Talk:Race and crime

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Given the clear WP:NPOV issues expressed about this article, I am proposing that it be redirected to Race and crime in the United States. ––FormalDude ^talk 11:04, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Discrimination, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Black Lives Matter, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sociology, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ethnic groups, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anthropology. ––FormalDude ^talk 11:12, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Notified: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Law, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard. ––FormalDude ^talk 04:59, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - I can't see any harm, someone can create an article with an international scope in the future. Doug Weller talk 12:31, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm not sure this is a good idea. NPOV problems alone are not a valid reason to remove an article if it is notable and otherwise justified. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 14:03, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Support No reason to have two articles on the same topic, and the suggested redirect target is a better-crafted page. XOR'easter (talk) 14:13, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Support "Race" is not an absolute meaningful term (scientifically, it's baseless), but can only be understood in a local/national context. In many parts of the world, it is totally meaningless in its rigid classificatory sense. An article that combines a term with no well-defined meaning on a global scale with a rigid concept such as crime (societies may differ a lot about what is punishable by law, but all have the concept of "crime") is absolutely non-defining. An article Race and crime could only be upheld if racial categories objectively were a thing. But they aren't. –Austronesier (talk) 14:47, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. As Doug Weller points out, an article with international scope can easily be created in the future if sufficient reliable sources are provided. But as Austronesier has stated, this scenario is unlikely to occur because serious social scientists are unlikely to consider it a valid field of inquiry. Generalrelative (talk) 16:17, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Austronesier's comments get to the core of the issue. Given the invalidity of 'race' as an objective classification, it simply isn't possible to construct a legitimately-sourced article on 'race and crime' in the abstract. Even with the best of intentions, the result (if it actually manages to cover issues beyond the United States in any detail, which this one singularly fails to do) can only ever be synthesis, cobbled together from sources discussing specific local contexts, and specific local constructs. Any 'global' article constructed around such sources can only ever decontextualise them, and give a misleading impression regarding what it is exactly that the sources are discussing. As Wikipedia:Article titles notes, "Titles containing "and" are often red flags that the article has neutrality problems or is engaging in original research", and I'd have to suggest that is what is going on here, even if it isn't obvious, or even necessarily intentional. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:00, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. I agree that the article is too US-centric right now, but there is at least a paragraph on Europe and it could be expanded with other regions. It would be very strange if readers searching for "race and crime" to were sent to race and crime in the United States; falsely implying that racist policing or racist attitudes towards criminality in general do not exist outside the US. It would make more sense to trim the POV/US-centric sections of this article and leave it as a stub for expansion. If we can't do that, then deleting it and leaving it red is better than a misleading redirect. – Joe (talk) 09:34, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. As a unified topic this is mostly confined to the US; there are smaller individual controversies in specific areas where specific ethnic minorities face prejudice, but they're better handled on individual articles. The one paragraph on Europe reads like mostly a mash-up of random studies without any real unifying theme or subject. Furthermore, many of the citations there do not mention or focus on race (they generally mention ethnic minorities or immigrants, which are not the same thing) - supporting the idea that focusing on "race" as a broad categorical lens through which to view crime is a largely US-centric phenomenon. --Aquillion (talk) 01:56, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose: Not everyone lives in the USA. See WP:GLOBAL. Canada, France, the UK, etc. all have similar race and crime–related controversies. I'm shocked something like this would be proposed. Dunutubble (talk) 21:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose The controversy surrounding race and crime exists outside the united states, we just need to find more sources discussing the topic outside the US. X-Editor (talk) 05:22, 7 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose per WP:INUSA this would be an inappropriate redirect. If the notable concept of the intersection of race and crime exists only in the United States, the specific article should be at this title. If the notable concept exists elsewhere as well then this title should not lead to an article solely about the United States. Per X-Editor, Dunutubble and others above and content like A 2021 survey [...] found that minority ethnic groups were disproportionately targeted [by police] across Europe at Stop and search make it clear that this concept is not restricted to the United States. Thryduulf (talk) 02:50, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. This is not a US topic, it's just for now poorly written in a US-centric manner, and needs broadening. It would be fine to create a "Race and crime in the United States" article and move most of the content there leaving behind just a WP:SUMMARY, but this article already has non-US content in it, so it obviously can't just redirect to the "in the United States". Why is this discussion even still open?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:49, 12 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Obviously when two article substantially overlap, the solution is to merge them. But I wonder if we should not merge the articles the other way around. After all, the connection between race and crime is primarily a pursuit in the U.S. which may also be applied to other countries. Scientology for example was founded in the U.S., where most of its members live and the article is almost exclusively focused on the U.S. But we don't call it "Scientology in the U.S." and even if we had articles for specific countries, the main article would still primarily focus on the U.S. TFD (talk) 15:10, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment on Joe Roe's statement in "Survey": the title Race and crime in the first place suggests that there is a connection between race and crime. For most readers, "race" refers to something related to physical appearance (whether you believe in the objective reality of races in a classificatory sense or not), while crime refers primarily to the transgression of law, and secondarily to its enforcement. So "Race and crime" is about the potential correlation of certain physical characteristics with the proneness to criminal behavior. OTOH, "racist policing or racist attitudes towards criminality" is about the correlation between the derived topics Racism and Law enforcement, and as such is better covered in articles about systemic racism rather than in an article that turns the assumed correlation between physical appearance and criminal behavior into a thing.

While only tangentially related to our discussion, I would also argue that e.g. in Europe racism is primarily xenophobic, thus not based in a belief in innate racial characteristics. E.g., in Germany, Polish immigrants "visually" pass as Germans, but will nevertheless face discrimination and prejudice once they are known to be Polish (e.g. by their accent). But beyond this, distinct physical appearance generally puts people at risk of being othered as "foreign" (this is what constantly happens e.g. to Afro-Germans, who are often subject to systemic racist policing), and then xenophobia and racism become the same thing. –Austronesier (talk) 11:12, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yup. 'Race and crime' as a title violates NPOV. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:59, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Above SMcCandlish proposed moving it to race and criminal justice, which I would have supported. Or it could be race and policing or race and law enforcement. But that seems to have little to do with this discussion, or my comment? The proposed redirect target is race and crime in the United States, which uses the same phrase. – Joe (talk) 15:36, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Qualified by "...in the United States". I read it as the cross-section of Race in the United States (a particular and still state-supported demographic usage of the term "race") and Crime in the United States. This is a topic that has been given ample SIGCOV in numerous reliable and less reliable US-based sources. –Austronesier (talk) 16:42, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, then is the contention that it has not received significant coverage for other parts of the world? Because I don't think that's the case: this edited volume on "Race, Crime and Criminal Justice", for example, has chapters on Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Australia and New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, and the US. – Joe (talk) 19:29, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then is the contention that it has not received significant coverage for other parts of the world? Yes. And it becomes even stronger after reading the abstracts of the individual chapters of the book. Editorial policy has streamlined the complex problems of each country under the header race. Not all contributors are happy with it. The chapter about Italy even starts with: As a necessary premise to this contribution, it should be borne in mind that debates around ‘race’, in Italy, would be deemed racist. I agree. Since we have a choice, I prefer not to follow the editorial decision of the editor of the Springer volume, Kalunta-Crumpton. –Austronesier (talk) 20:18, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"debates around ‘race’, in Italy, would be deemed racist". Indeed. I suspect that the same could be said for much of Europe. There is clearly discussion of the intersection between racism, ethnicity, crime, and the often-self-evident failings of criminal justice systems in such contexts, but framing this all as about 'race and crime' does nothing but perpetuate the stereotypical discourse over the subject that the US has been blighted with for so long. The United States is not the centre of the universe, and accordingly Wikipedia is under no obligation to mirror its deficiencies in article titles. Or in articles purporting to present a broader perspective. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:37, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The intersection of race and criminal justice has received significant coverage world-wide. This article should have national sections in it, since different jurisdictions have different legal systems, but we need not have US-specific, etc., articles on this until the main article exceeds WP:LENGTH limits.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:43, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am afraid I start being repetitive, but what does "race" even mean worldwide? If it's about racist bias in criminal justice worldwide, we should spell it out as such. –Austronesier (talk) 23:24, 18 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Answer to the question posed here[1]. Maybe the discussion is still open because a potential closer wonders why none of the opposers (except for one exception) has addressed the question of what "race" means in a global context. A US-based view on phenomena outside of the US is quite the opposite of what is intended by WP:GLOBAL and WP:INUSA. –Austronesier (talk) 19:20, 12 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]