Tell You About Black Crime
by Jason L. Riley
(The following is excerpted from “Please Stop
Helping Us” by Jason Riley. Copyright ©2014 by Jason Riley. Used by permission
of Encounter Books. All rights reserved.)
In the summer of 2013, after
neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the
shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left
wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that
lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and
Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted
to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads
wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment and the
supposedly racist criminal justice system. But any candid debate on race and
criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are
responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has
been the case for at least the past half a century.
Crime began rising
precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl
Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of
respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place
from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was
supported wholeheartedly by the liberal intellectuals of that era, as well as
by politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the
criminals. Popular books of the time, like Karl Menninger’s “The Crime of
Punishment,” argued that “law and order” was an “inflammatory” term with racial
overtones. “What it really means,” said Menninger, “is that we should all go out
and find the n–– and beat them up.”
The late William Stuntz, a Harvard
law professor, addressed this history in his 2011 book, “The Collapse of
American Criminal Justice.” “The lenient turn of the mid-twentieth century was,
in part, the product of judges, prosecutors and politicians who saw criminal
punishment as too harsh a remedy for ghetto violence,” wrote Mr. Stuntz. “The
Supreme Court’s expansion of criminal defendants’ legal rights in the 1960s and
after flowed from the Justices’ perception that poor and black defendants were
being victimized by a system run by white government officials. Even the rise of
harsh drug laws was in large measure the product of reformers’ efforts to limit
the awful costs illegal drug markets impose on poor city neighborhoods. Each of
these changes flowed, in large measure, from the decisions of men who saw
themselves as reformers. But their reforms showed an uncanny ability to take bad
situations and make them worse.”
When it comes to arrests for marijuana possession, the
ACLU says Gordon County, Georgia, has one of the highest racial disparities in
the nation. While surveys show that black and white people use marijuana
at...
Crime rates rose by 139 percent during the 1960s, and the murder
rate doubled. Cities couldn’t hire cops fast enough. “The number of police per
1,000 people was up twice the rate of the population growth, and yet clearance
rates for crimes dropped 31 percent and conviction rates were down 6 percent,”
wrote Lucas A. Powe Jr. in “The Warren Court and American Politics,” his history
of the Warren Court. “During the last weeks of his [1968] presidential campaign,
Nixon had a favorite line in his standard speech. ‘In the past 45 minutes this
is what happened in America. There has been one murder, two rapes, forty-five
major crimes of violence, countless robberies and auto thefts.’”
As
remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepresented among those
arrested and imprisoned. In urban areas in 1967, blacks were 17 times more
likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980 blacks comprised about
one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder,
rape and robbery, according to FBI data. And they were between one-fourth and
one-third of all those arrested for crimes such as burglary, auto theft and
aggravated assault.
Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population
and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976
and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States.
The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault
and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation
in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons
arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and
embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist
cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines and drug laws doesn’t cut it as
a plausible explanation.
“Even allowing for the existence of
discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among
black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein
in their classic 1985 study, “Crime and Human Nature.” “Every study of crime
using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested,
convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades before the
authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades later.
“The overrepresentation
of blacks among arrested persons persists throughout the criminal justice
system,” wrote Wilson and Herrnstein. “Though prosecutors and judges may well
make discriminatory judgments, such decisions do not account for more than a
small fraction of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison.” Yet liberal
policy makers and their allies in the press and the academy consistently
downplay the empirical data on black crime rates, when they bother to discuss
them at all. Stories about the racial makeup of prisons are commonplace; stories
about the excessive amount of black criminality are much harder to come
by.
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a
matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote Mr. Stuntz. “The
trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized
North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise
of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control of city
governments.” The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the
system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and
incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore,
Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington under
black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the
United States today are run by blacks.
Black people are not shooting each
other at these alarming rates in Chicago and other urban areas because of our
gun laws or our drug laws or a criminal justice system that has it in for them.
The problem is primarily cultural — self-destructive behaviors and attitudes all
too common among the black underclass. The problem is black criminal behavior,
which is one manifestation of a black pathology that ultimately stems from the
breakdown of the black family. Liberals want to talk about what others should do
for blacks instead of what blacks should do for themselves. But if we don’t
acknowledge the cultural barriers to black progress, how can we address them?
How can you even begin to fix something that almost no one wants to talk about
honestly?
Jason Riley is a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial
Board.
