The Fugly Facts

[from 12/9/09]

In December 1998 one of our local Seattle daily newspapers told us that homeless man on the #359 bus started shooting, and the bus went off the Aurora bridge and landed hard in Fremont. It actually turned out the perpetrator wasn't homeless and the paper kindly corrected itself a couple days later in a tiny note on page 8, as I recall, but that's besides the point I'm about to make.

My point, which I am making now, unusually early in a column, is that the mainstream media does that sort of thing, that is, tell you in headlines when a perpetrator is homeless, but not tell you when they aren't homeless, or bury it 3 paragraphs down.

Pointing this out is not as picky or as whiny as it may seem, because I can make a case for the idea that it is precisely this kind of disparate treatment that results in serious discrimination and oppression.

Let's invent an imaginary two-class town. Call it Laidvue. Say Laidvue has 100,000 people, of which 99,000 are butt ugly, and 1,000 are face ugly. It's 99% Buglies, 1% Fuglies. Assume that in Laidvue, Buglies and Fuglies are equally lawful one by one, so that 99% of the crimes are committed by Buglies and 1% by Fuglies, according to their numbers. But suppose that the Laidvue Daily Ladle, the main media in town, only identifies Fugly suspects by class.

That would be natural, wouldn't it? If 99% of the people are Buglies, shouldn't that be the default assumption? If you're reading about a crime and the paper doesn't tell you a Fugly did it, well then, you'd just assume it was a regular person right? And in this scenario, a regular person is an Bugly, right?

Right. You should assume that, but you wouldn't, because that's not how human brains work. Instead, what happens is, over time, you'd become aware that whenever the class of a perpetrator is known, the perp is a Fugly. So you'll think all, or almost all, of the crime being reported is caused by Fuglies. Eventually you and your neighbors will organize block watches so when a Fugly person walks through your neighborhood someone can alert the police. As those calls come in and get logged, it will turn out that 10% of all calls concern Fugly suspects, a minority, but 10 times as much as should be for their numbers. Instead of being seen as evidence of profiling, the numbers will be taken as proof that Fuglies are indeed ten times as likely to commit crimes. After all, it isn't the police who will be making the calls, it's the concerned community doing it. The community can't be profiling! They're just reporting what they see.

It gets worse. Since the police are more likely called to investigate activities of Fuglies, they arrest more of them than expected by their numbers, which leads to more convictions per population for the Fuglies (while the corresponding Buglies aren't caught, because the police are busy elsewhere), and those statistics are used to justify genuine police profiling (as opposed to community discrimination described above), which leads to more disparate conviction results, which leads to more profiling, etc, and you got one grand screeching social feedback squawk.

Then, as if that isn't enough, you have to endure sanctimonious carping from liberals like me, braying about the death of reason and crap like that.

To avoid the screeching feedback squawk of perpetual injustice and tiresome braying, there are two ways to proceed. Either, the media can stop telling us the class of the perpetrators. Or, if they can't bring themselves to do that, they should always reveal the class whenever they know it, whatever it is.

Why didn't Monfort and Clemmons get that treatment? How many people just scanning the headlines have absorbed the fact that these people were housed? When are the headlines going to start telling us about the 99% of crimes committed by housed people?