> In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks.
This is untrue. From my prior research, virtually every analysis concludes the opposite - that income alone cannot explain the difference in crime rate between black and white Americans. Most studies show income as 30-60% of that regression, which is huge, but when comparing similar income brackets, African Americans have a higher crime rate than whites in almost all of them under $100k. To cover the full difference, it's necessary to bring in other factors (in particular, the rate of single parent households). Please cite a source for the claim you have made or retract it.
> > the fact is... violent (fatal and nonfatal) crimes do happen at a much higher rate in poor neighborhoods
> I think this statement is worth examining.
Are you trying to suggest that there are a large number of unreported, undiscovered murders in more affluent areas? Because that's one of the the kinds of violent crime that we're pretty sure happen disproportionately in poor or black communities. (you're more likely to be murdered if you're poor, and more likely to be murdered if you're black, with IIRC the richest 20% of blacks still being murdered more often than the poorest 20% of non-hispanic whites)
> we can change the reason for the statistical correlation: poverty.
Even within the same income bracket, the black homicide rate is an order of magnitude larger than the white one (and after 1975, the homicide rate of the richest blacks is larger than of the poorest whites):
>The unfortunate truth is that black people are more likely to commit violent crime in the US.
It doesn't make much sense to cite the proportion of black people convicted of a crime by US law enforcement as evidence refuting the claim that the US law enforcement's interaction with people changes according to their race. The proportion of black people convicted of [category] crimes could be high for many reasons, including actually higher incidence of such crimes among blacks, racial prejudices at various points along the legal path of alleged criminals, and any combination of those or other factors.
> There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it.
I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.
> So poor blacks kill each other in huge numbers, and poor whites don't. What's your point exactly?
90% of black murder victims are killed by black perpetrators, 84% of white murder victims are killed by white perpetrators, so I'm not sure why you suggested that poor white people don't kill each other. My point is that the higher black on black homicide rate is what we'd expect to see for a population that is disproportionately concentrated into densely populated low income regions, which will push up their representation in overall homicide stats.
> Also, maybe you missed the black on white numbers which are off the charts compared to the inverse
What exactly does off the charts mean?
13.6% of white murders are committed by black people, 7.6% of black murders are committed by white people, so yes, blacks murder whites at a higher rate, that is clear, but what is your point?
> because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws.
Not correct. Blacks don't disproportionally break laws. The problem is that non-violent crimes in America are disproportionally enforced. Several Thousand, probably close to a million cases of illegal white collar crime go unenforced every year. Stuff like insider trading, corruption, fraud, laundering, etc. Crimes that white people are more likely to break simply are not regularly enforced. Non-violent crimes like drug possession in Black urban areas are highly enforced, while whites in suburb areas use drugs at the same rate, are not enforced. There is a bias in the enforcement laws
> More white people than black live in poverty, yet blacks commit crime at far higher rates. For statistics see FBI and DOJ crime data:
1 in 10 whites live in poverty compared to 1 in 4 blacks so it's not true that more whites live in poverty (unless you're talking about absolute numbers, which doesn't tell us anything meaningful in a comparison to the black crime rate).
> Discrimination appears to be indirect, stemming from the amplification of initial disadvantages over time, along with the social construction of "moral panics" and associated political responses. The "drug war" of the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated the disproportionate representation of blacks in state and federal prisons
> Blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, suffer much higher rates of robbery and homicide victimization than do whites. Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black males and females. These differences result in part from social forces that ecologically concentrate race with poverty and other social dislocations.
I agree that the topic could use more good science and research.
> but I smell a weasel in the phrase 'crime rate', because law enforcement is discretionary and also/therefore racist
> This is why homicide rates are useful. For most cases, it is pretty obvious a crime of some sort occurred.
Tldr; homicide conviction rates are subject to other artifacts and can't support either side very well without additional data.
Law enforcement is discretionary not just in deciding what counts as a crime but in who they decide to investigate and other tactics employed. Not that this hugely affects any relative statistics, but the murder false imprisonment rate is estimated at 4-11%, and false imprisonment (as far as we can tell from subsequent DNA exhoneration and whatnot -- this might not be representative of all murders) disproportionately affects black people. Not that this necessarily says anything about broad crime racial statistics, but it could throw any direct comparisons off.
More importantly though, 30-40% of murders go unsolved, and it's probably not reasonable to assume that distribution to reflect the distribution of successfully convicted murders (if for no other reason than the race<->income correlation). That's such a huge monkey wrench in any comparative statistics that murder conviction rates without any additional information don't strongly support either side of things.
> you have people on HN saying pretty much that most of the black people who get shot and killed by police deserved it and that black people are stupid violent criminals so it's no wonder they get killed so often
I haven't seen anyone say anything so nasty, but I have seen the FBI's crime statistics:
Blacks make up 13.2% of the population, yet are arrested for 49.4% of the murders (3.7x their share), 32.5% of the forcible rapes (2.4x), 54.9% of the robberies (4.1x), 34.1% of the aggravated assaults (2.5x), 38.5% of the violent arson (2.9x) and 31.9% of other assaults (2.4x). The numbers for whites (77.1% of the population) are 48.2% of the murders (.6x),
Now, it's important to note that the explanation is almost certainly due to poverty and class; class in America being unfortunately highly correlated with race. It's also important to note there are almost certainly structural factors which protect some whites from being fairly arrested and lead to some blacks being unfairly arrested.
Given those violent crime statistics, is it not understandable that people in a potentially violent situation fear more for their lives when facing a random black, who is approximately 6.1 times more likely to commit murder than a random white?
And in fact, adjusted for the racial disparity in homicides, the police are 1.7 times more likely to kill whites than blacks; adjusted for the racial disparity in cop-killing, the police are 1.3 times more likely to kill whites than blacks[1].
'Black people' are not 'stupid violent criminals,' and anyone who says so is a racist idiot. But a higher percentage of black people are violent criminals, and thus it's no wonder that a higher percentage (but fewer absolutely, and fewer adjusted for the higher rate of crime!) get killed for violent crime.
Now, how does one reduce the racial disparity (by reducing the rate of black criminality to that of white criminality, not vice versa, I hope)? That's really tough to answer. Maybe it has something to do with ending the War on Some Drugs, which takes fathers away from their families; maybe it involves basic income, which would eliminate poverty; maybe it involves school choice and/or vouchers, to enable blacks to escape terrible schools and get good educations; maybe it involves using social persuasion to reduce the culture of violence (fat chance when that culture is so highly profitable!).
> It appears blacks committed 52.2% of homicides from 1976 through 2005 while representing 12.3% of the population .
We can take this further: It should not be compared against the total population, but segmented by traits known to be associated with violent crime, like poverty. But even then, since violence is itself cultural, I'd expect certain area's to be more unsafe than others, despite similar levels of poverty. So we'd need to look at blacks and non-blacks in those specific areas and compare those specific traits. I'm _sure_ someone has done this study, does anyone have enough familiarity with this area to provide some high quality references?
> African Americans commit a disproportionately large amount of violent crimes. It seems reasonable to expect that they also commit a larger amount of misdemeanors and minor infractions.
There is no obvious causal reason to link violent offenses and non-violent offenses. In fact, in my experience, I would expect an inverse causal relationship. I know quite a few ... people ... who would pick your pocket, steal from your house, etc. but would never actually physically assault somebody.
Your statement might be true, but some data is required.
Of the 12,664 murders 4,077 were cases where offender's race was unknown leaving 8,587. Males were responsible for about 90%. 90% of 8,587= 7,728 US murders we know to be committed by males. White males committed 45.2% of 7,728 murders which = 3,143 murders. Black males committed 52.4% of 7,728 murders which = 4,049 murders. Black males make up 7% of this nation's population with about 19m individuals. White males make up about 28% of this nation's population with about 112m individuals.
Odds of a white man being a murderer: 1 in 35,634.
Odds of a black man being a murderer: 1 in 4,693.
African American male is 9 times more likely to commit homicide. It's very unlikely that biased policing is the cause of 9x homicide conviction rate.
> this violent crime rate disparity exists even when controlling for SES
That's exactly the kind of additional data I was asking for. I just didn't think murder conviction rates by themselves were sufficient evidence to support the claims they were being thrown against.
> Criminologists consider homicides to be reliable because it's difficult for police to ignore homicides.
That side-steps my point a bit doesn't it (in hindsight I should have been more clear)? Being difficult to ignore makes homicides generally reliable for some kinds of comparisons (e.g. comparing violent crime between countries), but that reliability doesn't transfer well. E.g., when a plausible suspect is thrown in jail the spotlight is removed from everyone involved. I gave specific examples where despite a high reliability in overall murder rates, piggybacking on that reliability to lend credibility to the racial distribution of conviction rates isn't justified (without additional information). The rest of your comment notwithstanding (I did appreciate it and do generally agree with you), rebutting by reaffirming points I already agree with and pulling in criminologists as experts in the vaguest way possible isn't satisfactory.
> Note again that virtually no one is arguing that blacks are inherently criminal, but that these disparities are a vestige of centuries of severe institutional racism--it would be shocking if no disparities remained only 60 years after the formal end of Jim Crow.
No argument here. I tend to agree with the claim, but the evidence (based on murder conviction rates) was suspect.
> If blacks commit so much crime, why, and if they don't, why are the numbers inaccurate?
We don't know this because the figures cited are biased towards successful convictions. If white folks are able to afford better, more competent lawyers, you can expect them to mount successful defenses. I've never, ever, seen anyone post the 13/50 stat without acknowledging this fact in their comments or replies. And I've seen it a lot.
"It doesn't make much sense to cite the proportion of black people convicted of a crime by US law enforcement as evidence refuting the claim that the US law enforcement's interaction with people changes according to their race. "
It actually does.
The rate of violent crime among African Americans is massively disproportionate. There's no way any kind of racial bias on the part of police could account for it.
A major study done in the late 2000's actually showed that while African Americans did receive more punishment for similar crimes - once 'criminal history' was taken into consideration, the difference evaporated.
Given that there is a massive difference in 'recorded convictions' (which is arguably biased because of 'racist cops') and numerous attempts to study the prevalence of racism in the system - it's pretty safe to assume that there's no way on earth that 'racist cops' are why there is why African Americans are about 700% more likely to commit violent crimes than others.
It's a sad situation, surely, but it's important to keep the facts in check.
About 50% of violent crime in America is committed by African American men, though they are only about 7% of the population (about 13% including women). This is quite radically high and it's not even explained by poverty.
The sheer size of the discrepancy between ethnic groups is unsettling.
How is this even possible? Aren't black responsible for more than 50% of the murders despite being only 13% of the population? These stats don't add up.
> Are you trying to suggest that there are a large number of unreported, undiscovered murders in more affluent areas?
No. I didn't mention murders - is there a reason you're focused on them?
I'm saying that the same forces the put poor communities of color at risk for crime also likely disrupt the collection of statistics in more wealthy & powerful communities. This is important because both sides of the ratio matter. I believe there's more crime in vulnerable communities and I believe that we likely over-estimate how much more. This generates statistics that support the over-policing of poor communities.
This is untrue. From my prior research, virtually every analysis concludes the opposite - that income alone cannot explain the difference in crime rate between black and white Americans. Most studies show income as 30-60% of that regression, which is huge, but when comparing similar income brackets, African Americans have a higher crime rate than whites in almost all of them under $100k. To cover the full difference, it's necessary to bring in other factors (in particular, the rate of single parent households). Please cite a source for the claim you have made or retract it.
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