Violent domestic incidents in the NFL are actually half of that in the general public–
We’re being led to believe that the NFL as a whole is a big troubled organization, when regular society is much worse.
Rush Limbaugh took on the liberal media’s War on Football on Tuesday.
Guns, gays, domestic violence, these are topics that I frankly don’t be need to be preached to about. I don’t need to be lectured, and I certainly don’t want to turn on a football game and end up being accused of all kinds of social misbehavior.
Redstate reported on the rate of violence in the NFL:
The truth of the matter is that the rate of criminality in the NFL is lower than that of the general public. No, the NFL does not have a “violence against women problem”, or at least not one that is worse than the public in general. As Jim Picht of Communities Digital News shows us, the incidence of domestic violence by NFL players is actually around half that of the same age group in the general United States population. He cites two different studies that show similar results…one done in 1999 by Alfred Blumstein & Jeff Benedict, and another published back in July by Benjamin Morris at fivethirtyeight.com. Picht writes:
Blumstein and Benedict found that of the 342 black players in their sample, 97 of them, or 28 percent, had an arrest for one of these crimes. There were 77 whites in the sample; seven of them, or 9 percent, had an arrest
Those numbers appear high until we compare them with arrest numbers for the general population. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports provided the arrest data. For the general population, the arrest rate for assault for black men was 6,990 per 100,00, and for whites, 2,209.
The corresponding rate for NFL players, black and white, was less than half the rate for the general population.
More recently, USA Today published its USA Today NFL Arrests Database, which goes from 2000, just after the Blumstein-Benedict study, to today. Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEight’s DataLab used these data with the Bureau of Crime Statistics’ Arrest Data Analysis Tool to compare arrest rates for NFL players and the general population.
Morris looked only at the 25-30 age group, which most closely reflects the age of NFL players. What he found was that, again, NFL players have arrest rates far below the general population. Their arrest rates for domestic violence are half the rate of the general public, just as Blumstein and Benedict found. In addition, Morris found that NFL arrest rates for DUI were about one-fourth the general rate; for non-domestic assault, about one-sixth; for sex offenses, about one-half; and for non-violent gun-related offenses, about one-half.
Overall, arrest rates in the NFL are only 13 percent those for the general public among men aged 25 to 30.
