Steven Snow: The difference between race and ethnicity

To The Daily Sun,

Replying to Rick Notkin's letter published March 11, upon reading the article about police disproportionately arresting people of color, I may have an explanation about why the percentages add up to more than 100. From the article, "Of those arrested that year, 92.7 percent were white, 5.4 percent were Black, 0.7 percent were Asian and 5.1 percent were Hispanic or Latino. Less than 0.1 percent of arrestees were Native American or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. Race was listed as unknown for about 1 percent of arrests, and ethnicity unknown for about 4 percent. Gender was approximately 70 percent male and 30 percent female." I think that Mr. Notkin confuses ethnicity with race. Hispanic or Latino does not connote race and should not be added to the racial percentages. Likewise, the 4 percent whose ethnicity is unknown should not be added in to the total. Then you get 92.7 percent white + 5.4 percent Black + 0.7 percent Asian + ~1 percent unknown = ~99.8 percent, or rounded off, 100 percent.

What I found much more troubling in the article is the suggestion later that the disparate arrest rates are evidence of racial prejudice. That is insulting and unfair to the police. The arrest rate should be proportional to the offense rate, not to the relative share of the population of the race of the arrestee. To illustrate how ridiculous it would be to arrest people by their race's share of the population, Asians are estimated to account for 2.4 percent of the population of New Hampshire according to the Statistical Atlas, yet in 2019 only 0.7 percent of those arrested were Asian. Would any sane person suggest that we more than triple the arrests of Asians in New Hampshire just to make their arrests proportional to their share of the population? Of course not!

Steven Snow

Gilford