Economist: Half of Ferguson’s Young Black Men Are ‘Missing’ [+video]

black signNearly 50 percent of the young black men in Ferguson, Missouri have gone “missing” from their communities thanks to prison, premature death, and other social dysfunctions, according to an analysis by economist Stephen Bronars for Forbes.

Ferguson is currently being vilified after a federal report slammed the city’s police department for violating blacks’ civil rights and employing only four black officers on a force of more than 50. Now, however, an economist has published a stark analysis of the demographics in Ferguson, revealing that one reason the town infamous for Michael Brown’s death has so few black police is that half of its young men have disappeared from society altogether.

According to Ferguson’s federal census data, Bronars notes, there are 1,182 black women in Ferguson between the ages of 25 and 34. In comparison, however, there are only 577 black men within the same age range. The gap is smaller but still vast in other age ranges; black men are about 40 percent below the numbers they should have for the 20-24 and 35-54 age ranges.

There are peripheral factors, Bronars says, that play a small role in creating the gap. Black men in the military aren’t counted in Ferguson’s census data, and a marginally higher number of them have died for one reason or another.

The biggest causes of the disappearing black men are representative of crippling social dysfunctions in Ferguson. Hundreds of men from the city are in prison, while others fall through the cracks of census data due to problems like homelessness and crippling substance abuse. (Read more from “Economist: Half of Ferguson’s Young Black Men Are ‘Missing’ [+video]” HERE)

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