Crime and Racism

Heather MacDonald, writing in National Review, discusses the standard liberal response to the Charleston, South Carolina massacre:

The Roof massacre was also portrayed as part of a pattern of white violence against blacks. Blacks live with the “daily threat of terror,” according to Patricia Williams Lessane, the director of the Avery Institute for Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. Such “terror,” Lessane wrote in the New York Times, “does not exist within a vacuum. It looms within the growing prison-industrial state, against the backdrop of school-reform debates, our slow movement toward gun reform and the political maneuvers by Republicans to make it increasingly more difficult for poor people and minorities to vote. The reality that our civil rights are under attack is just as heavy as our fear for our lives.” Bryan Stevenson, a black lawyer and activist, told the New York Times that the Charleston bloodbath is just the latest example, however extreme, of the way “black men and boys are treated by the police, by schools, and by the state.”

But the reality of race and crime is radically different. MacDonald provides data on crime, broken down by the race of the victim and the race of the offender, and the story is one of blacks victimizing whites, not whites victimizing blacks.

Click on image to enlarge

Both blacks and whites are mostly victimized by people of their own race, but there are many more black on white crimes than white on black crimes. According to MacDonald:

In fact, white violence against blacks is dwarfed by black on white violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. Both the absolute number of incidents and the rate of black-on-white violence are therefore magnitudes higher than white-on-black violence. There is no white race war going on.

So blacks commit 5.64 times as many interracial violent crimes as whites, but white population was 4.74 times that of black population in 2013.

Which means that a random black person is about 26.7 times as likely to commit a violent crime against a member of the white race as a random white person is to commit an violent crime against a black person.

One might ask why the above statistics exclude homicide. The answer is simple: this data are based on a victimization survey, and victims of homicide are not around to answer questions about their victimization.

Data on homicide exists, however.

It shows that blacks commit over twice as many homicides against whites as whites commit against blacks (2.23 times as many, to be exact). Since there are 6.01 times as many whites as blacks in the population (we are not classifying Hispanics, who can be any race, separately here, to be consistent with the homicide data), this means that a random black person is over 12 times as likely to murder a white as a random white person is to murder a black.

This is the reality that the politically correct don’t want to talk about. Which is why when a bunch of leftist Marquette students demonstrated and blocked traffic on Wisconsin Avenue, one of their demands was that Marquette’s Public Safety Alerts conceal the race of the suspect.

The Bigger Reality

But there is a bigger reality, shown in these statistics. The vast majority of crimes against white people are committed by other white people, and the vast majority of crimes against black people are committed by black people.

Which means that when the race hustlers who complain about “over policing” in the inner city, they are clearly (if implicitly) siding with the thugs who victimize black people, and not the innocent black victims.