Ignoring the Demographics of Murder Is Dangerous
How can cities fight crime effectively if discussing its racial and economic component is verboten?
The FBI released its preliminary crime figures for 2007 last week, and as is sometimes the case there was both good and bad news to be found in the report. Violent crime in the U.S. fell by 1.4 percent last year, a modest decline to be sure but a decline nonetheless after increases of 1.9 percent in 2006 and 2.3 percent in 2005. This nationwide trend is largely attributable to the even more dramatic drop in crime seen in America’s largest cities: there was a 9.8 percent drop in murders in cities with populations of greater than one million. New York, for example, saw a 17 percent drop, Houston was down 6.6 percent, and even Philadelphia, where in some neighborhoods homicide is seen as a municipal pastime, saw a decrease of 3.4 percent.
But the news was not so encouraging elsewhere. Murders increased by 7.1 percent in Washington, DC, and by 12.6 percent in Cleveland. And those wondering if New Orleans will ever return to pre-Katrina conditions will probably not be heartened by one indicator that things are indeed getting back to normal: murders were up by 29 percent in the Crescent City in 2007.
And the picture is also alarming in America’s less-populous cities. In cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000, murders were up 3.7 percent last year. Smaller towns, i.e., those between 10,000 and 25,000, saw murders rise by 1.9 percent, and in what the FBI calls “non-metropolitan counties,” murders were up by 1.8 percent.
This is an expectation-defying trend, one that has sent sociologists, criminologists, and demographers to their drawing boards in search for an explanation. And in one city the picture that emerged, oddly, was that of a bunny rabbit.
Writing in this month’s Atlantic, Hanna Rosin describes how two researchers stumbled upon a pattern that surely will cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the halls of government and academia. In “American Murder Mystery,” Rosin recounts the discovery made by Richard Janikowski, a criminologist at the University of Memphis, who was trying to explain the shifts seen in that city’s crime patterns since the mid-1990s. Violent crime, Janikowski observed, was on the decline in Memphis’s inner city but rising along two corridors north and west of the city (the rabbit’s ears) and another to the southeast (the tail).
As luck would have it, Janikowski is married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts had been measuring the impact made by the razing of Memphis’s public housing projects, which began in 1997, and part of her research entailed keeping track of where the projects’ former residents, supplied with “Section 8″ government housing vouchers, had gone. When she and Janikowski merged their data maps, what followed was what one suspects was an “ah ha” moment: the dots represented by Betts’s transplanted project dwellers corresponded perfectly with the crime spikes on Janikowski’s map.
But “ah ha” soon gave way to “uh oh.” Rosin writes:
Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed — and deflated — to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore.
Alas, where government is concerned, when it comes to issues of race and crime there is nothing too obvious to ignore. When Betts presented her findings to city officials in Memphis, the reception she got was a cool one. Rosin describes the meeting:
Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he’s still not moved. “You’ve already marginalized people and told them they have to move out,” he told me irritably, just as he’s told Betts. “Now you’re saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That’s a really, really unfair assessment. You’re putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that’s, quote-unquote, criminal.” To Lipscomb, what matters is sending people who lived in public housing the message that “they can be successful, they can go to work and have kids who go to school. They can be self-sufficient and reach for the middle class.”
And there you have it: The truth, even when it’s measured in dead bodies, must not obscure the all-important “message.”
Here in Los Angeles, a similar war of words has broken out over a similarly volatile issue. The city’s two top cops, LAPD Chief William Bratton and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, are offering divergent assessments on the extent to which tensions between black and Latino residents are affecting crime. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed piece by Baca with the provocative headline “In L.A., Race Kills.” And the piece itself was no less provocative. “So let me be very clear about one thing,” Baca wrote, “we have a serious interracial violence problem in this county involving blacks and Latinos.”
Do we really? As Bratton and other LAPD leaders have pointed out, the raw statistics do not bear out the sheriff’s stark appraisal. The L.A. Times analyzed 562 Los Angeles County homicides from last year in which a black or a Latino was killed and the race of the suspect was known. In nine out of ten of those murders the victim and suspect were of the same race, which would seem to undercut Sheriff Baca’s assertion. But the city has seen a handful of high-profile killings in which race was surely a factor, including the murders of a 14-year-old black girl last year and a 17-year-old black boy this year. Both of their alleged killers were Latino gang members, and the crimes reinforced a belief held by many in Los Angeles that some Latino gangs were out to “racially cleanse” whole neighborhoods in the city.
So who is right, Baca or Bratton?
Each is right in his own way, says L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten. Writing in Saturday’s edition, Rutten says Bratton is underplaying the race angle while Baca is overplaying it. Bratton’s initial denial — to the point of publicly upbraiding a reporter who dared raise the question — of any racial component in the city’s violent crime problem was “politically tone deaf,” Rutten says, but he adds that it is reckless for Baca to suggest that incidents of interracial violence are more numerous than they really are.
In one sense, Baca enjoys more credibility on the matter than does Bratton. For his part, Baca says he has learned of the racial tensions through conversations with, among others, cops on the beat, which immediately sets him apart from his LAPD counterpart. I’m guessing Bratton hasn’t had an honest dialog with a street cop in years. There certainly weren’t any with him as he dined at Le Cirque in Manhattan on Friday night. Indeed, one of the many criticisms LAPD rank-and-file officers have of Bratton is that he spends too much time hobnobbing with the swells in New York and not enough time talking with his own cops here in Los Angeles.
But like the city officials who turned a blind eye to the demographic reality of crime in Memphis, what neither Bratton nor Baca — nor almost anyone else, for that matter — seems willing to recognize is that violent crime in Los Angeles is largely confined to blacks and Latinos. Of the 352 homicide victims in Los Angeles County reported as of June 9, 199 were Latino and 104 were black. The Times has been criticized in some quarters for publicizing these figures, but facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things.
As long as the two groups keep their disputes — and their bullets — among themselves, very little attention, either from the media or from government, will be focused on the problem. As Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin discovered in Memphis, one must be careful of sending the wrong message.
“Jack Dunphy” is the pseudonym of an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.
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36 Comments
1. Shannon Love:The really sad thing is that minorities, especially African-Americans are wildly disproportionately likely to be murdered as well as to commit murder. Political leaders, journalist and academics have proven more concerned about stigmatizing African-Americans for being violent than they are about preventing them from actually being killed.
I think it has more to do with protecting their own position than helping the people they claim to speak for.
Jun 17, 2008 - 10:43 am 2. Roark:“How can cities fight crime effectively if discussing its racial and economic component is verboten?”
—Detroit is a perfect example.
Jun 17, 2008 - 10:57 am 3. uburoisc:Everyone knows the racial component of crime; that’s why people pay so much more money to live in one part of a city vs. another part, even when they are only a few miles from one another. This is true of every major US city I have ever lived in. Talk is cheap; the facts are in where people buy property and where they send their children to school.
Jun 17, 2008 - 11:35 am 4. gcblues:1. the words poverty or economics and crime do not belong in the same sentence, concept or solution. there is not and never has been a causative correlation between either crime and poverty or education. to assert so is an insult to every honest poor person. the fact that violent evil people usually only have criminal income and hide among the honest poor is not a causal relationship. therefore there is no social justice solution. as shown the problem simply moves with it’s cover.
2. there is however intuitive reasoning to suggest, and good cause for research into the relation of murder victims and the degree of protection they have. possibly social justice should be free firearms for everyone poor over 18 that has never been charged and or convicted of a crime. then we could enjoy seeing the “rabbit ears” moving to affluent unarmed hoods
Jun 17, 2008 - 1:21 pm 5. Jimmy:These so-called “burdened” people are burdened by their own reckless, self-destructive behavior. 80% of children born to unwed mothers, multiple children by multiple men (don’t call them fathers), single-women households, gangsta culture, anti-education attitudes. These are the facts. Our welfare system is still broke because we are paying for baby factories. These babies are treated like living dolls, not human beings that need to be molded into responsible adults.
Jun 17, 2008 - 1:23 pm 6. Mary:We’ve thrown money, educational opportunities and everything but the kitchen sink at these feral people (of whatever race or ethnicity). They persist in their lifestyle — and in crime.
Yet another reason to stop trying to keep guns out of law-abiding hands.
Jun 17, 2008 - 1:54 pm 7. Joanna:I remember Victor Hugo said in Les Mis that “The only thing worse than the wicked rich is the wicked poor.” Thenardier was the example: His family had no food, no heat and no real shelter, but he had his tobacco.
Jun 17, 2008 - 2:48 pm 8. Roy M:Is there still a “racial component” to crime that isn’t explained by the “economic component”? This isn’t a rehtorical question! Anyone here know eenough to comment?
Jun 17, 2008 - 4:00 pm 9. Mary:Roy M, that’s a tough one to quantify, as statisticians would probably agree. Based on my limited education performing studies using statistics, I know you have to account for variables — in this case, percentage of crimes committed by a particular ethnicity, broken down by percentage of crimes committed by low income suspects, etc. And then there’s the “spoilers,” which could include the fairness of imposing harsher punishment on crack versus powder cocaine (a good number of crimes are drug related) and so on. I don’t envy researchers their task.
Your question is valid. I’d be willing to bet economics, across all racial spectra, trumps race. However, I’d also be willing to bet proportionally, within ethnic or racial groups, there are higher rates than within the Caucasian group.
Jun 17, 2008 - 4:25 pm 10. Smarty:Why bet, Mary? With so many liberals having so much to gain by proving that poverty=crime, why do you have to bet?
Any fool can look up racial breakdown of cities. then compare crime stats against each other. “diversity” is by far the biggest indicator of high crime. My country has a high % of poverty. But as it is almost all white, crime is very low.
That trend is commonplace.
Jun 17, 2008 - 6:09 pm 11. Wes:Oh yes! Somebody say it! People committing murder and mayhem because their value system just simply sucks!! Is that racism? No!! It’s a statistic…
Jun 17, 2008 - 6:43 pm 12. Mary:Wes, LOL yep, now you’re tapping in.
We can’t possibly assign VALUE to anything, because we’re all RELATIVE, now can we!
:o)
Jun 17, 2008 - 7:12 pm 13. Javelin:i’ve lived in very poor areas where almost every household was struggling and had multiple guns, yet there was little crime beyond some deer jacking, pot growing, speeding and some domestic beatings. So the economic causation is a shaky point.
Jun 17, 2008 - 7:40 pm 14. Richard:Has anyone considered that people NEED SPACE to be happy? I believe that any time you stack people like cord wood in these “housing developments” which were a Democratic construct, and you don’t give them living room/space it’s natural to push off.
Jun 18, 2008 - 3:23 am 15. Amphipolis:No privacy, no space, poor denizens, no hope (aside from Barrack) of getting out.
These places for the most part are resemble prisons, with steel grates on the windows, security guards etc.
I’m not saying these factors are the only things contributing to the crime in the Democratic bastions, not at all.
“Don’t fence me in” is all I’m saying.
I have always thought that it would be helpful to see the racial breakdown of victims as well as perpetrators. There may be a disproportionate number of minorities in prison, but there is also a disproportionate number of minorities dead in the gutter.
Jun 18, 2008 - 7:13 am 16. Marsouin:I live a block and a half from the ghetto here in DC for four decades. During all this time, the social pathologies and dysfunctionalism hasn’t changed one bit. Howard Univ. (all black), black churches (4 in neighborhood), and civil “activists” have done nothing all this time. If people are sincere in their desire for change, it would have happened long ago. But, sadly, this Marxist notion of victimhood has a deathgrip on the majority of blacks whereby hating and blaming whites is more important than loving black children.
Jun 18, 2008 - 7:19 am 17. Wayne:The ‘poverty causes crime’ stance explicitly ignores the direction of causality. Perhaps it is that personally and socially destructive behavior (drug use, low education, teenage pregnancy, etc.) causes both crime and poverty for the individuals who exhibit those behaviors. Others may be poor for other reasons (such as those cited by the left that are intended to cover all poor people.) Thus, people can be poor and honest or poor and criminal. By assuming that all poor people are the same, and that all poverty is caused by something other than individual behaviors, the left is preventing us from addressing individuals with different behaviors according to their behaviors. Thus, the ‘poor and honest’ receive no societal benefit from their honesty, while the ‘poor and criminal’ receive no disadvantage from their criminality until they are caught and (maybe) punished.
Jun 18, 2008 - 7:30 am 18. Ignoring the Demographics of Murder Is Dangerous.. « Tizona’s Weblog:[...] “Jack Dunphy” is the pseudonym of an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinion… [...]
Jun 18, 2008 - 7:38 am 19. Sandra M:Marva Collines, a black woman, and one of America’s greatest teachers (MARVA COLLINS WAY and 2 made for TV movies starring Cicely Tyson, once observed that in the South, Blacks were extremely house-proud, but when they came North and became anonymous in Chicago housing projects, they became the opposite.
The well-intended “social engineering” of welfare destroyed the black family. Public housing projects destroyed much else. Meet THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.
At this moment, THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES is careening through the world causing real hunger and starvation for the poor in Central and South America where corn is a staple food. Asia is facing the same because soybeans, their staple for Tofu and Tempeh, is also being diverted to biofuel. Now, orange grove owners are switching to a plant for biofuel which will be subsidized and pay them more, so orange juice prices will go skyhigh.
Venezuela, Russia and fundamentalist Arab regimes are sucking our wealth out of America because of high oil prices. All kinds of companies are going out of business not just airlines. Russia is re-arming itself. So is Venezuela. Iran is building nuclear bombs to be aimed at little Satan (Israel) and big Satan (US), all financed by oil money.
The environmentalist Watermelons (russian nickname for “green on the outside, red on the inside”) who had only good intentions are driving us into bankruptcy. Call the CAPITOL SWITCHBOARD (202-225-3121) and demand that they agree to drilling in Anwar, out on the continental shelf, et al. They’ll listen and they’ll listen for only one reason: there’s an election in a few months. That’s the only leverage we have and there’s an expiration date on that leverage.
Jun 18, 2008 - 9:07 am 20. Scott Wiggins:More than 50% of homicides and violent crime are committed by black males…The juvenile statistics are even higher. The real shocker is that blacks make up only 12% of the population…Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Ray Nagin don’t want you to know or understand these statistics because it’s our fault, American Society…I recommend that black leadership start counseling their own to get away from having children out of wedlock, drugs, and gangsta behavior…Check out the FBI crime statistics for yourself.
Jun 18, 2008 - 9:10 am 21. abu al-fin:Criminality and IQ correlate fairly well (inversely). But the key correlation to crime is “executive function.” This is a frontal lobe function that controls impulsivity , planning, and ability to behave appropriately for the situation.
Executive function is more important for the future success of a child than his IQ. And executive function appears to be even more highly heritable than IQ.
Is it a racial thing? No, but it is inherited. Race just tags along for the ride. Understand genetics better and we may get to the source of a lot of social problems.
What do Haiti, Detroit, and South Africa have in common? Race just goes along for the ride.
Jun 18, 2008 - 9:21 am 22. edw:Richard-
Has anyone considered that people NEED SPACE to be happy? I believe that any time you stack people like cord wood in these “housing developments” which were a Democratic construct, and you don’t give them living room/space it’s natural to push off.
There are numerous very crowded cities throughout the world–Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo to name but a few–that don’t have anywhere near the crime rate of a city like Atlanta, which at less than 10/acre is more of a suburb than a traditional city (Hong Kong is about 10,000/acre). Most of the worst neighborhoods in Atlanta have mainly single family homes on 1/4 acre lots, which would be enough for a 7 story walkup in Paris. Similar things can be said of other American cities like Detroit and LA. In fact, there’s a theory in urban planning, usually referred to as “eyes on the street”, that claims that crime on a street decreases as the number of legitimate people and activities there increases. That would explain also why New York has a comparatively low crime rate compared to less dense American cities.
Someone with more time than me might explore the idea that density actually affects crime rates by changing the demographic mix. Put simply, single family residences tend to include children, regardless of the actual quality of the family, and the young male ones tend to contribute most to crime stats; meanwhile, denser urban cores tend to attract childless young professionals, homosexuals, and empty nesters more and more.
Jun 18, 2008 - 9:33 am 23. Mickey:It is time to adopt some laws from our international friends. You murder, we cut off your head during a public ceremony. You steal, we cut off a hand; your choice of hand. Use a gun when committing a crime, off with a hand first time, life in prison second time, no parole. Pull the trigger, whether it fires or not; off with your head in front of national TV. Illegal immigrant? Slave labor for one year, then deported. Come back? We send your head to your family in your country! Car jacking? 5 years first time, 30 years second time regardless of age! Rape/sodomy? Injection to make them like raisins PERMANENTLY. Child molestation; off with the jewels! Second time? Off with the head. Assault police? Off with the head. Running from police via automobile? Crush your car at the salvage yard and off with a hand or foot!
Jun 18, 2008 - 12:02 pm 24. Amphipolis:There is no excuse for murder.
No. Excuse.
Jun 18, 2008 - 12:51 pm 25. Roy M:Off with Mickeys fingers!
If he posts again, off with his nose!
Funny place Pajams Media. Here it is verboten to talk about crime WITHOUT talking about race, or to talk about race without talking about crime.
Look. figures show if you are white then it’ll probably be a white person that murders you.
There. Don’t you feel better now? Don’t you feel safer?
Jun 18, 2008 - 1:44 pm 26. Awake:I think you may be on to something Roy M: I think it is repression actually. People have been staring at the elephant in the room for years and have been punished and degraded for even hinting that they notice it. Now they have found a place where they can talk about it and it is thus something that comes up frequently.
Mickey, you are wrong. That is the scary thing about crime and social decay. You can’t cure it. It has to be something that all of the little people want as they go about their daily lives. How they want to live, what effort they are willing to put forward to make it happen, how they want to deal with problems, stress, and other people.
Throwing money at the problem doesn’t help. We’ve tried that for years. Confronting people with their errors goes a long way, or at least a longer way, but then you run a foul of people who spout culutral superiority, and blaming the victim. Also, their are certain segments of society that you can’t criticize due to PCness. Usually, they are the ones who need to face their problems the most, and while you here them talking about a dialogue they are usually talking about a dialogue that infers that all of their problems are someone else’s.
Jun 18, 2008 - 2:07 pm 27. Richard:edw-
“Someone with more time than me might explore the idea that density actually affects crime rates by changing the demographic mix. Put simply, single family residences tend to include children, regardless of the actual quality of the family, and the young male ones tend to contribute most to crime stats; meanwhile, denser urban cores tend to attract childless young professionals, homosexuals, and empty nesters more and more.”
You’re right of course. The demographic missing in the inner-city mix you’ve prescribed is the happily married, gainfully employed couple. Can’t think of a more stable example. Those, can afford to leave the “urban” scene and do. Who’s left are those who can’t afford to, or by poor choices have left themselves unable.
Jun 18, 2008 - 2:59 pm 28. Eric:Chicken or egg question
Are poor people poor because of bad habits or do poor people have bad habits b/c they’re poor?
Jun 18, 2008 - 7:24 pm 29. James:Well liberals love having the poor stay poor, othewise what are they going to promise to fix each year?? This situation of welfare and poverty and crime has been carefully maniuplated to STAY this way, don’t kid yourself.
Jun 19, 2008 - 3:35 pm 30. Paul:Eric,
Jun 19, 2008 - 9:07 pm 31. J.Wallace:Reject education, and stay poor and without enough knowledge and information to succeed.
Same statistics as above, what group causes the most trouble in the classroom?
What students is it declared unfair to suspend when it becomes identifiable?
We all see the problem.
Obama’s preacher, opened the religious angle. Look at Liberation Theology, the religion of blaming everyone else, the religion of permanent victim hood.
The anti-White religion.
http://www.downwithabsolutes.com/
Blacks commit 52.3% of ALL murders in this country and in spite of all the rethoric by the likes of Sharpton and Jackson blacks are responsible for 90 % of ALL interacial violence in this nation. They are also charged with hate crime at a rate 2 1/2 times greater by % of population than whites. What do these cities have in common Detriot, New Orleans, Compton, East St. Louis, Washington D.C. . With all the above they continue to insist that I as a white man is the problem. I submit that perhaps it is their actions and behaviors which is the cause of any mistrust and racial animosity and suspect that if they ever manage to set their own house in order people would be much less concerned with race.
Jun 20, 2008 - 5:50 pm 32. Jimi:95% of the outstanding murder warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens. 27% of the California prison population is composed of illegal aliens, from all parts of the world. Stats on illegal alien crime are spotty due to santuary city policies of don’t ask, don’t tell, like special order 40 in Los Angeles. Regardless of these numbers, don’t we have enough home grown criminals without having to import them?
Jun 21, 2008 - 12:56 pm 33. Bobby:The writer of this article typically tries to write as if he were free of any politically correct constraints, but he has failed. Sheriff Baca is right. Blacks and Mexicans do not get along. Why don’t you go and ask them.
Jun 21, 2008 - 12:59 pm 34. Larry:HELP STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION…….MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD: http://www.numbersusa.com/dfax?series=vdggl1&gclid=COO0gcLGx5MCFSgtagodA3cbCA
Jun 21, 2008 - 9:08 pm 35. Jim:I return, as always, to my example of the most extreme poverty in the U.S.: whites in Appalachia. If poverty caused or was even remotely related to crime, then we should expect that violent crime would be rampant, or at the very least significantly higher than the national average. Yet it’s nearly zero. Why?
It’s all about who has character and who doesn’t…You can’t argue with the facts.
Jun 21, 2008 - 10:31 pm 36. Jay:I grew up in a government housing project in the 40’s and part of the 50’s in a northern industrial city. We were segregated two blocks white and two blocks black. Almost all the whites were Catholics and went to a Catholic grade school. I went to a virtually all black grade school plus I took my piano classes in the heart of the black “ghetto”. I walked with no fear to school and to piano lessons. There were no guns and no drugs in my neighborhood.
Jun 25, 2008 - 1:33 pmI would not dare go there now?