Yeah, that’s very complicated. It’s almost certainly the case that wealthier people commit fewer crimes and get caught less for the crimes they commit. There are a lot of things to tease out of that as well. Looking at statistics it’s pretty easy to mistake effects of wealth for effects of education. But then that’s complicated too. It would be silly to think that there aren’t any NFL players who were fraudulently given college diplomas in return for their college football service. And then you also have the fact that the NFL is a subgroup of the rich that is very disproportionately black, and black men are very disproportionately likely to be arrested for violent crimes that they commit. That effect of rich people being able to talk their way out of arrest is going to work a lot better for a millionaire white businessman than it is for a millionaire black 6’6" man who weighs 350 lbs.
But a quick google search on a few different stats tells me that even if crime rates vary a lot with different social groups, they aren’t orders of magnitude off. I think that saying that NFL players are below the general population of men for domestic violence suggests that, at the very least, there isn’t a staggering epidemic of domestic violence in the NFL (probably more or less around the usual, horrendous amount).
I think the opposite is possibly true. An NFL player likely has more pull with your average cop than a millionaire white dude does (though the millionaire may have more pull with the D.A., which might result in him not being charged even though he was arrested).
That’s why the five thirty eight analysis is interesting: if we assume that the wealth and celebrity status of professional athletes may reduce their arrest rate relative to the general public, why is their domestic violence arrest rate 55% of the general public, while their overall arrest rate is only 13%? In other words, why is domestic violence wildly over-represented in terms of the proportion of arrests they represent?
This is probably a fair point. I think it is definitely hard to say how all those factors would come out in the wash.
I agree that’s an interesting question. But it’s still worthwhile to note that the question being asked is why their rate of arrest for certain crimes isn’t as much lower than their rates of arrest for other crimes. It’s still lower. The effects of wealth/being in the public eye/discipline/whatever on NFL players don’t seem to pull down their rates of domestic violence as much as it pulls down their rates of other crimes. I suspect that’s probably because domestic violence is a tough nut to crack and is a lot less subject to circumstances in your adult life.
Most people who commit domestic violence grew up around it - they have a broken mental model of what relationships are supposed to be like. The motivator for committing theft is usually material gain, so you’d expect less theft from someone who is richer than they ever thought they would be. But the motivator for domestic violence is that you have learned that violence is a way to solve interpersonal conflict. Getting a million dollar paycheck makes it less likely you’ll be in a stressful enough situation that you will resort to violence, but it doesn’t change whether violence is your go-to solution for very stressful situations.
Anyway, that’s all just speculation/pop psychology. My overall point, I guess, is that even with that analysis, I wonder if it makes sense to say that the NFL is so kind of breeding ground for domestic abuse. If about 1 in 5 people are abused in an intimate relationship in their lifetime then we’ve got a sweeping problem with domestic abuse. But I don’t know if we can look at the NFL as a microcosm of that problem. Saying that the NFL is a hotbed of domestic abuse is potentially greatly understating how bad the problem of domestic abuse is generally.
I think that the assumption is that when you look at overall crime rates you’re controlling for age, wealth, and influence effects on arrests (but not crime: they could still be just as criminal as the general public, but their wealth and influence suppresses a lot of arrests, as we seem to see quite frequently with college athletes like Jameis Winston), and that it should therefore be reasonable to expect arrest rates in all categories to fall by the same amount. Of course that isn’t strictly true, because when it comes to the economic crime categories of theft, burglary, and fraud we see that NFL crimes rates are only 5.5%, 2.0%, and 1.1% of the national crime rates in those respective categories. Discard the downward-skewing outliers and the overall NFL arrest rate will increase, but domestic violence will still be way higher.
Or, more simply, compare domestic violence rates to non-domestic assault rates. Why should domestic violence be 55% of the general population while non-domestic assault is 17%? And do you really believe that NFL players are only 17% as likely as the general public to assault someone, or that there only 17% as likely to be arrested for it?
I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here. As wealth increases we should expect to see different crimes fall at different rates depending on why the people commit the crimes. It’s no surprise we see economic crime fall as people get wealthier* - a lot of economic crime is committed by people who need money. As I was saying, though, intimate partner and family violence is much more about your response to stress and how families have been modeled for you. Having money can reduce a lot of stress to a point, but family relationships create their own stresses.
So as people get richer I would expect to see domestic violence fall (they are less likely to get into a fight about money that escalates into violence and fights about money are a big source of stress in relationships) but if you’ve got someone who, when things get really contentious, hits people, there is still a good chance that one day they are going to start hitting people.
The article notes that NFL players have 55% of the domestic violence arrests that the general population has. But people with high incomes have 39% of the domestic violence arrests that the general population has. But recently a lot of people have been talking about the NFLs domestic violence problem and I’m not sure that makes sense. If the point is while NFL players commit fewer domestic assaults than the population at large but don’t commit as many fewer as we would like then that’s true (we’d like it to be zero). But that’s what this data shows: the circumstances that NFL players find themselves in aren’t as powerful in reducing domestic violence as the circumstances of the average wealthy person.
I feel there are too many differences between family violence and non-family violence to connect them. I’m sure there is a strong correlation between the two in the general population, but we can’t expect that to hold up under very unusual circumstances.
But to directly answer your question, no, I don’t particularly believe that NFL players commit only 17% the number of assaults that ordinary people do. Domestic assaults I’m less sure of - in many cases the reason why a domestic assault does not result in an arrest is because the victim doesn’t want it to; I’m not sure that the victims of NFL-player domestic assault are so substantially different than the victims of domestic violence in the general population. So I don’t really believe they only commit only 55% of the domestic violence that is seen in the general population either. But it would seem weird to guess that they commit 150% or 200%, which is the level that would make me think, “Wow, what the hell is up with the NFL and domestic assault?!?”
* Number of economic crimes committed probably falls as people get wealthier, but not total quantity of economic crime. If you could add up every economic crime committed by every single person in the bottom 20% income in the US in a year I wouldn’t know whether to bet on it being more or less than one Bernie Madoff.
I acknowledged that when I included the very low rates of arrest for economic crimes as compared the general public. Throw these economic crimes out, however, and the overall arrest rate would still be substantially lower than the general public, so it’s not the case that the rates of economic crimes are unfairly dragging the overall arrest rate down in comparison to domestic assault arrest rates.
And since it’s not clear that lower arrest rates actually reflects lower crime rates—as opposed to simply a lower chance of getting caught/arrested when you commit those crimes—it may make sense to use the overall arrest rate (or the rate of arrest for non-domestic assault) as a baseline by which domestic violence is properly compared.
And I think that in many—if not most—jurisdictions the opinions of the victim are irrelevant when it comes to arresting someone for domestic violence (although the cooperation of the victim may play a role when it comes to the DA pressing charges). In contrast, the views of the victim do play a role in arrests for non-domestic assault. This would cut against your reasoning. And to the extent that the victims of domestic violence perpetrated by NFL players are not differ from the general public (an assumption I would disagree with, since most victims of domestic violence aren’t in a financially unequal relationships with people worth millions), the same is true of victims of non-domestic assault committed by NFL players.
Well, it’s not clear that a lower arrest rate reflect lower crime rates, but it’s hardly clear that a lower arrest rate does not reflect a lower crime rate. The truth is probably in the middle.
That can’t really be true in practice. If the cops show up at the house and the victim of the assault says, “No, it was just a misunderstanding,” then it is going to be pretty hard to arrest anyone. At a minimum the victim will have to cooperate by supplying facts about what happened (well, in some cases, in others facts may be apparent).
I think there are a lot of complex reasons why people stay abusers, minimize their own abuse and refuse to cooperate with investigations into their abuse and I don’t think assault against strangers or acquaintances is a good analogue. I think a lot of victims of domestic violence are in financially unequal relationships. Some of those victims are in financially unequal relationships where the inequality is in their favour. I recognize that a big disparity like that can give one side more a lot more power, but I don’t think that domestic violence situations can be easily reduced.
At any rate, I think we’ve been over this enough. Based on the stats I’ve seen, including the article you link, I think it is very tough to argue that NFL players engage in substantially more domestic violence than the general population. I accept the point that they don’t convincingly show that the commit less domestic violence either, but a lot more just seems like too much of a stretch (as a conclusion from these facts - if more facts showed that it’s actually the case that they commit a lot more domestic violence than the general population I wouldn’t exactly be blown out of my seat with surprise). I’m going to leave it at that until there is new information.
Maybe, but they can’t not arrest someone just because the victim refuses to press charges or cooperate. So long as there is probable cause, they arrest. Contrast this to other forms of assault, where if there is no complainant then it is unlikely that anyone is arrested, regardless of whether there was probable cause to believe an assault occurred.
I’m not saying that domestic violence is analogous to non-domestic assault: I’m saying that it’s difficult to understand why NFL players would show a greater drop in non-domestic assault as compared to domestic assault, especially when strangers have significant financial incentives to claim assault while domestic partners may have significant financial motivation to suppress assault claims.
Obviously the data is not specific enough to draw any firm conclusions, but it’s interesting how they can be interpreted as showing either lower rates of domestic violence or higher propensities for domestic violence depending on how you look at it.
