The Color of Crime, 2016

1,710 words

^[1]Edwin S. Rubenstein
The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America ^[2]
Revised Edition
Oakton, Virginia: New Century Foundation, 2016

Are we ready to brace ourselves for a little good news?

The 2016 revised edition of The Color of Crime study, released by the American Renaissance New Century Foundation and written by Edwin Rubenstein, reveals quite a bit of it. Along with telling us what we already know about crime (with blacks committing the most of it, then Hispanics, then whites, and then Asians), it also contains updated approaches to crime statistics which make the revised study more useful than the original 2005 edition.

The two major updates include more detailed breakdowns between white and Hispanic crime and a thorough statistical investigation of police racial bias, especially vis-à-vis blacks. Both of these updates constitute major improvements. The former is far more relevant today than in 2005 thanks to the skyrocketing Hispanic population in America and the intense support and controversy caused by the anti-illegal immigration platform of presidential candidate Donald Trump. And the latter update is also extremely relevant today given the vitriolic accusations of racial bias the Black Lives Matter crowd and others have leveled at police ever since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson in the summer of 2014.

If the first bit of good news is the increased usefulness of the study (which we will get to later), the second is that crime has gone down since 2005 across the board. These means all forms of violent crime, among all races, in almost all parts of the country.

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the victims of violent crime in America decreased in number from a record 17.1 million in 1994 to 6.1 million in 2013. The rate of violent crime per 1,000 people showed an even steeper decline during this time period. According to the FBI, the number and rate of violent crimes took a similar nosedive during from 1994 to 2013.

The absolute number as well as rate of violent victimizations among whites and blacks decreased significantly during this time as well. And while the number of Hispanic victimizations increased by 25.6 percent, its rate actually decreased by 17.1 percent, suggesting that this increase was caused not so much by more violent Hispanics but by the increasing Hispanic American population and better statistical means of distinguishing Hispanic from non-Hispanic offenders than was available in 2005.

So much for the good news.

What we already know, however, and what we should expect from a study entitled The Color of Crime (available for free download ^[2] at American Renaissance), is bad news. Depressing news. Blacks and Hispanics continue to commit vastly disproportionate amounts of crime, especially violent crime, and white people must continue to share their world with them.

The actual data needs no recapitulation here since there is so much of it and Mr. Rubinstein provides crystal clear tables and graphs as well as copious sources. But to reveal a bit of its flavor, here are a few of the bullet point findings presented at the beginning of the study:

• In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race.
• In 2013, of the approximately 660,000 crimes of interracial violence that involved blacks and whites, blacks were the perpetrators 85 percent of the time. This meant a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa. A Hispanic was eight times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa.
• In 2014 in New York City, a black was 31 times more likely than a white to be arrested for murder, and a Hispanic was 12.4 times more likely. For the crime of “shooting”—defined as firing a bullet that hits someone—a black was 98.4 times more likely than a white to be arrested, and a Hispanic was 23.6 times more likely.
• If New York City were all white, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent.

Of course, this is a great service. Any time one helps circulate forbidden truths among a repressed people, one is aiding their ultimate liberation. In this case, we have whites who are simply not allowed to speak or act according to their racial interests or else face ostracism or worse. The Color of Crime quite clearly demonstrates how stupid and self-defeating it is for whites to act this way.

Table 10 on page 13 demonstrates this nicely. While white violent criminals, on average, targeted white victims 82.4 percent of the time from 2012 to 2013, black violent criminals targeted their own kind only 40.9 percent of the time. A whopping 38.6 percent of the black violent crime victims during this time period were white. The numbers for Hispanic violent criminals are even worse. Hispanics victimized their own kind only 40.1 percent of the time and victimized whites 50.7 percent of the time.

There is no defense for whites ignoring their own racial interests in the face of such troubling data. Perhaps this is why the Obama administration made the Soviet-style decision in 2009 to cease publishing information on offender race in National Crime Victimization Survey reports. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s Chicago followed suit in 2010.

Mr. Rubenstein provides an equally great service by presenting the statistical backbone for any argument which exonerates police officers of racial bias against blacks. Those of us who still communicate with liberals and others on the left will find such knowledge indispensable for shutting down the spurious claims of the Black Lives Matter crowd that police officers target blacks. Following are a few examples.

1. In 2015, a black was 2.45 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than a white. That figure was 1.21 for Hispanics. Both of these figures are lower than the likelihood of each of these minorities committing violent crimes when compared to whites. Those figures are roughly 7 for blacks and 3 for Hispanics.

2. Figure 4 on page 4 compares “the percentages of criminals that victims say were black to the percentages of arrested suspects who were black.” (emphasis mine). The logic here is that if the percentage of black arrestees were larger than the percentages the victims provided, then that would suggest bias. The figure reveals that the opposite is true for most crimes. And where this isn’t true, for instance with homicide offenses and counterfeiting/forgery, the percentages are very close. Only for gambling offenses do the percentage of black arrestees outnumber the victims’ claims by more than 5 percent.

On a humorous note, let us pause to imagine the Black Lives Matter crowd marching in the street over gambling offenses.

3. “FBI data show that from 2005 to 2014, blacks accounted for 40 percent of police killings. Since blacks were approximately 13 percent of the population, it meant they were 4.46 times more likely than people of other races to kill a police officer.” We already know this, but it is nice to have data constantly at our fingertips.

4. Although blacks made up 40.8 percent of the unarmed shooting deaths at the hands of police, they also were “9.6 times more likely than whites (including Hispanics) to be charged with resisting arrest” in San Francisco. In Chicago from 2014-2015 blacks were responsible for 77 percent of arrests for obstruction of justice and resisting arrest. So perhaps this recalcitrance gets them shot more often by police.

5. “Since at least 2002 and up to 2013 . . . murder was the leading cause of death for black men, ages 15 to 34. Their murderers are almost always other black men. By contrast, the 256 police judicial killings of blacks in 2015 would be only 4.2 percent of the 6,095 blacks who were murdered in 2014. . . . The 38 unarmed blacks killed by police accounted for just 0.6 percent. Police shootings of unarmed blacks is a very small problem compared to murder in the black community.”

6. In 2015, according to the Department of Justice, black police officers were nearly twice as likely as white officers to shoot unarmed blacks. That’s 11.4 percent of black officer shootings versus 6.8 percent of white officer shootings. Further, while only 12 percent of American police officers are black, “between 2005 and 2015, 16.6 percent of the 54 officers criminally charged for fatally shooting someone while on duty were black.” This means that any racial bias charge must be leveled disproportionately against black police officers.

The study ends on an unsettling note, however. Crime is back on the rise. In 2014 and 2015, murder increased in many large cities such as New York City (5 percent), Los Angeles (10 percent), Philadelphia (12 percent), Chicago (13 percent), Houston (23 percent), Washington, DC (54 percent), Baltimore (63 percent), and Milwaukee (65 percent).

Mr. Rubenstein speculates that the “Ferguson Effect” is responsible for this sudden rise. That is, police officers becoming so demoralized by the unjustified backlash after Ferguson that they now take fewer risks in preventing crime and pursue criminals less aggressively. In some places, this lax attitude has become official policy, such as in Baltimore where officers were instructed not to “engage” with criminals during the riots of April 2015. Many police predicted that this would produce a spike in crimes, and they were right.

Of course, many of the victims of this recent increase in crime are black. This goes to show how stupid and short-sighted the black elites and the Black Lives Matter crowd are when their anti-cop hysteria leads directly to a gutting of their own communities.

If this were all it was, then whites should simply chant along with them and watch on as the less civilized people tear each other to pieces. Fewer blacks and Hispanics means less crime and more civic order. Who are we to stop them if they want to remove themselves from the gene pool? But unfortunately, this is not all there is. Black and Hispanics export their violence and target whites as much or more often than they target their own kind. Therefore, they present a large problem for us.

One statistic helps explain why violent crime decreased from 1994 to 2013: an increase in the number of incarcerated persons. From 2001 to 2013, every race showed a marked increase in their prison population. Perhaps then, in order to nip this current uptick in crime in the bud, we should build more prisons and fill them up with this new generation of criminals who think that a thug getting his just desserts in Ferguson is a good excuse for committing violent crimes.

That would be good news as well.