Try to keep things civil yo.
The statement "GroupA commits more crime than groupB" could be unreliable based on interpretation of the statement.
It might depend on how you measure crime. Consider situations where someone commits a relatively minor crime (e.g. Keep off the grass), but doesn't realise that they have committed a crime, or a situation where authorities know a crime has taken place, but cannot prove who the perpetrator was.
So data on crimes committed is very difficult to collect in this manner, but there are other means and measurements that are easier to do.
Several seconds of Googling led me to
wiki, which shows a table displaying statistics for prison population vs. general population split by race. Said table referenced to a study found
here. Glancing at other pages on the site, their data including prison populations seems to be based on census data.
The factor of wealth would probably be incredibly difficult to gather reliably, so probably not going to find (m)any studies with that kind of data.
But anyway, the linked study seems to indicate that certain groups are more likely to be
incarcerated than others.
There could be lots of reasons for such an imbalance.
• GroupX is more likely to be prosecuted than another group
• GroupX is more likely to be caught than another group
• GroupX is more predisposed towards crime because background/poverty/prejudice/genetics
There are also caveats to using incarceration to measure crime in general. Consider that someone of groupA commits 1000 crimes but escapes conviction, against someone of groupB who commits a single crime and does get convicted; census data would only count the convicted person despite the crime rate heavily leaning in the other direction.
It's possible that some people who are incarcerated have committed many crimes, while others may have only committed a single crime. We can probably assume that incarceration does not necessarily directly correlate to the number of crimes committed.
It's also possible for people for a persons group to change or be misreported (
e.g. The Michael Jackson Effect). We're living in (or approaching) a time where people can change gender arbitrarily, so perhaps the same situation could apply to other group distinctions in the future, which would in turn make all this comparison either meaningless or a bit more difficult.
All it takes is one bad link in a chain of a study for things to fall apart, which makes assumptions very dangerous things indeed. The assumptions here are that:
• The study didn't make any mistakes, fudge data or abuse their methodology
• The data they used for their study wasn't unreliable or flawed in the first place
There are tests for verifying the validity of a hypothesis, but they're not completely foolproof either. To be completely sure we'd have to redo the study from the ground up or perhaps do a study of the study.
Regardless of what empirical data might suggest, it's probably an unwise thing for someone to exclaim with no context. It's quite possible the person who said it had no idea what they were talking about and was repeating something they heard elsewhere like a game of Chinese whispers, or perhaps they made an assumption based on something else.
At any rate, I don't know the reasons or motives involved so I couldn't possibly begin to speculate. Blanket racism is one possibility but there could be others. Who is this "Jon Tron" anyway? Some kind of scientist perhaps?
Perhaps if he had said "people of groupA were more likely to be incarcerated than people of groupB based on x study using y data from 2010", people wouldn't be so angry at him.
As for numbers of crimes committed, we might never know...