They haven't been getting a pass, criminalization is just totally ineffective at dealing with the problem. As far as disproportionate enforcement goes, rural and suburban Americans haven't been murdering anyone at nearly the rate of inner city gangs, which is a big part of why there's more enforcement in urban areas.
It was already said that violent crime rates are actually higher in rural areas than urban ones, but it should also be mentioned that areas with high minority populations, especially black communities, are more heavily policed.
As someone who came to America undocumented at the age of 5, my personal intuition is that undocumented people tend to be more fearful of authority and therefore more likely to avoid getting in trouble
If you consider the murder closure rate in most cities, selective enforcement of violent crimes seems absolutely normal - the cops simply will not find everyone who kills someone and track them down. They're not very good at it.
This undermines a lot of the certainty of punishment and therefore the deterring factor of law enforcement, of course.
Are population density factored in? My guess would be that a higher proportion of poor white people live in rural areas, compared with poor black people, and out in the sticks crimes are more likely to go unnoticed (you're less likely to get picked up painting or even shooting stop signs than tagging walls in a city, I expect) or to not happen due to lack of opportunity (what, you gonna go on a pick-pocketing spree at the Piggly Wiggly checkout line?)
(I'm not saying that's definitely what causes the difference to persist when income-adjusted, I'm just curious if you found that to be factored in, somehow, in the research you've seen)
[EDIT] I guess for international readers or US readers who haven't spent much time in the country, I should clarify that shooting street signs, mostly stop signs, is a (perhaps surprisingly) common activity in the rural US. You'll see lots of bullet-holes in signs if you drive around a bit in that kind of area. It's the rural equivalent of putting bumper stickers on the back of them, I guess.
Why should cities have more crime than suburban and rural areas, per capita? I know we take it as a given, but I've not heard a particularly good explanation for it (other than the Mother Jones lead article).
This does not match with my experience in poor areas. In my experience, the bar to get in trouble with the police is higher because of the vastly greater violent crime rates. Most minor laws see zero enforcement
This isn't true. There are many poor communities where enforcement is effective and theft and crime are low too. It is all about the expectation of consequences and community standards.
If those numbers have been consistent for decades despite the police being given harsher and harsher tools for dealing with them, perhaps those tools aren't doing anything but resulting in harm to people who are not committing those crimes.
Alternatively, crimes are more common in metropolitan areas due to increased contact.
Crimes are also more likely to be reported in poor metropolitan areas. Poor minorities are more like to stay in metropolitan areas. Resulting in a rather insidious bias that's hard to adjust for.
My guess would be that law enforcement doesn't do much at all for public safety and the level of violence in any given area is probably driven by economic or other factors.
The "broken windows" theory of police enforcement doesn't stand up when compared to other Western cities. A big part of the "broken windows" theory is that small crimes, such as graffiti, created an atmosphere that allowed worse crimes to happen. And yet, if you visit Berlin, you will see a city with a shocking amount of graffiti, but very little crime. If you visit parts of London you'll see run down industrial districts, but very little crime.
Even if you confine your analysis to the USA, the "broken windows" theory of crime does not explain the relative shift in crime towards the suburbs, nor does it explain the increasing epidemic of drugs in rural areas. There is a lot that it does not explain, so it should be treated with suspicion. A theory that only explains one data point is not a theory at all.
Most Western nations have seen decreases in crime during since the late 1980s. The USA had the most crime, and the USA has seen the biggest decrease. No one knows why. New York City has seen the biggest decrease of all the big cities, but figuring out why, given the extremely multi-variate nature of the problem, will be extremely difficult to do. Even those theories that attempt to explain the decline of crime in the USA (aging of the population, Roe vs Wade, unleaded gasoline, change in police tactics) fail to explain why New York City should see the largest decrease in crime, since one can find other cities, for any of those variables, that saw larger changes than New York City.
I'm not convinced that systemic poverty is the cause. Plenty of poorer counties and non urban, but just a poor, areas in the USA don't have these high violent crime rates.
Additionally, suburban and rural crime is rising just as quickly as urban crime. This isn't just an urban problem or an argument that dense cities are bad. It's simply that crime is rising in this time of social and economic uncertainty coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is my prevailing theory as to why minority enclaves in metropolitan areas tend to have higher violent crime. It's not socioeconomic as much as it is folks being forced to mete out justice on their own.
They're not enforcing the laws. I lived there for many years before the pandemic and it became clear the police and the city were prioritizing the drug addicts and criminals on the streets over tax paying citizens. My theory is that those in power acquired a certain perspective of human nature that says that people are inherently good and only commit violent crime because of the economic system that we have (plus other grievances). As a result it becomes unjust and cruel to punish anyone and put them in prison or removing them from society, even if they committed acts of violence repeatedly.
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