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
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.
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.
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.
Looking at one of the studies mentioned, the study period was 1990-2014 [1].
Secure communities was piloted in 2008, and by 2011 appearantly still wasn't in effect in most communities [2]. Thus it seems that the low crime rate found in these studies PREDATES the secure communities program. Which would make it a tough on crime program targeting a low crime population, which would make it arbitrary and inefficient.
Consider that crime might be higher in areas with a concentration of immigrants simply because those areas intrinsically offer good opportunities for both immigrants and criminals. Good jobs/pay for people (immigrants included) also means better stuff that criminals can steal.
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.
The data shows something that is powerful but hard to internalize: a large portion of crime rates does not strongly correlate with policing but rather external environmental factors.
We often compare the difference in crime between US and Europe, or US and Canada as a direct result of the gun policy (even this article mentions this). But there are many differences between these regions. Canada and European countries all have much stronger social safety nets and typically a more close society in general (not trying to make a race homogeneity argument but one of walkability). I wish more conversation would revolve around this, but I'm afraid of the complexity in this (because you have to solve a lot of problems) makes this unattractive. But if the problems were simple to solve they probably would have been solved. Everything is highly multifactored these days.
There has actually been a large trend of decreasing crime since the 90's, when politicians talked about "super predators." A lot of research has been done on this and there's been been discussions if it is things like the decrease of lead in the air, abortions, or other things, but generally it doesn't seem that "tough on crime" was the dominating factor.
Another interesting statistic is that most Americans believe crime is increasing year over year despite the reverse happening. It's a good example of perception bias and probably is one of those factors mentioned above.
Crime correlates to poverty. People with nothing to lose roll the dice and do dumb shit.
I grew up in NYC and a rural part of Upstate NY that were about as opposite as you could get. The small town still had "bad" neighborhoods, they were run down trailer parks with old trailers and poor people. They committed the same types of stupid crimes, like robbery, vandalism and fighting. The drug trade was there, but mostly centered around smuggling and growing weed. (There are only so many drug users in a town of 2,500 without a major transit route, so the retail business wasn't great!)
In the inner city, you get the added instability of the retail drug market. IMO, population density and the retail drug business are the reason why black males get arrested more. Desperate white people are just as desperate as their black equivalent.
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
That's one interpretation. Another is that a certain percentage of Americans live in areas where crime is not just more prevalent, but (unfortunately) it's also the only thing some people living there have ever known. Areas with higher crime rates also tend to have higher police involvement (and no, law enforcement doesn't solve crime, but it is necessary to respond and help victims of crime), and where you have more involvement, you'll have higher raw numbers of anything that follows a normal distribution (e.g., moral judgement of local law enforcement officers). We can do a lot to help skew that distribution toward better-trained, effective law enforcement, but it's still a distribution, and as much as it comes at the cost of real human lives, there will be outliers in every population.
I grew up in rural America and I would describe my experiences with police in the same terms. Of course, the purpose of policing is to deter crime, not give “positive experiences”. And thanks in large part to these luxury beliefs, police departments are doing less preventative policing (routine traffic stops, etc) especially in communities of color for fear of being the next Ferguson, and consequently violent crime is soaring all over the country.
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.
Lots of factors contribute to change in criminal activity, urbanization, rise of income inequality but also more people in segregated areas will probably not work out very well either.
In addition, studies like this one (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9125.1...) have found that the relationship between crime rates and undocumented immigrants actually decreases
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
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