Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Race and crime

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep and cleanup. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 22:04, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Race and crime

Race and crime (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

This page has so many cleanup tags it's not even funny. Not encyclopedic. POV. Not factual. Misleading. Lack of context. Lack of verification. Rewrite from scratch. To sum it up this appears to be original research and tending towards racism. >Radiant< 16:56, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

• Delete per nom and WP:NOR. There is an overpowering reek of soap drifting from this POV nightmare. I'd rate the chances of this ever being a decent page at just about zero. --Folantin 17:25, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep and clean up, it is certainly an encyclopedic topic and subject of study of criminology. --FateClub 17:28, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete, whether this is a viable topic for WP is debatable. This is not the kind of topic where grow and expand can comply with WP:NPOV, it's either well-researched and exhaustive or nothing at all. hateless 17:43, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete content and redirect to Anthropological criminology. This article cherry picks to make a racist point and doesn't reflect credible criminiological treatments of the subject; there's nothing worth salvaging here. Note that the actual topic of the article is nothing more than a correlation, which says little about the actual relationship between race and crime. Bobanny 19:49, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Anthropological criminology doesn't seem to be about a current subject. If so, it would be an inappropriate redirect. The subject of the article is an academic subject and notable.Noroton 02:20, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep and clean up, add counter points and other information. Ulairix 23:39, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep and clean up this sad, sick article. I think I have to vote this way, but we're an encyclopedia and the subject itself is notable and, in theory, could be written without animus and actual racism. There simply are differences in crime rates by race (as well as by sex, age, ethnicity and just about every other way you could chop up a population; and other subjects besides crime could also be looked at that way). This article will always have to fight off the racists and the politically correct people. I guess you just can't avoid it. Nature of the Wikipedia beast. What a chore. I'm going to delete the part about Jews and North Africans not being "white". Ugh! Noroton 02:20, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep and clean up. Notable topic; execrable article. csloat 05:00, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete per nom and Bobanny (although I agree with Noroton that Anthropological criminology is not an ideal fit). POV/racist undertones throughout here, there isn't even a mention of the most obvious alternative explanation: poverty, related to both race and crime. The subject could be interesting if done right, but the article needs to be completely wiped and started over from scratch, which I might encourage. The only thing worth saving here is the title, delete everything else. Jakerforever 13:43, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment: Well, no consensus so far on whether to delete or not, but seems a strong consensus that everything but the title is crap. If anyone's up for re-writing it, you might want to check out American Renaissance (magazine) and these clowns (guess what color?): Jared Taylor, J. Philippe Rushton, and Steve Sailer for some of the context lacking in this article and as a jumping off point. Bobanny 15:05, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment I have been trying to come up with an alternative merge suggestion...I'm surprised that the subject was not handed elsewhere in some (better) way. As an alternative proposal, perhaps the page could just be defered in favor of Racial profiling, which I think is the essence of the article here proposed for deleetion, that minorities are more likely to be involved in crime, although the racial profiling article does a much better job. If you would allow me one rant, in this (in my opinion racist) article, there is no mention of say, white-collar crime, which is almost exclusively committed by caucasians, and argueably has a much greater per-crime impact on society (I'm white myself, by the way). Jakerforever 13:45, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

• Delete per arguments above. Normally I would vote keep in this instance. The article itself is important, but a collection of statistics implying whitey is best is not helpful, and should not be used as a basis for this article. Redirect per Bobanny as there is nothing to salvage from the current one. mceder (u t c) 07:58, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep with massive cleanup - Wikipedia is not bowdlerized. Like it or not this topic is brought up often in the real world, regardless of how much distaste one may feel for even considering such a comparison. There is plenty of information out there on this topic, but the current revision reflects information that is either cherry-picked or from fringe sources. The POV of the article is definitely slanted, as almost every statistic is compared to the corresponding for "White" people. 90% of the current content needs to be thrown out, which would normally lead us to delete or merge the article. The problem is that a) Wikipedia is not censored so we can't really salt it, and b) if we delete it some racist hack will just re-create it, probably with even worse sources. (As it is some of the sources are quite respectable, just summarized shoddily) A far better solution would be for some intelligent, well-reasoning editors to take an interest in this page and turn it into an unbiased, complete, speculation and conclusion free article. I'm willing to chip in a bit, but it'll definitely take several editors working together to make this article what it should be. On the positive side, it will likely turn into a good (if controversial) article. -- Y|yukichigai (_ramble argue ^check) 09:41, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep per Yukichigai. Joie de Vivre 19:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the racist stuff can or should be purged in a re-write, since that's part of the subject's significance. I remember when J. Philippe Rushton - a professor at a mainstream Canadian university - came out with his book. He was quickly and decisively denounced by other academics for using dubious methodology and scientifically invalid interpretations of the data (things like ignoring that variations were greater within his racial categories than across categories, which signifies that the racial categories were arbitrary). Normal criminologists deal with race as a sociological, not biological, phenomenon, which leads to something quite different than the contents of this article, but the biological determinism is still an aspect that merits encyclopedic treatment because the racists don't always stay on the fringes where they belong. Also, racial profiling is something quite different, and is more about law enforcement than criminology. Bobanny 05:30, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

The issue isn't that the sources are "racist", it's that many of them fail WP:FRINGE and WP:RS. The rest of the "racist" content seems to be WP:OR, or runs afoul of WP:NPOV by comparing every other race to whites. Like I said before, Wikipedia is not censored; nothing will be removed on the basis of it being racist, just on whether or not it meets WP:V, WP:NOR, and other policy. -- Y|yukichigai (_ramble argue ^check) 07:19, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I wasn't suggesting that anyone's proposing censorship. I also don't think whoever does a rewrite needs to use what's already in the article as a starting point at all (per WP:NPOV and WP:NOR). However, the racist element here probably shouldn't be excluded as an irrelevant fringe perspective because it periodically sparks controversy and gets mainstream coverage see here, for example. On a practical note, dealing with the racist perspective encyclopedically would also make it easier to protect the article from it being highjacked with original research (inappropriate edits are more likely to be reverted in articles where the standards have been set high by proper citations, NPOV, etc.) I'm not arguing that the racist perspective should necessarily take up much space in the article; it'll ultimately take a bit of research to determine what the rewritten article should consist of and in what proportions. Bobanny 19:00, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

• comment - I'd love to see people volunteer to take this article over and clean it up, as it's great for Wikipedia to encourage learning about all sides of the topic. However, I think it'll always be a permanent magnet for POV complaints and re-editing that adds new OR and SOAPBOX violations - you'd need an army putting this article on their watchlists forever to keep it safe. AllGloryToTheHypnotoad 23:53, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
• keep - I gave a cursory look at the article and every single statement made has been attributed with an outside link. No OR or POV jumped out, nor did I see fact tags. I'm sorry, but while perhaps refutations and counter-statistics could be added, I don't see why this article has to be deleted, except maybe that people find it distasteful. AllGloryToTheHypnotoad 23:59, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

  Reply - The POV issue is a type of systematic sampling bias, in that all statistics are specifically compared to "Whites", using them as a sort of control group and making this article so that it reads from "the white point of view". The article also notably omits certain statistics, such as the arrest vs. conviction rates of certain races, and implicitly directs the reader to draw conclusions concerning the general "lawfulness" of certain races. POV-pushing doesn't have to "jump" out at you to be present. -- Y|yukichigai (_ramble argue ^check) 21:32, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep - The relationship between racial origin and involvement in the criminal justice system is a notable subject discussed by persons from all shades of the political spectrum in many countries. Wikipedia should maintain an article in regard to it. The solution to POV in to add/alter content. In regard to fringe sources I list here most of those contained within the article: U.S. Department of Justice · Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, New York Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Home Office,Research Branch Correctional Service of Canada, New Zealand Department of Corrections and Australian Bureau of Statistics. Romper 21:40, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
• Delete. This is undoubtedly a valid article topic, although I don't think lumping together statistics from various countries (not to mention continents) was a good idea. The nom provides 7 reasons to delete, one of which (not encyclopedic) is overly vague. 3 others are obviously inaccurate descriptions of the article (not factual, lack of context, lack of verification). That leaves: POV (inclusive of "misleading"), original research, and attack page. This is not a blatant attack page, so that can be dropped as well. The fact that sources exist in most cases, inclusive of this one, means this is not original research (perhaps incomplete research). There is no "unique synthesis"--it's simply a poorly- or insufficiently-performed synthesis. That leaves only POV, which I have never before supported as a reason to delete an article. This time, I will make an exception. This article was clearly created with a POV agenda (for instance, it doesn't even mention that perceived racial effects are significantly reduced after controlling for socioeconomic status). There are more than enough available reliable sources about the relationship between race and crime (government records and scholarly articles) to write a good article but no effort was made to incorporate them. -- Black Falcon 21:49, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.