Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
(BTW: I find your claim that "the difference in the murder rates is explained by the different racial fractions in each city" rather strange, when Centerwall has shown that when household crowding is controlled for, black and white domestic homicide rates in Atlanta are the same.)
C. D. Tavares said:
Huh? 'Scuse me, which one is Atlanta in: Seattle, or Vancouver?
The situation in Seattle may be different from Atlanta (and the black and white homicide rates in Vancouver do not differ significantly), but that is not the only piece of evidence that socio-economic status explains racial differences in the rate of homicide.
Maybe I'm off the track here, but I believe the original claim was not so much that the difference in murder rates could be explained by the different racial fractions in each city (although, since you put this in quotes I assume that's what the original poster TYPED) but that the increased murder rate for each of the racial fractions differed ONLY in one fraction between the two cities, which difference entirely constituted the difference in the rates for the two cities as a whole. In other words, the rate for one specific fraction was relatively off the graph and caused the entire discrepancy. Is this or is this not the case?
More or less. The difference is entirely associated with different rates for minority groups (i.e homicide rate for whites was the same). Of course this does not explain the difference. (Anyone who thinks it does, must also accept that the different firearm homicide rates also explains the difference, since the non-firearm homicide rates were the same.)
