Race and Crime

For John, BLUF:  The problem is, crime is done by individuals and it is wrong to place blame on groups, most of whose members are innocent.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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I love looking at the statistics of a problem, but realize that the statistics may obscure some important details.  I found a very long article at The Unz Review.  This item is a year and a half old, but still perhaps timely.  The Author, Mr Ron Unz, talks to "Race and Crime in America:  The unspoken statistical reality of urban crime over the last quarter century."

Here is a key part of the 7,300 word story.

The small city of Palo Alto is one of the most desirable local residential areas, home to the late Steve Jobs, as well as the current CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and a host of other companies; by some estimates, it may contain the world’s highest per capita concentration of billionaires.  On three sides, Palo Alto abuts communities of a similar character: Mountain View, containing Google; the Stanford University campus; and Menlo Park, the center of America’s venture capital industry.  But on the fourth side, mostly separated by Highway 101, lies East Palo Alto, which for decades was a dangerous ghetto, overwhelmingly black.

I moved back to Palo Alto from New York City in 1992, and that year East Palo Alto recorded America’s highest per capita murder rate; although relatively few of the homicides, robberies, and rapes spilled across the border, enough did to leave many people uneasy.  Gated communities and even street fences are quite uncommon in the region, and for years anyone who wished could go to the home of Steve Jobs and walk around his yard or even peer into his windows.  Meanwhile, the sort of harsh racial profiling widely practiced in some large cities was completely abhorrent to the socially liberal citizenry. One may easily imagine a scenario in which escalating street crime from the ghetto next door might have produced a collapse in high housing prices and sparked a massive flight of the wealthy.

One reason this did not occur was the vast influx of impoverished immigrants from south of the border that swept into the less affluent communities of the region during those same years and rapidly transformed the local demographics.  Between 1980 and 2010 the combined Hispanic population of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties nearly tripled.  A city offering cheap housing such as East Palo Alto saw far greater relative increases, reversing its demographics during that period from 60% black and 14% Hispanic to 16% black and 65% Hispanic. Over the last twenty years, the homicide rate in that small city dropped by 85%, with similar huge declines in other crime categories as well, thereby transforming a miserable ghetto into a pleasant working-class community, now featuring new office complexes, luxury hotels, and large regional shopping centers.  Multi-billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife recently purchased a large $9 million home just a few hundred feet from the East Palo Alto border, a decision that would have been unthinkable during the early 1990s. Technology executives are highly quantitative individuals, skilled in pattern recognition, and I find it difficult to believe that they have all remained completely oblivious to these local racial factors.

However the powerful role of immigration in transforming the crime rates of important urban centers probably had a much smaller impact on the national totals.  The combined black populations of New York City, Washington, and Los Angeles may have dropped by half a million over the last two decades, but the individuals pushed out did not disappear from the world; they merely moved to Atlanta or Baltimore or Riverside.  But from the personal perspective of America’s ruling elite, they did indeed disappear.

For over thirty years, local black activists in Washington, D.C. have accused the ruling white power structure of promoting “The Plan,” a deliberate strategy of removing most of the black population from our national capital and replacing them with whites; and this “conspiracy theory” has been endlessly ridiculed as absurdly paranoid nonsense by our elite Washington media.  Meanwhile, during this same thirty year period, Washington’s black population dropped from over 70% to less than half and will probably fall below the white total within the next few years.

The way I read it, Hispanic immigration, legal and not, has worked to reduce urban crime.  That is an interesting point.  It raises questions about other things that have supposedly reduced crime, such as the "Broken Window Theory"♠ and New York City's "Stop and Frisk".♥

Consider that over one-quarter of all the urban black males in America have vanished from our society, a loss-ratio approaching that experienced by Europeans during the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Yet these astonishing statistics have largely remained unreported by our major media and hence unrecognized by the general American public. Should the medieval scribes of the Fourteenth Century have ignored the annihilating impact of the bubonic plague all around them and merely confined their writings to more pleasant news?

I am not sure what this means, exactly, but when I EMailed the author it bounced back, so I am reduced to trying to figure it out by looking at the Census Bureau data.  Not much luck, actually.  However, I did find data on sex ratio by race, here.  The average is 96.1 males per females.  The lowest ratio is 90.1.  That would be for Blacks.  See the Chart, below:

There may, in fact, be large cultural differences that might well need to be bridged.  Here is a Census Chart from 2002.

Yes, it is twelve year old data, but the most recent I found surfing the web.  To the chart, the sharp differences look bad to someone who thinks that Subsidiarity is, in fact, the genius of the American system.  If there is no family, there is no family as the lowest level of self-government.

Having said all that, the Unz article might suggest to some that Republicans are racist, rather than the idea that Progressives want Hispanics to displace Blacks.  This article, by PJ Media author Rick Moran, says "Racism Isn’t the Reason Southern Whites Have Abandoned Democrats".  Further, the author suggests that "Liberal condescension toward southerners is a far greater factor than racism in the Democrats' decline."

Yes, it is likely that way back in 2009 the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, was correct when he said:

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

Not that we are hiding behind some rock, but that we are affair that we will upset the apple cart and have nothing to gain from it.  The danger of too many hurt feelings—All pain with no gain.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I have heard it argued that the suppression of petty crime merely results in a reduction of snitches and sources for the police and leads to over-policing and too many people in prison.
♥  To me Stop and Frisk is just flat our Unconstitutional.