It’s commonly reported that “despite” the fact that black people make up only about 8.8% of Toronto’s population they represent almost a third of people arrested, charged, and incarcerated.
No, it’s not despite but because … it’s exactly because black people make up 8.8% of the population that the other values follow, not despite. If the black population of Toronto was bigger, that number would be different — it’s a direct causation, the cause followed by the effect.
I’ve gone over this topic again and again, showing how the overtly racist, malevolent, destructive, not to mention violent lies propping up Black Lives Matter twist information to appear exactly opposite to what it actually is.
But who gives a shit about accuracy or context when you’re reporting on people’s lives, right?
Apparently not the media and certainly not the academics producing these reports. It’s almost like they have an agenda that they’re trying to promote…
It’s the same reason why the word “disproportionately” is bandied about with zero explanation. Many people assume that this word means that all the numbers are equally weighted, that numbers of individual human beings are being equally compared to other individual human beings, except this is completely false.
I’ve already described at length how numbers are manipulated to turn them on their head in order to support a false narrative, one that’s subsequently propped up with misleading or technical (and conveniently unexplained) jargon that actual means something entirely different — in this case the diametric opposite — in common usage.
It reminds me of when I started looking into cryptography for the CypherPoker project. I saw a few discussions started by people who had claimed to have come up with “theoretically unbreakable” systems to encrypt, and subsequently decrypt, information.
Without knowing the details of how such systems work, most people would probably accept this claim as possibly being true. Except that in a cryptographic context it makes no sense.
In the academic fields that collectively make up the study of cryptography, the word “theoretically” means “in theory“, or as described in the underlying mathematics. Any encryption that can be shown to be impossible to undo (decrypt) would be “theoretically unbreakable”, which means that once the information is encrypted it can never be retrieved.
Although such a property could be useful (in a hash function, for example), to make the claim that a system is “theoretically unbreakable” and then proceed to describe how encrypted information can be decrypted is completely self-contradictory, even though in common parlance (outside of academia), this is often how the word “theoretically” is used.
The people proposing this “theoretically unbreakable” encryption were nearly universally panned online for their fundamental lack of understanding and seeming lack of even the most basic research.
The proponents should’ve been saying “practically unbreakable”, meaning “in practice” or when attempted in the real world. “Theoretically”, most cryptosystems are breakable (they often have to be), but the good ones are “practically” unbreakable.
In fact, for most such systems the theory includes a description of how long they might take to break if one had access to X number of computers capable of Y number of calculations per second, which demonstrates that no one would be able to break the encryption in any practical amount of time.
A correct understanding of the underlying language can often result in a completely different understanding of the supporting information.
So it should come as no surprise that studies like “Racial Disparity in arrests and charges“, the second of three documents cited as a source for the Ontario Human Right Commission’s “A Disparate Impact” study, makes the claim that black people are “disproportionately” affected by police encounters (with no attempt to explain what that actually means), while the actual numbers — not the misleading proportional percentages — stuffed into reams of tables at the end reveal that the lived reality of individual human beings is completely different.
I was going to post these tables here but there are so many of them that they’d literally go on for pages. I urge you to please have a look and judge for yourself.
You’ll find that with only one or two minor exceptions throughout the data, it’s white people who are overwhelmingly stopped, arrested, and incarcerated by police. When taken in the context of all people (when everyone is considered equally), then it’s white people who are disproportionately affected in nearly every category.
No doubt this is why the Ontario Human Rights Council is so keen on stopping any and all debate about the facts that they themselves present.
The time for debate about whether anti-Black bias exists is over.
Ena Chadha, OHRC interim chief commissioner
Because the last thing that researchers and scientists should be doing is asking questions.
Because debate might cause people to look at the numbers and question why nearly every single one of them runs 180 degrees contrary to the OHRC’s narrative.
Because people might also question why nearly all mainstream media, all levels of government, and the heads of police organizations are goose stepping in synchrony with these lies, misrepresentations, and conveniently missing facts.
It might also bring into question some of the other “systemic racism” charges brought forward by exactly the same people who conveniently jump from one institution and government agency to another to demonstrate just how “widespread” the problem is.
Another constant in this discusionless “discussion” is the regular presentation of statistics based on “self-reported” information. You’ll find this sort of “evidence” in many of the works of Dr. Scot Wortley, the lead researcher behind the OHRC’s reports.
To put this into perspective, consider talking to random teenagers on the street and asking them if they’ve engaged in any illegal activity within the past year. If you found that 90% of respondents said they hadn’t, would you conclude that claims of widespread teen criminality are therefore provably false?
I would be a little loathe to draw such conclusions if there wasn’t some sort of actual scientific evidence showing that teenagers generally don’t lie, but this is apparently where Dr. Wortley draws the line. A handful of aggrieved black people complain about their interactions with police, therefore the police are racist, therefore systemic racism, therefore white equals racist. Q.E.D., no debate allowed.
It’s precisely because this sort of flimsy, unreliable, and sometimes outright fraudulent “research” that has given rise to something called the replication crisis, a problem most prevalent in precisely the types of study that Dr. Wortley is engaged in.
In a nutshell, for a theory to be considered valid it must be independently reproducible; other scientists should be able to produce the same results if they follow the same methods. If not, there’s a major problem!
In the social “sciences”, the lack of replication or reproducibility is getting increasingly worse with each passing year. In fact, it would be accurate to say that a lot of the so-called research requires a good dose of ignorance, gullibility, and blind faith to be believed because other people carrying out the same experiments will often produce startlingly different results. But that requires skepticism and questions.
Imagine buying a light bulb that was claimed to “work everywhere” but in reality only lit up when screwed into one specific socket in the manufacturer’s testing facility — that’s the level of “science” at work here.
Personally I’d call that a fraud but if you prefer the word “lie” I won’t argue with you — the conclusion drawn is the same either way.
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