The purpose of this post is to cite the extent of black crime around the world. The first section is concerned with black crime in the United States. This section should not be terribly surprising to most people since I assume (hope) most people are aware that black people are disproportionately engaged in crime in the United States. I believe the latter two sections contain information that most people are not aware of. The second section covers misconduct among black children in the United States. The third and final section covers black crime and misconduct outside of the United States. The last two sections, especially the last section, will probably be educational for the vast majority of people reading this post. If not, the post at the very least serves as a useful fact sheet for those interested in this topic.
Category: Criminality
Police killings and black crime
In light of the killing of George Floyd, there has been much discussion regarding anti-black bias in the criminal justice system (CJS) in the United States. It seems to me that the mainstream assumption is that the disproportionate police killings of black people is strong evidence of an anti-black bias in the CJS. My goal in this post is to refute this assumption. I believe that an honest and impartial assessment of all of the relevant data provides strong reason to deny that the disproportionate police killings of blacks is evidence of anti-black bias. I will argue that the best explanation of disproportionate police killings against blacks doesn’t involve any appeal to an anti-black bias. The best explanation consists in the fact that black people disproportionately engage in criminal activity and the fact that the police disproportionately kill criminals.
Exploring two common explanations of the black-white crime gap
The purpose of this post is to explore two commonly hypothesized explanations of the high levels of criminality in the black population. The first explanation states that high rates of black crime is primarily the result of systemic racism against blacks. The second explanation states that high rates of black crime is primarily the result of the structural or socioeconomic circumstances that black people find themselves in. I will present data that should prompt skepticism of both of these explanations. I’ll begin by describing racial differences in crime.
Studies attempting to explain the black-white crime gap
In a previous post, I provided reasons to be skeptical of SES-based explanations of black criminality. This post provides studies that attempt to more rigorously examine the relationship between SES and black criminality. At the city and state level, crime is more strongly associated with the presence of blacks than it is with low-SES conditions. At the neighborhood level, studies suggest that controlling for SES can statistically account for a moderate portion of the black-white gaps in crime (although findings are mixed on the magnitude of the explained gap). Regardless, as I will argue below, such studies cannot demonstrate causality. That is, they cannot demonstrate that racial differences in neighborhood SES cause any portion of the racial gap in crime.
Causes of disproportionate black crime
In a previous post, I argued that systemic racism and socioeconomic status (SES) were poor explanations of disproportionate levels of black crime. I concluded with the claim that the intelligence gap (or IQ gap), not the SES gap, is the primary cause of the disproportionate levels of black crime. In other words, the IQ gap is the primary cause of the disparities in crime between blacks and whites. I will defend this claim in the first half of this post. Another significant cause of the black-white crime gap seems to be differences in family structure between blacks and whites, e.g. racial differences in the rates of single-mother households and out-of-wedlock birth rates. I will explore the importance of family structure in the second half of the post.