It’s valid that we overfocus on the race issue.

The eternal struggle in American politics is whether to persecute black people because they are largely poor, or to persecute poor people because so many of them are black.

Unfortunately using bad statistics only gets those race people to focus on race

The efforts by both historical and modern American leadership to impose a formal caste system on a melting pot of ethnicity and migrating communities has produced an enormous number of contradictory policies and practices.

But one upshot is how you can focus in on a particular state or agency or subset of the criminal statistics, and get any kind of trend you want.

You can then draw all sorts of conclusions - some of them pretty nakedly illogical and incoherent - and then build a media career around using these statistics to prove your fringe view to a gullible audience.

I might say that the problem isn't with "bad statistics" nearly so much as pure "bad faith". Arguing for vicious, sadistic, and largely ineffectual policies by pointing to a singular cohort in a sliver of the overall data set and insisting we need to do full-on Gestapo-esque policing if anyone is to sleep soundly ever again.