• rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    The other user who responded to you, @evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world, does a good job of analyzing the core idea here. To quote Benjamin Disraeli, there’s lies, damn lies, and statistics. Black people are no more “innately inclined towards criminality” than a pit-bull is innately inclined towards mauling people. Where people of color have been historically over policed, profiled by the criminal justice system, and generally set up to have a higher rate of criminal statistics than other ethnic groups, pit-bulls face similar statistical problems. Bite statistics are often self-reported by people who either witnessed a dog attack or who were themselves victims of one. Identifying a dog’s breed by sight, especially for mixed breed dogs, is nearly impossible, and more error prone than accurate. And for a pound, any “big dog with a blocky head” immediately gets labeled as a pit-bull, even if it has literally no pit-bull DNA. These dogs are routinely adopted by people who explicitly train a dog to be mean to people, as opposed to socializing them. The fact that they also have this reputation as guard dogs or attack dogs exacerbates their reputation.