Part 12
"Urbanization Causes Crime" — The Second False Liberal Argument (A)
Liberals hardly ever concede defeat in any part of a race debate because liberals are almost never honest debators. But they will change their rationale, as slippery as an eel, and pretend never to have held any position that was just disproved in front of them. When confronted with facts such as those that I gave to prove that poverty does not cause violent crime, liberals will usually try to repair the hole shot in their egalitarian doctrine by shifting from a 'poverty causes crime' position to a 'class-envy causes crime' position. Suddenly it isn't the conditions of poverty per se that lead to crime, but the sight of rich people driving by in their stretch limos on their way to posh restaurants for caviar buffets. Whereas earlier the Liberal had been implying that unfulfilled basic needs drove poor Blacks to a life of crime, now the Liberal is saying that jealousy (for which of course the Black criminals should not be blamed) is the problem. In rural areas, the poor and the rich don't bump into each other much, while in urban areas there is more contact and, say the liberals, more opportunity for class-envy to arise and subsequently to motivate violent crime.
But this hypothesis is easily shot down as well. Compare Mississippi (over 30% Black) with West Virginia (about 3% Black). Both states are relatively rural. But Mississippi has the higher rates of violent crime. If you think that this comparison is atypical, then feel free to replace West Virginia with Iowa, or with North Dakota, or with any other mostly rural state-sized region with an at least 96% White majority. Or feel free to replace Mississippi with any other mostly rural state-sized region in which Blacks are more than 30% of the population. Then for good measure, try contrasting cities with essentially equal levels of urbanization but with differing racial demographics, to check out that side of the urban-rural scale. For example, you might compare crime rates in Washington DC with those in Colorado Springs. Again, you'll see that racial composition makes a much better predictor of the rates for violent crimes than the degree of urbanization, and the liberal evasion of class-envy is thus refuted.
A while ago, I found (on separate websites) lists of US cities showing, in one case, the percentage of Blacks in the resident population and, in the other case, the per capita crime rate. The lists didn't correspond to each other very well, with either list having cities not included in the other, and the demographic data was gathered in 1990 while the crime rate data was for 1994. For a few weeks, though, it was the best data I could find, so I made a study and estimated that the crime rate (Y) depended on the percentage of Blacks in the resident population (X) according to the equation:
From the equation, it seemed likely that an all-White urban area would probably have somewhere around 750 violent crimes per 100,000 population per year, while an all-Black urban area would probably have about 3500 violent crimes per 100,000 population per year. On the average. I recognized that the mismatch in the dates of the demographic data and the crime rate data might result in errors in the model, and I expressed a hope of finding better data soon.
Well, I did find better data, and it had been right under my nose. The source is Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1996, Table #46 and Table #311. Table #46 gives the percentages of US city populations by race, and Table #311 gives the cities' murder rates per 100,000 population. Since Blacks and Hispanics are different races of non-Whites, I decided to treat them separately and indicate the crime rate by color-coding. Here is the graph:
It didn't surprise me that the cities with the most Blacks in them would also have the most crime. What did surprise me was the evidence that Hispanics don't appear to have an elevated urban murder rate. (Hispanics in the United States are about 80% mestizos, nevermind the government's caveat that a Hispanic may be of any race.) I was surprised because crime rates in Western US states do appear to be correlated at the state level with the concentration of Hispanics. I think that mestizos probably get along in each other's company better than Blacks do, and that violence involving mestizos may result from their antipathy toward persons of other races. Such antipathy is characteristic of Blacks, too, but Blacks are approximately as violent toward other Blacks as they are toward everyone else. Mestizos at least seem to take better care of each other, whatever danger they may represent to non-mestizos.
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This looks like an excellent place to insert a paragraph about a "Politically Correct" analysis of urban crime included in a book called Urban Change in the United States and Western Europe: Comparative Analysis and Policy, edited by Summers, Cheshire and Senn, and published in 1999. As an inquiry into the causes of urban crime, the book deliberately and methodically fails to notice the obvious racial factor. For example, in a subsection of chapter 11 headed "CRIME" (page 362), we find: Many factors are associated with rising crime rates. Nonetheless, as shown in table 11.14, the changes in crime rates are loosely correlated with 1982 levels of standardized fiscal health. Notice that they are speaking about changes in crime rates, rather than the crime rates themselves. This attention given to the time derivative of urban crime rates might have merit after the causes of urban crime are identified, in order to determine the influence of lesser, secondary factors. But focusing closely on urban crime rates is what these liberal writers dare not do. They dare not say that the crime rates, themselves, are STRONGLY correlated with the racial composition of urban areas, because that would amount to confessing that the doctrine of racial equality is a pack of lies. And so they pass over the question, and they obscure their passage by dwelling tediously on minor fluctuations of the crime rate with time and by speculating that maybe the local economy has something to do with those fluctuations. (That's like a doctor poking around with the bowel movements of a decapitated patient in order to find out what the cause of death was.) In his Foreward to Urban Change, Urban Institute President William Gorham begins: "Cities in the United States developed in response to profoundly different cultural, economic, and political factors." Blah blah blah. I tell you, folks, the people who wrote this book KNOW about the racial factor. They're not stupid; they're intentionally concealing the causes of the problem that they pretend to study. |