Many and one

Steve Schwartzman

Jun 7

How could I not show more of the densest and most expansive colony of horsemints (Monarda citriodora) I've seen in years? I photographed it on May 28th in between US 183 and the 183A toll road in Leander, where unfortunately construction is already under way on parts of the field. Below is a single horsemint blowing in the breeze that had come up by the time I was finishing my pictures. Call it flower tower power.

§ § §

"Disparate impact"

One of the most pernicious concepts ever to have grabbed hold of our culture and legal system is the one called "disparate impact." Here's how it works. Suppose the legislature passes a law making it illegal for a person to commit a certain act (for example murder, assault, theft, fraud). The law is prima facie neutral, meaning it doesn't mention anything about the personal characteristics of a would-be violator; the law merely says that any person who violates it can be arrested and prosecuted for breaking that law.

Now suppose that of all the people who do get arrested and prosecuted for breaking that law, people with characteristic X happen to constitute a larger share than people with characteristic X make up of the general population. Believers in "disparate impact" then complain that authorities are going after people with characteristic X, and those believers proceed to call society X-ist (or systemically X-ist), X-phobic, bigoted, hateful, etc.

The obvious flaw in such claims is that there may be a simple, non-discriminatory reason why people with characteristic X get arrested and prosecuted for breaking a law more than their representation in the population would predict: it's that people with characteristic X actually break that law more often—sometimes much more often—than their representation in the population would predict. True believers in "disparate impact" conveniently refuse to look at the data, and whenever someone does present the unbiased data they attack that person as an X-ist, an X-phobe, a bigot, a hater, etc.

What's worse, activists wage campaigns to have the police arrest fewer, and prosecutors prosecute fewer, people with characteristic X who do break the law. In other words, ideologues want more of those criminals turned loose upon society, even if it means more crimes will be committed.

To see the folly of such fact- and consequences-free advocacy, look at the situation where characteristic X is being male. The current United States population is approximately 49.5% male and 50.5% female. For convenience, let's just say the two sexes are about equally represented in the population. Now suppose the crime in question is murder. According to FBI crime statistics, of the people arrested for murder (or nonnegligent manslaughter) in 2012, 88.7% of them were men and 11.3% were women. According to "disparate impact" ideology, this is an egregious example of anti-male bias because police arrested almost 8 times as many men as women for this crime. But would ideologues insist that police arrest only as many male murderers as female ones? That would be folly, right? But that sort of folly is what "disparate impact" ideology calls for. The reality, of course, is that men commit way more murders than women, so of course we expect the police to arrest way more men than women for committing that crime.