thing about comparing the black/asian difference and male/female difference is that the side which supports discrimination based upon the difference is the left in one case and the right in the other, so its interesting to see whether people have a consistent opinion across both cases. One debate tactic is to counter “all men are potential rapists” and “men should be taught not to rape” is to compare with statements replacing sex with race, like “teach black people not to steal” in an attempt to expose underlying hypocrisy. Of course, these two cases are not exactly symmetrical.
For anyone approximating a Baysian reasoner, for more information to move you away from the truth is absurd. However, I do acknowledge that any discrimination on group based differences is open to abuse by those ‘reasoning’ in bad faith.
The children’s cartoon Dora the Explorer which is heavily oriented towards Hispanics has a resident character named Swiper who tends to steal stuff. In a lot of episodes Dora and friends stand around loudly yelling “Swiper, no swiping!” X-D
This police assumption likely increases the number of falsely accused and convicted men, and of wrongly non-accused or acquited women. The justice system sometimes has very high conviction rates (i.e. persons convicted out of those brought to trial): above 90% for federal cases in 2001-2012 (random Google link to a PDF link from 2012). Therefore, one must ask what independent evidence we have about how much more likely men are to be the perpetrator in domestic violence cases.
This is a good point. Given that men commit more violence in general, it seems likely that they commit more domestic violence. However, I’m not sure that there is much evidence as to how large this difference is. One could look at the rates of domestic violence in male and female gay relationships, as this removes the ‘the man is always arrested’ bias, but there is evidence of differences in violence behaviour between gay and straight people, so this wouldn’t help all that much.
Perhaps look at the rates of mothers vs fathers beating children?
Different kinds of domestic violence (against children, spouses, parents, etc.) have significant psychological or behavioral differences. I don’t want to generalize from “parents of gender X more likely to beat their children” to “people of gender X more likely to beat their spouse” without evidence.
In any case, how do you propose to look at the rates of any kind of violence? If we don’t trust data from the justice system, or from the police, and we obviously can’t trust self-reporting and surveys, then what do we do?
All data is relative to a definition of what constitutes domestic violence. Fifty or a hundred years ago, men raping their wives wasn’t violence. Today, some surveyors (or police or judges) sometimes consider a wife hitting or raping her husband not to be violence, but the husband hitting his wife to be violence. We need to agree on a definition of violence, and then to find a reliable data source that uses the same definition.
Well, this is one of the many problems with sociology. There are some obvious approaches to use, such as finding crimes which are solved far beyond doubt, such as where there are many witnesses or DNA evidence, and hope this generalises to crimes which are harder to solve, such as domestic violence.
Of course, as you point out, these different kinds of violence might not generalise, as different people commit different crimes for different reasons. So I really don’t know what to do about crimes that happen in private where there are no witnesses, short of putting cameras in every room of every house.