Black on Black Crime

Introduction

A sociologist and criminologist asked his American colleagues why in their published research they so consistently skate over the importance of race? Is it that it is so obvious and well-known that it is not thought worth mentioning or is it a liberally-motivated conspiracy of silence? If the latter, it is particularly regrettable as America has demonstrated that there are non-repressive ways of dealing with the problem of black crime.

Analysis

These thoughts are especially brought to the fore by a perusal of her basic table of results reveals that according to U.S. census and other official data, the percentage of blacks in a community was the best single predictor of total crime rate in that community! True, the raw correlation is not high in absolute terms but, due to difficulties in measurement, this tends to be true of most correlations in social science. As one example of such a difficulty that might have applied to Jackson's data, one must remark that in large cities with a high crime rate, much crime might go unreported because the victims have come to accept it as routine or at least inevitable whereas in a low-crime small town similar incidents might be reported with energetic indignation. Thus the official statistics which were Jackson's basic data may have been distorted from the beginning. That this is more than a possibility is suggested by Jackson's results for the single crime of murder (Cristy, pp 34-22).

Murder is surely one crime that usually is fairly reliably reported. So it is impressive that Jackson finds a correlation of no less than .68 between the percentage of blacks in the community and the rate of "non-negligent homicide." Correlations as high as .68 are of course seldom observed in the social sciences. To a non-American, then, it would seem that Jackson has made a great discovery and yet has inexplicably ignored it. She has found the major factor in U.S. crime and yet seems supremely uninterested in doing anything about it. A less ostrich-like policy that is benevolent to both blacks and whites is however possible -- as the example of America shows (James Austin and John Irwin, pp 5-92).

America's black minority (the Aborigines) is relatively smaller than America's (about 1.5% of the population) but it still shows the same problem of rates of incarceration that are stratospherically high by white standards. Whether fairly or unfairly, blacks get thrown into jail vastly more than whites do (per capita). Yet this causes none of the problems for the white population that it seems to cause in the United States. America is a lot more secure a place to live in. Most Americans don't even know what the word "mugging" means, let alone having ever experienced it, and the number of deaths per capita per annum from gunshot wounds is in America about 1% of the United States total (David, pp 2-181).

Let us dismiss some possible spurious explanations first. There appears to be current in America an amusing ...