Tuesday, May 25, 2010
How much crime is committed by illegal immigrants?
Here is another statement from Utah Representative Stephen Sandstrom:
"Illegal aliens [are] committing a disproportionate amount of murders [and] rapes in our state."
Representative Sandstrom was interviewed by Doug Fabrizio on Radiowest:
KUER: 5/18/10: Immigration and America's Identity (2010-05-18)
So, how much crime is really being committed by illegal immigrants?
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I think it is scary how easy it is for people to mess up the statistics and make a group of people look worse than what they really are. I hope that someone can correct these guys in public so that people can have a better understanding on what is really going on. just like charlie said in class.
ReplyDeleteThis is why it is important to get your information from reliable sources. I feel like a lot of the time news stations have bias and are just trying to create a good entertaining story rather than give useful information to us. Its pretty awful that they use statistics in this way because statistics often sound very convincing and un-refutable but these are manipulated in such a way that it has a huge negative effect on a group of people.
ReplyDeleteI remember this day in class when Professor Morgan was really upset about the statistics and I say justifiably so. I'm a Communications major and there isn't anything more frustrating than people who represent the mass media using numbers to manipulate opinions without explaining all the data. The difficulty is having only a few minutes to say the statistics and not having the numbers in front of your face, it leads to moments like this.
ReplyDeleteSadly, these numbers were used to make people feel threatened by Latinos. Soon, the discussion changed from illegal immigration to Latinos. I hadn't noticed how common this was until I watched KSL the other night. I realized that in many of the stories that were reported, the race of the individuals at fault was mentioned or a visual aid was provided to show the individuals. I worry that the media plays too big a role in continuing bad race relations and understanding.
Have you ever read the book Statistics LIe? Its a great read about people shaping anything they want with numbers to the point of changing peoples lives, just like this. News reporters, politicians, corporations. They all twist these numbers to get reactions out of people and get interest. I think that the way they represented the numbers here about immigrants committing crimes is unjustifiable and should be illegal. They are segregating an entire group of people by making them look scary and dangerous when in fact they are not. There's a problem in our media and our country when things like this are put on the air and taken seriously by the citizens watching it.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe these people can get away with things like this! It's infuriating that these "reliable numbers" are being misrepresented in not only one way, but three! They are only arrests, they are by Hispanics, not illegal immigrants, and they didn't even include all of the numbers. It's too small of a sample size to find anything conclusive anyways! This makes me nervous about other things I've heard in the past and assumed to be true. Like Jen said above, it's so important to know where the information is from. If people would always check the source of news reports, the media would look like fools for portraying the wrong results and would eventually stop manipulating the numbers so much. Ahh, in a perfect world...
ReplyDeleteI agree, I wish this was a more perfect world where people could just get facts that hadn't been changed, but that's not the world we live in. We just have to make sure we are listening critically and taking everything said by the media and politicians lightly till we have researched more fully.
ReplyDeleteAs already mentioned, this just goes to show how important it is to make sure that we are getting our information from reliable sources and that we are critical of extreme statistics like these. What is scary, however, is that the majority of Americans see this on the news and take it for fact, creating a misleading rumor that then spreads like fire, stimulating even more prejudices and stereotypes.
ReplyDeleteThis type of news coverage is infuriating to me. Most of the public will watch a broadcast like this one and pay little attention to the facts and statistics being presented, but they end up believing what is said. Hearing that 81% of crimes that are committed in Utah are by Hispanics is a bogus stat. In order to come to that number they throw out 7 of the 18 individuals who committed a crime in 2008 because they were labeled as an "unknown ethnicity." Once doing so, they were left with 9 Hispanics and 2 Non-Hispanics. Tossing out almost half of the total number of criminals does not accurately measure the percentage of Hispanics committing crimes. In my opinion, this information is helping to encourage racism. By simply throwing out a random statistic about a certain race that is committing crimes, we are raising tensions and ill feelings towards them. If these facts were more true it might be newsworthy information that would be important for our state to know about. Yet in reality, it is possible that many other "unknown" races participated in criminal acts but for some reason did not mark their ethnicity.
ReplyDeleteWe should not be so quick to give statistics that may not include all of the data involving a specific topic. This lessens the credibility of statistics, in my opinion, and makes me question what else is being withheld from the public.