I feel like the politics around crime statistics and race are at once both fascinating and exhausting / dispiriting.
On the one hand, I've come across angry black activists and civilians (in public discourse) insisting that cops are racists, white people are committing exactly the same crimes that black people do, and cops don't care because those white people are white. And, I mean, I do kind of get it, to a point. I absolutely do know white suburban people who, say, sold some weed to their friends in high school and there wasn't a police dragnet around trying to catch those people. There likely is a certain amount of that. The more that cops are around, the more that they're likely to notice you doing stuff and getting the state involved.
But on the other hand, whenever I've tried to look into the topic of mass incarceration (I'm thinking especially here of Jill Leovy's great book "Ghettoside"), one thing that comes up constantly when talking about the kind of Hatfield-McCoy retaliatory violence in many black communities is that, historically, black communities have been massively underpoliced. Like, after the collapse of slavery and during Reconstruction, lots and lots of white people looked at the truly insane amount crime and violence in black communities, shrugged, said "that's just how black people are, it will never change, they are literally outlaws by nature, and it is not the role of the police or the state to do anything about that". And so in that sense, the police really were mostly there to try to preserve decent, civilized white communities (and thus also notably disregarded poor, dysfunctional white communities too). But the consequence of that fact was, as a practical matter, crime rates in black communities were actually much, much, much higher than whatever ended up getting reported by police statistics. And the argument in her book (covering LA around 2000, I think) is that actual black people in those communities certainly did recognize the massive amount of criminality occurring in their communities, they knew the police wouldn't help (or couldn't be trusted to be useful if they showed up anyway), and so frequently vigilante behavior seemed like a sensible response.
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I feel like the politics around crime statistics and race are at once both fascinating and exhausting / dispiriting.
On the one hand, I've come across angry black activists and civilians (in public discourse) insisting that cops are racists, white people are committing exactly the same crimes that black people do, and cops don't care because those white people are white. And, I mean, I do kind of get it, to a point. I absolutely do know white suburban people who, say, sold some weed to their friends in high school and there wasn't a police dragnet around trying to catch those people. There likely is a certain amount of that. The more that cops are around, the more that they're likely to notice you doing stuff and getting the state involved.
But on the other hand, whenever I've tried to look into the topic of mass incarceration (I'm thinking especially here of Jill Leovy's great book "Ghettoside"), one thing that comes up constantly when talking about the kind of Hatfield-McCoy retaliatory violence in many black communities is that, historically, black communities have been massively underpoliced. Like, after the collapse of slavery and during Reconstruction, lots and lots of white people looked at the truly insane amount crime and violence in black communities, shrugged, said "that's just how black people are, it will never change, they are literally outlaws by nature, and it is not the role of the police or the state to do anything about that". And so in that sense, the police really were mostly there to try to preserve decent, civilized white communities (and thus also notably disregarded poor, dysfunctional white communities too). But the consequence of that fact was, as a practical matter, crime rates in black communities were actually much, much, much higher than whatever ended up getting reported by police statistics. And the argument in her book (covering LA around 2000, I think) is that actual black people in those communities certainly did recognize the massive amount of criminality occurring in their communities, they knew the police wouldn't help (or couldn't be trusted to be useful if they showed up anyway), and so frequently vigilante behavior seemed like a sensible response.
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