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Here's a little bit of incomplete thinking about the classic "13/53" number, which is a ballpark figure (varying year to year) that represents the fact that black people are overrepresented by a factor of about 5x in crime. I see a lot of people tend to interpret this number as "black people are 5x more likely to commit crimes", but that might not actually be the case.
Concretely, there's two ways this stat could come about:
a. There are 5x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 1x the rate of white criminals.
b. There are 1x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 5x the rate of white criminals.
There is of course a continuum between them, but I think it's useful to focus on the two endpoints because the endpoints have totally different policy responses and also suggest totally different causes.
For example, the policy response to (a) is that we need more police to catch a lot more black criminals. The policy response to (b) is that we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes.
They also suggest different causes. Scenario (a) suggests something (HBD, special kinds of poverty not reflected in census stats) causes blacks to have a higher criminal propensity, whereas (b) suggests police might just be extra lenient towards black criminals thereby giving them more time on the street in which they commit more crimes.
Interestingly, while the theory of police abandonment will get you cancelled today, it was very much the theory pushed by black community leaders in the 90's. It was one of the things leading to "3 strikes" laws (long prison sentences for the 3'rd crime in order to get rid of the very worst criminals).
I have recently discovered some weak evidence in favor of theory (b) while going down an internet rabbithole on a totally different topic. Specifically, look at the first graph in this analysis:
https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis/blob/master/Compas%20Analysis.ipynb
The "decile score" of the x-axis is a reasonably predictive index of a convicted criminal committing new crimes. The dominant features in the model generating the index are things like "# of previous crimes", "was the current crime violent", etc. As can be seen from the graph, white criminals are overrepresented on the left tail (little repeat crime risk) of the graph, whereas black criminals are spread evenly. Of course, this evidence is very weak - it's only about criminals up for parole in a certain region of Florida.
Does anyone know of more data on this?
Option c: blacks are 5x as much "overpoliced" or white criminals are 1/5 as likely to be caught and convicted.
I took a college class that claimed that black drug users were much more likely to purchase and use drugs in public, where the cops eventually catch them. White drug users buy and use illegal drugs in private residences. White and black Americans have comparable drug use rates, but the black ones are caught more.
This obviously doesn't explain differing homicide rates. And take stuff a college class asserted with a big grain of salt. But to some degree maybe white people are better criminals and cops don't typically crack down on upstanding whites.
This data is self reported, so is very questionable. Even then the self reported rates are pretty significantly different IIRC. Something like 20-30% higher for black people.
The difference in jail time/convictions for drug use is mostly down to a difference in dealing anyways. IE black people aren't actually caught for personal use that much more, but are a disproportionate amount of dealers (or at minimum, dealers who are caught)
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Studies based on the National Crime Victimization Survey show a close match between the racial demographics of criminals as reported by those claiming to have been victimized and the racial demographics of those arrested for those crimes. The 13/53 figure is specifically based on murder and is thus technically not covered since murder victims cannot be surveyed, but violent crimes in general are included and show a similar but somewhat lesser disparity. (Generally the racial disparity is larger the more violent and severe the crime is, so murder has a larger disparity than violent crime in general, which has a larger disparity than crime in general. So while the crime victimization survey also doesn't cover crimes without victims, those have a smaller disparity to begin with, and white criminals with victims answering the National Crime Victimization Survey don't seem to be getting away with it more.)
I'm kind of with @TIRM on this one but have a slightly different theory on the mechanism. I think a good chunk of the difference comes down to public housing, which due to reasons both historical and economic skews overwhelmingly black. When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans. This also conveniently explains a lot of the victimization statistics as Gang wars tend to happen in areas where the gangs hold sway and methed-out psychos generally have issues with bus fare.
What we have is a situation there are certain geographical pockets of violent crime that are so extreme that they are skewing the statistics for the entire population.
Edit to Add: this also ties in with @hanikrummihundursvin's comment below.
Rural South has a lot more shootings and murders than rural Washington, Vermont, or Idaho. There are indeed pockets of extreme crime, but it is by all means false that all “crime problem” is concentrated there.
Yes, the rural south may have more shootings per capita but I don't think that proves as much as you think it proves. Two murders in Smallville might be statistically equivalent to 500 in Metropolis but the latter is going to show up in the national statistics more than the former.
Sure, most of the crime is committed in cities, and these have most impact on national statistics, but what I point out is still a death blow to your argument as stated above:
The places you listed do most of work in bringing up the national crime rate, but it doesn't mean that there is no "crime problem" outside of these. Heavily black areas in the South have huge crime problem, with homicide rates often nearing those of big cities with lots of crime.
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This is a greatly underpowered answer. While the study shades at blaming racism, the fact is affluent black young men appear to commit a lot more crime than white peers in the same income and housing.
Black people have a much higher propensity to crime at every income level, but single motherhood alone makes up almost all that difference. The problem is much clearer than people often let on.
The father is usually alive. Parents don't live together probably because one, or maybe both parents are assholes. These traits are passed to children. Doesn't neccessarily mean that forcing parents to live together will eliminate the gap. Remember, pre Civil-rights era such horrible share of single parent household didn't exist and the crime gap was about the same.
Obviously the parent is still alive, the question is if they are contributing to child care in any meaningful way. Just splitting the time between households is probably not meaningfully different than having 1 parent. The benefit of nuclear family is probably mostly in having more child rearing labor at any time. You actually see the same effect in Japan, except with traditional multi generational families having better outcomes vs nuclear families.
This may have some effect, but given that even significantly heritable factors like height and intelligence aren't that inheritable (I think IQ is roughly 30%?), it really doesn't fit.
Pre ~1950 data isn't that good in the first place, (EDIT: actually even now I don't think the data is excellent) but there is a pretty huge uptick in crime that fits very well with the adolescence of the first generation of single parent children.
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I think you're looking at different parts of the elephant. Suppose propensity to commit violence has a distribution that, like the normal distribution, has the property that a small shift of the mean results in a large change at the tails. If that's true, if black people overall have a slightly higher mean propensity to commit violence, the tail of black people with a VERY high propensity to commit violence will be much larger than the same tail of white people, and will account for most of the staggering numbers like 13/53.
That, plus a tendency for blacks to live in conditions(eg, single motherhood, poverty, drug use) where that propensity is more likely to be realized.
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Firstly that's not what the study says, secondly in order to actually rebutt my hypothesis you'd have to first answer the question; where are these "affluent black young men" coming from?
Prince Georges County, Maryland is the wealthiest predominantly-black county in America, but its crime rate is pretty high.
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Well, they appear largely to be too young to have made the money themselves...
There may be studies that show a zip code breakdown that says that within zip codes there is no difference. I am not aware of such a study. This Times article appears to make the claim that living in wealthy neighborhoods does not protect black men from the devil of racism, which would seem to rebut your theory to an extent.
I never said it was poverty asshole, It's culture. As much as wokesters and their fellow travelers like to make hay out of blacks making up 38 percent of those incarcerated despite being only 15 percent of the general population, the fact remains that "is the son of a single mother" remains a far stronger predictor of whether someone will spend time in prison than their skin color, and that's a big part of why establishment liberals would rather make it about race.
Thing is that woke left and alt right have both made rolling their eyes at and talking down "boomer social-cons" a major component of their identity, and the last thing any of them want to do is admit that the Republicans were right about anything.
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Iirc, Scott looked into this at one point. The takeaway was that the "within the last year" rates were reported to be similar, but the "within the last week" rates showed a large discrepancy. And anecdotally similar to the "in public" point, when I encounter people out in the world who show signs of drug use, such as blatantly smelling like weed, they are almost always black, wildly in excess of any plausible discrepancy in use rates. I assume the real difference is how much people worry about being caught.
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Is this based on self-reports, or actual research?
This is exactly why OP with homicide rates, and not drug convictions. In fact, it is Black murder victims that have lower clearance rate, which combined with the fact that most crime is intraracial, implies that, if anything, it is Black people who are likely to get away with murder.
What would you expect other than self reporting? These are illegal acts done (by sensible people) in private. Other than asking people or performing random drug testing we aren't going to get use rates.
I mean, given that blacks have both higher rates of mental illness and lower average iq, we can expect far fewer of them to be sensible people(hence, public drug use).
Low effort, highly inflammatory, no argumentation or evidence. Don't post like this, please.
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This does nothing to address TIRM's point. It's just a low-effort swipe at black people.
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Counter point to that theory is crime victimization surveys. Arrest rates match rather closely with self reported victimization rates. If there were any relevant amount of white criminals going underpoliced you would see that discrepancy in the victimization surveys.
I'd also argue, as a counterweight to the idea that black criminals are more policed relative to white criminals, that black criminals are more likely than white criminals to get away with serious crimes without being arrested due to the sheer amount of crimes being committed in the areas that make up the bulk of black crime rates. Like, for example, in Chicago where the majority of homicides go unsolved.
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