Here, then, is the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018, with regard to “rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault“:
And here is the data for serious nonfatal violent crimes, which excludes simple assaults, and thus focuses on “rape/sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault”:
Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were 12.5% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were 60.4%. It thus appears from this data that the black per capita violent crime rate is roughly 2.3 to 2.8 times the rate for the country as a whole, while the white per capita violent crime rate is roughly 0.7 to 0.9 times the rate for the country as a whole.
It also appears that the arrest rates for violent crime are roughly comparable to the rates of offending, especially if one takes into account those offenses reported to the police (which is a choice of the victims, not of police departments). And the great bulk of such violent crime is intraracial.
The disparity is even more striking for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, which the NCVS doesn’t measure (since the crime victim can’t respond to the survey), and which thus relies on the police department reports in the UCR:
When the race of the offender was known, 55.9 percent were Black or African American, 41.1 percent were White, and 3.0 percent were of other races….
Many homicides are unsolved, and of course there is the risk of race-based investigation and enforcement. But again this is the best data we have, and it’s consistent with victim demographics—it’s clear that blacks are disproportionately likely to be murder victims—and the broadly accepted view that the overwhelming majority of homicide is intraracial.
Now naturally this reflects just aggregate statistics; the great majority of people in all racial groups don’t commit violent crimes, and even the aggregate data may differ from place to place. Moreover, this doesn’t tell us about property crimes (other than robbery, which is classified as a violent crime), because it’s so hard to approximate the true rates of offense commission there: Most such property crimes are unwitnessed, so it’s hard to gather survey data. And again, I’d love to hear any other data that might shed a different light on the violent crime statistics as well.
Still, the best data that I know of suggests that
— black-on-black violent crime is not a myth;
— blacks and whites generally commit violent crimes at substantially disparate rates (and, for homicides, sharply disparate rates); and
— as best we can tell, the disparity in arrest rates for violent crimes is pretty close to the disparity in crimes that are committed, and especially crimes that the victims report to the police.
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I want to highlight especially one chart Eugene refers to, here. It’s the FBI/UCR chart for expanded homicide data for 2019. The most startling fact it reveals is this: Even though non-Hispanic whites in the United States outnumber blacks by close to five-to-one, among murderers whose race was known, blacks outnumbered whites by 6,425 to 4,728. (Black murder victims also outnumbered white victims).
I’ve said before and I’ll say again for emphasis. Race to an extent correlates with violent crime, but it is not the cause of violent crime. Indeed, race has nothing to do with causation. The cause is to be found elsewhere, mainly, in my view, in family structure and the rearing of children by a married, stable, loving, sober mother and father who value discipline when needed and educational excellence. But the statistics are what they are, and I’m not going to either lie about them or hide them. We’re not going to fix the problem if we won’t even look at it.
Finally, my hat is off to Prof. Volokh for having the courage to write his piece in Reason. In our current academic climate of Be Woke Or Else, telling a truthful but unwelcome story takes guts.
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Would seriously be interested in what you think the answer to this question is: “Is There ‘Systemic Racism’ in Arrest Rates for NOT-SO-Serious Crime?” I ask in part because the vast majority of crime/arrests involve “not-so-serious” crime, and because I know Prof Hill cited drug crimes to Prof Volokh to support his statement that “white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates, but Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.”
In order to know the answer to your question, we’d have to know the incidence of “not-so-serious crime.” But we don’t. I’m thinking here that “not-so-serious-crime” would mean two or three things. One of them is minor property crime. We don’t know the incidence of that for the reasons Prof. Volokh explains; it tends not to be reported to the police, largely because the victims (correctly) believe it will be far down the investigation list and that they’ll never get their property or money back even if the offender is found. So we just don’t have enough info to even begin to answer the question as to what is by far the biggest category of “not-so-serious-crime.” See also this quite revealing Pew piece, showing that less than half of robberies, simple assaults, personal theft and larceny EVEN GET REPORTED TO THE POLICE, much less wind up with an arrest. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/
Another (but lesser) item that would count as a “not-so-serious-crime” would be smoking a joint. But we have at least the same not-enough-info problem there as well. The huge majority of joint smoking is done in private and consensually, so it never gets reported to or otherwise known by the authorities. Any estimate about how many joints get lit up is just a guess. Prof. Volokh wisely declines to use guesses and I join him in that.
But while all that is modestly relevant (although as it turns out, not very enlightening) it misses what is by far the main point. What worries the public about crime, and therefore drives policy, is the stuff for which we DO have figures — the figures Prof. Volokh uses. What worries the public is, specifically, murder, forcible rape, aggravated assault, armed robbery including street muggings, car jackings and home break-ins. The data — which criminal justice reformers repeatedly demand should drive policy — are in on that. Prof. Volokh cites them (while Prof. Hill says not a word). They overwhelmingly support Prof. Volokh’s conclusions, to wit, that blacks appear to commit violent crimes at a substantially higher rare per capita than do whites; there seems to be little aggregate disparity between the rate at which blacks commit violent crime and the rate at which blacks are arrested for [such] crimes; and the black-on-black crime rate is especially high.
I might add that these are the crimes for which people actually go to prison. In the real world, people do not get prison sentences for the other stuff — smoking a joint or (non-violently) making off with the microwave oven, etc.. There are occasional exceptions, sure, as there are occasional exceptions to everything, but if you want to find out how often people get sent to prison for that stuff, I again invite you to go down to your local courthouse and watch. I predict you’ll be watching a long time.
It’s to your credit that you would chime in in defense of your colleague (I kind of thought you would), but on the merits, and for the sorts of crimes that understandably and properly have the public worried and fearful, Prof. Volokh’s case is sound.
Do you disagree?
And Prof. Hill’s statement (which I’m quoting as he wrote it) that, “Black and white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates” is false. (And every single person I know who works in this field, including my opponents, knows it’s false).
I hope to reply at some length, Bill, but may not have a chance until this weekend.
OK, no problem. I just think the basics of Eugene’s conclusions and the supporting data are beyond serious dispute.
Nor am I new to this controversy. I’ve said before almost exactly what Eugene says. And I’m not the only one. Prof. Charles Ogletree of Harvard made the same observation more than 20 years ago. So have noted liberals Marc Mauer and Prof. David Cole. So has Judge Edith Jones. When she was falsely accused of racism for doing so, she was unanimously cleared by a panel chaired by then-Judge Merrick Garland, citing in part Sentencing Commission statistics that support her statement. (All this was set out in more detail three years ago, https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/03/washington-post-joins-smear-campaign-against-bill-otis.php.).
So I feel like I’ve got plenty of good company. And now that I think of it, the Pew Report linked in my entry also supports Eugene’s and my proposition: “When it comes to those who commit crimes, the same BJS survey asks victims about the perceived demographic characteristics of the offenders in the incidents they experienced. In 2019, those who are male, younger people and those who are Black accounted for considerably larger shares of perceived offenders in violent incidents than their respective shares of the U.S. population.”
Since its low point seven years ago, violent crime, and murder in particular, has seen an alarming increase. It was particularly bad last year (and continuing into this year), although it was also plenty bad in 2015 and 2016, when no one had ever heard of COVID. So that won’t work as an excuse — if we should be looking for an excuse, which we should not.
We have a problem. We need to be honest enough to face it. Intentional denial ranges from delusional to dishonest and thus deserves rejection in its own right. But if a consequentialist point be made of it, it will also make the problem worse not better — to the lethal detriment, disproportionately, of blacks.
Bill, my initial question was largely driven by the FBI data reporting there were “10,085,207 arrests in 2019. Of these arrests, 495,871 were for violent crimes.” In other words, only roughly 1 in every 20 arrests is for a violent crime (as defined by the FBI). I agree that violent crimes are justifiably what “worries the public” — but that is why I think we should be particularly worried about 95% of all police arrests being for other crimes and how that might problematically shape the perception that “Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.”
As you have noted in prior posts (and as others have discussed in response to Eugene’s response to Sean), few seem to be claiming that race alone is a causal factor in committing crime (e.g., I hear talk of poverty, family structures, childhood environments, etc, being the root causes). But, many seem to believe and fear that race alone is a causal factor in police behaviors. I sense that belief/fear of race influencing police behavior is real and quite harmful just like the fear of crime is real and quite harmful (even if not factually justified), and I would hope policy-makers and advocates would work together to address both realities. (I believe ending the “war on drugs” could help address both fears, just like the ending of alcohol Prohibition seemingly did. But I recognize reasonable differences of opinions on this front and others.)
My main point is that your shift from Sean’s discussion of ALL types of crimes/arrests to a discussion of “serious” or “violent” crimes risks whistling past the crime/policing experiences that comprise 95% of arrests (not to mention other types of non-arrest police encounters that Senator Tim Scott referenced last night). Moreover, given that I do not believe you are arguing that race alone is a causal factor in committing crime, it is not quite clear what sound policy implications you think flow from a focus on skin color rather than on factors like poverty, family structures, childhood environments, etc. I won’t try to speak for Sean, but I sense his concern is that a focus on skin color through an emphasis on so-called “Black-on-Black crime” does not really help advance any sound policy responses while it does risk (a) legitimating covert (or even overt) racialized approaches to policing where “Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest,” and (b) undercutting any and all criticism of covert (or even overt) racialized approaches to policing.
In short, I share your eagerness to be honest and clear about the data and their implications. For me, that would involve having police (and state actors more generally) even more invested in effectively addressing violent crimes and far less invested in other matters. Whether and how that might influence the race data and related narratives is interesting to speculate about.