| >Less likely to be arrested or incarcerated, less likely to be stopped or harassed by police Communities which experience more crime tend to interact more with law enforcement. The perpetrators of those crimes, who generally come from the same communities as their victims, tend to get arrested and incarcerated in proportion to their rate of criminality. Most murder in the US is committed by black men [1], and mainly concentrated in a handful of poor urban areas: St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, etc. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) [2][3], widely seen as the gold standard for data on criminal victimization, confirms that violent crime is simply a larger problem in America's urabn black communities compared to the white, Asian, and Hispanic communities. Rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration reflect this. It is no longer the 1960s. Body cameras and smartphones are everywhere. Racism has been taboo for decades. Police know that if they unjustly shoot or abuse a black person, there's a good chance their careers and lives as free citizens will be over. The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence. Tracing back through history, the forces which led to the present situation such as slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and redlining were undoubtedly racist and systemic. However, these systemic forces are now gone. They have even been replaced in many areas by systemic counter-forces, such as in university admissions [4], law school admissions [5], med school admissions [6], access to government debt relief [7], and access to the COVID vaccine [8]. The problems which bedevil many black Americans today- disproportionate poverty, broken families, drug addiction, all resultant criminality- would appear to be the results of historical inequities, not ongoing systemic racism. [1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... [2] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ncvs.html [3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/affirmative-action-50-... [5] https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/do-underrepresented-minorit... [6] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic... [7] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wisconsin-dairy-farmer-sue... [8] https://khn.org/news/article/vermont-gives-blacks-and-other-... |
Over-policing and racial profiling is a large cause of the increased criminality. The base rate of illegal drug use is fairly similar for all races but arrests and convictions have been much higher for Blacks and other minorities for quite some time [0][1].
> The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence.
Actually, traffic stops are biased against minorities despite a similar base rate of infraction [2] yet this increases the rate at which Black people interact with police which compounds the harm caused by statistically harsher reaction to infractions. Further, sentencing is influenced by race in complex ways for which there is unfortunately limited data [3] but Blacks tend to receive longer sentences and be at risk of minimum sentences [4].
The root causes of violent offenses are even more complex and although income disparity, childhood trauma/abuse/neglect, and oppression are all potential causes I haven't found good sources with solid statistics to dig into that.
[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf [1] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2019.3054... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/suspect-citizens/A399F1... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228718440_Reassessi... preprint; 2013 publication is behind a paywall. [4] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Fartic...