{"id":3572,"date":"2021-04-26T17:52:37","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T00:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=3572"},"modified":"2021-04-26T17:52:37","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T00:52:37","slug":"is-there-systemic-racism-in-arrest-rates-for-serious-crime-and-do-academics-lie-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeandconsequences.blog\/?p=3572","title":{"rendered":"Is There “Systemic Racism” in Arrest Rates for Serious Crime? And Do Academics Lie About It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The answer to the first question appears from the data to be no.\u00a0 The answer to the second is yes.\u00a0 As to whether the first subject or the second is more pressing, you’ll have to make up your own mind, but they’re both extraordinarily important to the policing debate we’re having in this country.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Perhaps the single most vocal complaint about claimed racism in policing is that cops arrest blacks much more frequently than whites for the same or similar serious offenses.\u00a0 Thus, Prof. Sean Hill of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State stated in his recent op-ed<\/a> in the Columbus Dispatch:<\/p>\n

The reality is that\u00a0Black-on-Black crime is a myth,<\/a>\u00a0and that Black and white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates, but Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A casual friend of mine, the highly regarded libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA, examined this assertion in his article<\/a> in Reason magazine.\u00a0 He put his conclusions up front:<\/p>\n

—\u00a0 blacks appear to commit violent crimes at a substantially higher rare per capita than do whites;<\/p>\n

—\u00a0 there seems to be little aggregate disparity between the rate at which blacks commit violent crime (especially when one focuses on crimes where the victims say they reported the crimes to the police) and the rate at which blacks are arrested for [such] crimes; and<\/p>\n

—\u00a0 the black-on-black crime rate is especially high.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Prof. Hill’s incendiary attack on supposedly racist policing is flat-out false; as we have seen so often, the demand for racism exceeds the supply.\u00a0 The shortfall is filled in by lying.<\/p>\n

I found Eugene’s expose’ of this fabrication especially convincing for two reasons.\u00a0 First, libertarians are not in general wildly sympathetic to the police.\u00a0 To the contrary, they, even more so than liberals, have been leading the attack against police unions, against qualified immunity, and against (what the see as) military-style weapons in police hands.\u00a0 Second, Eugene’s sources are excellent\u00a0 —\u00a0 he uses what is generally regarded as the gold standard for crime and policing statistics, the the National Crime Victimization Survey and the U.S. Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics.<\/p>\n

Eugene takes us to the original source:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

Here, then, is the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’\u00a0Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018<\/em><\/a>, with regard to “rape\/sexual assault, robbery,\u00a0aggravated assault<\/a>, and\u00a0simple assault<\/a>“:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And here is the data for serious nonfatal violent crimes, which excludes\u00a0simple assaults<\/a>, and thus focuses on “rape\/sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault”:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were\u00a012.5%<\/a>\u00a0of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were\u00a060.4%<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0intraracial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n
When<\/a> 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….<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2014it’s clear that blacks are disproportionately likely to be\u00a0murder victims<\/a>\u2014and the broadly accepted view that the overwhelming majority of homicide is\u00a0intraracial<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Still, the best data that I know of suggests that<\/p>\n

—\u00a0 black-on-black violent crime is not a myth;<\/p>\n

—\u00a0 blacks and whites generally commit violent crimes at substantially disparate rates (and, for homicides, sharply disparate rates); and<\/p>\n

—\u00a0 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*****************************************************<\/p>\n

I want to highlight especially one chart Eugene refers to, here<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s the FBI\/UCR chart for expanded homicide data for 2019.\u00a0 The most startling fact it reveals is this:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (Black murder victims also outnumbered white victims).<\/p>\n

I’ve said before and I’ll say again for emphasis.\u00a0 Race to an extent correlates with violent crime, but it is not the cause of violent crime.\u00a0<\/em> Indeed, race has nothing to do with causation.<\/em>\u00a0 The cause is to be found elsewhere, mainly,\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But the statistics are what they are, and I’m not going to either lie about them or hide them.\u00a0 We’re not going to fix the problem if we won’t even look at it.<\/p>\n

Finally, my hat is off to Prof. Volokh for having the courage to write his piece in Reason.\u00a0 In our current academic climate of Be Woke Or Else, telling a truthful but unwelcome story takes guts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The answer to the first question appears from the data to be no.\u00a0 The answer to the second is yes.\u00a0 As to whether the first subject or the second is more pressing, you’ll have to make up your own mind, but they’re both extraordinarily important to the policing debate we’re having in this country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policing","category-social-factors"],"yoast_head":"\nIs There "Systemic Racism" in Arrest Rates for Serious Crime? 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