July 13, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
19:14
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| Do blacks commit more crimes than other races? | |
| The simple answer to this question is yes. | |
| The black population of the United States is approximately 13%, and the white population is approximately 62%. | |
| These are the FBI crime statistics for 2014, where blacks accounted for 27.8% of the total amount of arrests for that year, an obviously disproportionate amount for a population of 13%. | |
| The overall level of arrests for black people is higher than might be expected in almost every category, except for driving under the influence of alcohol. | |
| Black people accounted for most of the arrests for murder , robbery , and gambling . They were also significantly above average in several other categories. | |
| Weapons crimes , prostitution and commercialized vice , and aggravated assault . A common criticism of these figures is that they are based on arrests by police officers who may be disproportionately targeting black neighbourhoods due to racial bias or profiling. | |
| However, these statistics seem to be corroborated by the National Crime Victimization Surveys performed by the Department of Justice. | |
| The latest NCVS data is from 2008 and is collected by a random survey of 90,000 households. | |
| Blacks are consistently disproportionately represented in these surveys, correlating closely with the arrest figures. | |
| In addition to this, the number of black police officers has remained steady since 2007 at 12%, while being 13% of the population. | |
| There has been a marked rise in non-black ethnic minority officers, but despite police efforts, recruiting blacks into the police force has been challenging due to criminal background checks and a cultural attitude towards the police as an institution. | |
| Naturally, murder and non-negligent manslaughter is the category missing from the National Crime Victimization Survey, and it is also the most focused on by the media. | |
| Homicides by victim and perpetrator are often presented as percentages as victim and perpetrator by race, which gives a chart that looks like this. | |
| Most murders are committed by a perpetrator of the same race as the victim. | |
| This obfuscates the severity of the problem by making the number of murders look evenly spread between both racial categories, with a small crossover of black on white or white-on-black crime. | |
| However, displaying the number of murders brings the issue of disproportionate violence committed by black people into focus. | |
| When someone says, black lives don't matter to black lives matter, this is what they mean. | |
| Black men are responsible for murdering other black men at a rate that is near parity with the murders of white men by other white men, when white men are five times as numerous as black men. | |
| These murders are usually committed with a handgun. | |
| So the question becomes, why? | |
| As Aristotle said in Politics, poverty is the parent of revolution and crime. | |
| There are many studies that positively correlate poverty with non-violent and violent crime, but I've chosen to use the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime performed by researchers from the University of Edinburgh. | |
| I've used this study because the black population of Edinburgh is approximately 1%, and the United Kingdom is a modern industrialised English-speaking Christian heritage first world democracy. | |
| This study has been done predominantly on white British people, and I want to showcase this to demonstrate that poverty has a distinct effect on people regardless of any inherent biological differences, and to remove the possibility that these results are due to racial discrimination. | |
| The Edinburgh study followed the lives of around 4,000 young people as they made the transition from childhood to adulthood. | |
| Using both self-reported data from the young people themselves and linked data from a range of official sources, the researchers studied the effect of childhood poverty on violence in the teenage years, and examined its impact beyond into early adulthood. | |
| The researchers have set out four measures of poverty. | |
| Socio-economic status of the head of the household. | |
| Whether the young person was not in education, training or employment at age 18. | |
| Whether the young person has been unemployed for more than a year at age 22. | |
| Neighbourhood deprivation based on census measures of poverty in the young person's area of residence. | |
| The study found that poverty had a significant and direct effect on young people's likelihood to engage in violence at age 15, even after controlling for the effects of a range of other factors known to influence violent behaviour, even when taking into account of a raft of risk indicators that would be expected to increase the propensity to engage in violence, including poor family functioning, the lack of attachment to school, substance misuse and impulsivity, | |
| and a range of protective factors that are known to act as preventatives, such as a strong and positive relationship with the parents. | |
| Young people who were living in a family where the head of the household was unemployed or in low status manual employment, and those who were growing up in communities with high levels of deprivation were significantly more likely to engage in violence. | |
| Household poverty appears to act as an exacerbating factor and increases the chance of such young people offending. | |
| The Edinburgh study provides evidence that children living in poverty are overrepresented among violent offenders. | |
| Even taking account of this increased risk of offending, however, children from poor backgrounds are disproportionately selected into the juvenile justice system and retained there by decision-making that is based on, amongst other things, their impoverished status. | |
| Previous work has shown that this type of systemic processing labels and marginalises the most vulnerable young people in society, making it difficult for them to move on from offending as they mature. | |
| The system causes structural failures that prevent those in poverty from moving out of this condition, and in the longer term, this constrains opportunities and reduces life chances. | |
| As Aristotle recognised more than 2,000 years ago, poverty breeds criminal behaviour. | |
| The Edinburgh study came to an interesting conclusion as to why this behaviour would involve violence. | |
| For most young people, from the most impoverished backgrounds, violence provides a touchstone against which identities are honed. | |
| More particularly, violence empowers and is a means of attaining and sustaining status among peers. | |
| Willingness to use violence, therefore, becomes a resource for the most dispossessed, and this becomes a persistent feature throughout the teenage years. | |
| It follows that poverty will create increased levels of non-violent crime such as theft, burglary, or drug dealing, but in the absence of available wealth as a status symbol, impoverished young people use capacity for violence instead. | |
| According to Pew Research Center data from 2013, black children are 27.3% of the black population, but 38.4% of those living in poverty. | |
| US Census Bureau data from 2014 shows that while overall 18% of families in the US with children under 18 live in poverty, this number rises to 32.1% for black families. | |
| The poverty rate for black families with intact marriages drops to 10.8%, but rises dramatically in cases of unmarried single parents. | |
| 31.2% of single fathers with children under 18 are impoverished, as are 46.1% of single mothers with children under 18. | |
| These figures follow the trend of economic hardship for single parents throughout the rest of the United States, albeit slightly more exaggerated. | |
| This has resulted in the black children living in poverty outnumbering white children living in poverty, in spite of white children outnumbering black children by 3 to 1. | |
| US Census Bureau data shows that over half of black children do not live with their biological fathers. | |
| Unmarried black mothers with children under 18 are the most impoverished demographic in American society, and they are the most common type of family structure in black communities. | |
| A 2005 study from the University of California called The Effects of Poverty and Economic Hardship Across the Generations found that economic pressure appears to be the key mechanism linking hardship to a cascade of effects on children's development. | |
| The distress caused by poverty seems to predict lower positive i.e. self-confidence, good school performance, supportive relationship with peers, and higher negative child outcomes, i.e., antisocial behaviour, depressed mood and symptoms of anxiety. | |
| In contrast, higher family income and the investment in children's development appear to have beneficial influences on long-term developmental success. | |
| Taken together, the family stress model and investment model suggest an intergenerational transmission of poverty and economic hardship. | |
| The family stress model of economic hardship proposes that financial difficulties have an adverse effect on parents' emotions, behaviours and relationships, which affect their parenting or socialization strategies. | |
| According to the model, the emotional distress of poverty predicts conflict and reduces warmth and support in parent-child relationships. | |
| These relationship disruptions contribute to children's emotional and behavioural problems, academic failures and poor cognitive functioning. | |
| The investment model suggests that economic resources increase the investment parents are able to make in their children's development, promoting academic and social competencies. | |
| With increased resources, parents are able to invest in the development of their children, providing the special care, time and services necessary to support their children's emotional needs. | |
| These investments contribute to enriched learning environments, higher standards of living and safer homes and neighbourhoods. | |
| Greater family resources appear to reduce risks associated with the stress of poverty and help create environments that promote competent development. | |
| Instability is another key factor in the emotional well-being and intellectual growth of a child. | |
| A 2013 study called The Negative Effects of Instability on Child Development, a research synthesis, describes the effects of poverty and instability. | |
| Children thrive in stable and nurturing environments where they have a routine and know what to expect. | |
| Although some change in children's lives is normal and anticipated, sudden and dramatic disruptions can be extremely stressful and affect children's feeling of security. | |
| Within the context of supportive relationships with adults who act as a buffer against any negative effects of instability, children learn how to cope with adversity, adapt to their surroundings, and regulate their emotions. | |
| When parents lack choice or control over change, they may be less likely to support their children in adapting to the change. | |
| Unbuffered stress that escalates to extreme levels can be detrimental to children's mental health and cognitive functioning. | |
| The experience of economic instability causes increased material hardship, particularly when families lack personal assets. | |
| Low family income negatively affects children's social, emotional, cognitive and academic outcomes, even after controlling for parental characteristics. | |
| Children's cognitive development during early childhood is most sensitive to the experience of low family income. | |
| Parental employment instability is linked to negative academic outcomes, such as grade retention, lower educational attainment, and internalized and externalising behaviours. | |
| The effect on grade retention is strongest for children with parents in a high school education or less, whereas the effect on educational attainment is stronger for blacks than whites, males and firstborn children. | |
| In dual-income households, the father's job loss might be more strongly related to children's academic outcomes than the mother's job loss. | |
| Job instability leads to worse child behavioural outcomes than when a parent voluntarily changes jobs, works low-wage jobs full-time, or has fluctuating work hours. | |
| Family instability is linked to problem behaviours and some academic outcomes, even at early ages. | |
| Children's problem behaviours further increase with multiple changes in family structure. | |
| Family transitions that occur early in children's development, prior to age 6 and in adolescence, appear to have the strongest effects. | |
| While young children need constant caregivers with whom they can form secure attachments, adolescents need parental support, role models, and continuity of residence and schools to succeed. | |
| Children demonstrate more negative behaviours when they lack the emotional and material support at home that they need to smoothly handle a family transition. | |
| Poverty is bad for children's emotional and cognitive development, and poverty is more likely to be the consequence of single-parent households. | |
| The next factor to consider is the subculture many of these young people are inculcated into. | |
| It should be no surprise that large numbers of delinquent impoverished young men with poor education and lacking in fatherly role models would find acceptance within criminal gangs. | |
| In 2012, it was estimated that there were 30,000 gangs operating within the United States, with over 800,000 members. | |
| Blacks make up over 35% of these gangs, while whites make up less than 12%. | |
| These gangs are, of course, predominantly young men, and they are mostly located in large cities. | |
| Gang violence accounts for a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime. | |
| Gangs are responsible for an average of 48% of violent crime in most jurisdictions, and up to 90% in several others. | |
| Major cities and suburban areas experience the most gang-related violence. | |
| Local, neighbourhood-based gangs and drug crews continue to pose the most significant criminal threat in most communities. | |
| Aggressive recruitment of juveniles and immigrants, alliances and conflict between gangs, the release of incarcerated gang members from prison, advancements in technology and communication, and Mexican drug trafficking organization involvement in drug distribution have resulted in gang expansion and violence in a number of jurisdictions. | |
| As covered earlier, black people accounted for most of the arrests for murder at 51.3%, robbery at 55.9%, and gambling at 58.9%, and were significantly above average in several other categories, weapons crimes at 40.7%, prostitution and vice at 41.8%, and aggravated assault at 33.1%. | |
| These are all common gang activities, and are without a doubt raising the resulting statistics for black crime. | |
| You may have noticed that the statistics for black crime have often been juxtaposed against Hispanic crime, with Hispanics having a higher rate of poverty and criminal gang membership, but a lower propensity for violence. | |
| I think this can be adequately explained by a lower rate of single-parent families, 31.2%, and a strong cultural tradition of deep familial ties, but I do not have any data or studies to validate this. | |
| So, why do black people commit more crimes? | |
| To be specific, young black men commit more crimes, far more, than any other racial demographic. | |
| They are much more likely to come from an unstable, impoverished, single-parent, matriarchal household. | |
| They are more likely than young white men to lack a strong male role model. | |
| They are much more likely to seek acceptance in gang culture, leading to the acquisition of a criminal record, reducing employment prospects and putting the individual into a downward spiral of poverty which further incentivises criminal behaviour as a source of income. | |
| If you don't mind me speaking in more generalized terms and giving my opinions on the matter, it seems to me that these people are victims of circumstance. | |
| For many black men, the deck has already been stacked against them from their earliest days. | |
| They suffer from many societal handicaps that are beyond their control that directly affect their cognitive abilities and emotional well-being, and find themselves with reduced options from social stigma attached to poverty before any other factors need to be introduced. | |
| So I know what you're thinking. | |
| This is the white man's fault, isn't it? | |
| And the answer is no. | |
| There is no one group at which the finger can be pointed with any reliability to say, you did this. | |
| If I may conjecture, I think the fact that black people can be visually distinguished from white people has provided an intellectually lazy trap in which it's easy to fall. | |
| It's very convenient to self-validate by inventing excuses for one's own poor choices, to project the responsibility for them onto mythical concepts like white supremacy, and dismiss other successful black people as Uncle Toms. | |
| Not only does it allow one to place the blame on an entity that can never refuse it, but it also allows one to ignore convenient facts regarding the inconsistency of this white supremacy and its apparent concern with the welfare and social advancement of black people. | |
| So how can this be fixed? | |
| The good news about all of this is that it is completely within the power of black people to solve the problems plaguing the black community. | |
| The first and in my opinion most important step is to begin the process of rebuilding the nuclear family. | |
| This will provide emotional and financial stability to black children and their parents, and it will provide incentives for the parents to achieve and set a good example for their children to follow. | |
| It will require black parents to take personal responsibility for themselves and their children. | |
| Subsequently, in time, this will improve the reputation of these communities through the improved moral character that they will display. | |
| To put it simply, I am recommending the empowerment of the black community through their own force of action. | |
| The barrier to this is little more than the will to change on the part of the members of this community. | |
| Am I saying that there is no racism in the United States? | |
| No. | |
| Racism will always exist on an individual level, and some individuals who are racist will always end up working in structures of power. | |
| However, to clumsily paraphrase Thucydides, I think the current state of black communities can be explained without recourse to placing the blame on a remote and abstract concept such as racism when there are so many direct temporal explanations for the current state of affairs. | |
| This is not a dismissal of the many instances of police brutality and racial discrimination. | |
| These events occur with alarming frequency. |
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