Let's do some math

Let's do some math!

So I saw this thing on the front page. Interesting post, but there's a few issues with the math. I'm going to go ahead and assume the numbers posted here are correct, for simplicity sake.

So wikipedia tells me that the US is 72.4% white and 12.6% black. That means that if a white person decided to commit a crime, statistically speaking there'd be a 12.6% chance of the victim being black. Meanwhile, if a black person commits a crime, there's a 72.4% chance of the victim being white. Thus, a black person is 5.75 times more likely to commit a crime on a white person than a black person, and a white person is 5.75 times LESS likely to commit a crime against a black person, due to just population demographics. This more than accounts for the "five times as many crimes as they receive" that OP cites.

This post in no way accounts for the societal problems surrounding crime, like the school-to-prison pipeline (look it up), etc. I'm just trying to show that we can all manipulate numbers to show what we want. Take a minute to think about WHY those numbers might appear that way before you believe one way or the other.