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June 20, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
48:02
Jared Taylor Press Conference on Race and Crime, 1999
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Now, a briefing on interracial crime.
The New Century Foundation hosted this news conference Wednesday to release a report on African Americans' crime and racial profiling.
Jared Taylor, the group's president and the author of the report, was on hand to take questions.
The briefing is about 50 minutes.
Good morning.
My name is James Lubinskis, and I handle media relations for the New Century Foundation.
I'd like to welcome you to our conference.
Here to present Color of Crime, Race, Crime, and Violence in America is New Century Foundation President, Jared Taylor.
Thank you.
Good morning.
I appreciate you all coming out today.
New Century Foundation is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1994.
to try to examine some of the factual bases of race relations in the United States.
And the report that we are issuing today, releasing to you right today, is called, as Mr. Lubinska said, The Color of Crime.
And what I would like to do is, first of all, go over some of our major findings very quickly, and then I will go back through them again and explain some of the ways we got to these conclusions.
I think some people in this room, as well as others in the United States, will find some of these conclusions a little bit surprising, and so we've gone to a lot of trouble to provide the sources and the data for our conclusions.
First of all, of the approximately 1.7 million interracial crimes committed in the United States every year, 90% are committed by blacks against whites.
This is really rather a staggering figure.
And it means that in terms of likelihood, blacks are about 50 times more likely to commit individual, single offender crimes against whites than the other way around.
When it comes to group crime, multiple offender crimes, blacks are as much as 200 times more likely to commit such crimes against whites than vice versa.
Another quite surprising conclusion.
Now, we move on to slightly different data where we find that in terms of violent crime,
blacks in the United States commit violence at about four to eight times the white rate.
Hispanics commit violent crimes at about three times the white rate.
And interestingly enough, Asians commit violent crimes at consistently less than the white rate, something about half to three quarters.
Moving on to the question of hate crimes,
We will go into some of the insufficiencies of the data that the FBI put out about this, but I think it's worth pointing out that even given the insufficient and incomplete data that we have, blacks are twice as likely to commit hate crimes than whites.
With respect to hate crimes, another point well worth making is that Hispanics are considered a distinct victim category, but are not a perpetrator category.
What we have is the rather astonishing situation in which, if a white person attacks a Mexican for ethnic reasons, we have a hate crime committed against a Hispanic by a white.
But if that same Mexican...
We have a white person recorded as having committed a crime against a white person.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of Hispanics...
Are, for racial classification purposes, considered whites in the case of hate crimes?
So, yes, indeed.
This is the way your government handles it.
And, in fact, in the most recent 1997 report on hate crimes, the FBI reports more than 200 whites having committed hate crimes against whites.
The FBI moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.
Finally... And in what may be perhaps the most provocative conclusion of this entire report, we find that blacks are as much more dangerous, as much more likely to commit violent crime than whites, as men are more likely to commit violent crime than women.
Now, this is linked, obviously, to the whole question of racial profiling about which we've heard a great deal.
Men are known to be more likely to commit crimes than women, and they are more likely to be stopped by the police for this reason.
Well, from a statistical point of view, all our evidence suggests that the police are justified in making similar distinctions
Now, to get back to the first point I made about the interracial crime and who is committing it, this information comes from a remarkable survey conducted by the United States government every year.
It's called the National Crime Victimization Survey.
And in the backs of the reports that you've received in Appendix A, there are two pages from that National Crime Survey.
And the idea that blacks commit 90% of the interracial crime is so astonishing to people that we thought it was important to include the data As an appendix, these are pages straight out of the government crime reports, as well as a careful explanation as to how we arrived at these figures.
Later on, if some of you want more specific questions about this, I can talk about that, but I think in the report it's very clear the data we used, how we used it, and the conclusions we reached.
Similar data.
Now, I might point out that there is an erratum sheet in your reports.
The second page of Appendix B, we happen to include the wrong page from the crime report.
And some of the people at New Century Foundation suggested to me, ah, these are reporters, you know, they're not going to tell the difference.
Well, I have a slightly higher opinion of you, ladies and gentlemen, and I thought it was important that you get absolutely the correct data.
So the loose sheet you have there is the erratum sheet.
And it's likewise from this data that we conclude that when blacks commit violent crime, they choose whites as their targets slightly over 50% of the time.
55, 52% of the time, when whites commit violent crime, they select blacks as their victims approximately 2 to 6% of the time.
Now, an important point that people make when they are talking about data of this kind and the rates of interracial violent crime...
One of the points they're inclined to make is, well, okay, maybe these are shocking figures, but what explains them is the fact that whites are wealthier than blacks, and if blacks are going to attack someone, if they're going to rob him, they will select whites for strictly monetary reasons.
Well, the fact is, of this 1.7 million, 1.7 million interracial crimes, fewer than one quarter of them are robberies.
That is to say, attempts to take money for someone.
The rest are rapes, murders.
Simple assault, aggravated assault, which do not, in fact, generally have a monetary motive.
Now, moving on to this question of the actual crime rates of the different ethnic groups.
Here, we move from the survey that I discussed earlier, this national survey that includes 100,000 people and from which extrapolation is made to the entire country at large.
We move from that to something called the Uniform Crime Reports.
The uniform crime reports are arrest statistics.
And race enters into arrest statistics, of course, only when an arrest is made.
Many people will therefore insist that arrest statistics are biased because there must be lots of crime out there being committed that we don't know about, not reported to the police.
The police may be biased.
Some groups may be better at escaping or eluding the police.
In fact, It's very, very interesting, and you'll find the methodology in footnote 12 of your report, but it's very interesting to find that if you compare the survey data, now this, as I said, is this massive sample of Americans surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
and you ask them, what kind of crime have you been a victim of?
Who did it?
What was he like?
How many of them were there?
You will find that blacks are overrepresented in those figures.
What this means is that the police are arresting people of different racial and ethnic groups in very close proportion to the proportions at which the American public at large reports those different ethnic groups to be committing violent crime.
There seems to be, in fact, very little bias in that respect.
Now, another point that can be made for arrest for violent crimes.
The police, in fact, have very little discretion about who they arrest for a violent crime.
If I say that I was assaulted by a white guy, the police can't very well go out and arrest a black guy instead.
There's simply very little discretion there.
The police, in fact, have more discretion in crimes like drunken driving.
Let's imagine the hypothetical racist cop that we're all supposed to believe are numerous out there.
He sees a car weaving around, looks like the driver can't drive.
He looks in the window.
Ah, it's a white guy.
I'll let him go.
Ah, it's a black guy.
I'll arrest him.
That is theoretically the mentality that we are supposed to imagine going along in a policeman's head.
Well, in fact, of all of the crimes for which there is arrest data, You will find in your report that blacks are very significantly overrepresented except, in fact, for drunk driving.
That data is not, in fact, included there, but blacks are arrested for drunk driving at almost exactly the same rate as whites.
This is precisely the kind of crime for which police could be thought to have.
Racist, discretionary power, a power which they're in fact not using because this is the crime, these are the crimes for which black arrest rates and proportions are significantly lower.
There's another, this report is centered primarily on violent crime, but people very frequently accuse the police of bias in enforcing drug laws, for example.
Some of the controversy about racial profiling, In the New Jersey State Police, in terms of who they stop, who they search, all of that has been based on the assumption that they are unfairly targeting minorities.
Well, there's a very, very interesting piece of data that suggests who is in fact using drugs in the United States today.
The Health and Human Services Department, and this data is in your report as well, it collects data.
On drug-related emergency room admissions by race.
In other words, if someone takes an overdose, is choking, about to pass out, and people rush into the emergency room, HHS has done a survey as to how the races sort themselves out.
And we find that blacks are 6.67 times more likely than whites to show up at an emergency room for a heroin or morphine-related problem.
And 10.5 times more likely to show up for a cocaine problem.
This suggests the only explanation for disproportions of this kind, 6.7 times and 10.5 times, the only explanation can be that blacks are in fact taking these drugs at a much higher rate than whites and consequently suffering from emergency room problems at a considerably higher rate.
Hispanics, by the way, are about two to three times more likely to show up for emergency room treatment of this kind.
Now, as far as the whole question of Hispanic crime rates are concerned, the United States is a very, very curious way to classify American citizens.
American citizens are classified by race according to whether they are white, black, American Indian or Eskimo, that's one category all by itself, or Asian, those four categories.
And they say that Hispanics can be any race at all.
Now, this can lead to rather curious and interesting classification problems.
The majority of Hispanics, in fact, end up being classified as white.
So, in the 1990 census of Los Angeles, it was reported to be 52.9% white, 13.9% black, 0.4% American Indian, and 23% Asian.
Works out to 100%.
But in addition, 39% of the population was Hispanic.
Well, the Census Bureau classifies approximately 91% of Hispanics as white, and so if you subtract them from the white population, the white population of Los Angeles goes from 53% white to 17% white.
It's a very interesting and significant shift.
Now, let's return to this question of hate crimes.
First of all, hate crimes attract a very, very significant amount of press and government attention.
How many actual violent hate crimes occur in the United States every year?
In 1997, that is the year for which the most recent data is available, there were 4,105.
Remember that number, 4,105.
and compare it to the 1,766,000 interracial crimes of violence committed to the United States every year as reported in the National Criminal Victimization Survey.
1.7 million as opposed to 4,000.
Now, let's face it.
This country is a racially conscious country.
And if a black person is assaulted by a white, if a white woman is gang-raped by blacks, I think that it would be a little bit difficult to imagine that the victim did not think...
That race might very well have had something to do with this assault.
And yet, this huge number of crimes, 90% of which are committed by blacks against whites, attract practically no attention.
To return to this other question of hate crimes, the other problem with hate crimes, and that is the classification of Hispanics, as I believe it's Appendix B to your report.
You have the form that the FBI distributes to local police officers when they are making a record of a bias crime or hate crime.
And you will find that Hispanics are a victim category, but not a perpetrator category.
They are described as either white, black, Asian, or American Indian.
And for this reason, and since almost all Hispanics are categorized as whites, we get the crazy situation I described to you earlier, in which...
The same Mexican or Paraguayan or whoever it is who is a victim is a Hispanic and then suddenly turns white when he becomes a perpetrator of a crime.
Now, the FBI was too busy, too important and busy to actually talk about the reasons for this over the phone.
And so I was obliged to write them and ask them why they work this way.
And the reply I got by letter was so...
Touchingly incomprehensible that I have included that in your report as well.
It's the last footnote.
Now, hate crimes are important, or they are said to be important, on the theory that crimes that cross racial boundaries are more important than those that don't.
There are heavier penalties in most states in this country for what are considered to be hate crimes, bias crimes for the reason of race, etc.
Now, bias crimes are defined as those crimes motivated in whole or in part for racial reasons.
Now, I suspect that in this 1.7 million violent crimes, quite a few are probably motivated, at least in part, by bias.
But if you don't say anything about bias, it's not a hate crime.
Well, I think that the concentration we have on hate crimes, some of which are, of course, quite spectacular, is misleading given the numbers.
And given the fact that I think if you are a victim of a crime, a violent crime by someone of a different race, you are probably affected in a way that affects race relations, which presumably we are trying to improve by this kind of data gathering.
Of course, data gathering on interracial or interethnic crimes is made almost useless if one entire ethnic group that's 13% of the country is simply classified as white.
But that's the way it works.
Now, even given these insufficient data, and data in which many of the whites that are reported as perpetrators of hate crimes are without a doubt Hispanic, even given these limitations,
blacks are twice as likely to commit hate crimes This runs counter to the popular notion of hate crimes as being something that is virtually exclusively the work of whites brutalizing non-whites.
Once again, blacks are twice as likely to commit these crimes than whites.
Now finally, to move on to this question of a comparison of violent crime rates between blacks and whites and men and women.
You will find on page 10 of your report a number of charts.
That describe the situation in pretty good detail.
You can do a comparison of the arrest rates for murder, robbery, assault for blacks as opposed to whites and men as opposed to women.
In all of those cases, you'll find that men are considerably more violent than women and blacks are considerably more violent than whites at about the same proportion.
In fact, in some respects, it's remarkable how similar the proportions are.
What does this mean in practical terms?
Well, even Jesse Jackson has confessed that if he's walking down a street at night and he hears people behind him, he is relieved to turn around and see that they are white rather than black.
Jesse Jackson himself recognizes that blacks are more dangerous than white.
Most of us, in fact, I would say everyone in this room probably reacts differently to a group of strangers who are men as opposed to a group of otherwise similar strangers who are women.
The men are more potentially dangerous, and we all know this.
We may not know the statistics involved.
We may not know that the difference is fourfold or eightfold or whatever it is, but we all know this, and no one accused anyone of bias of taking this data into some kind of consideration in terms of our potential protective behavior or evasive behavior.
What I'm saying to you, and I realize that this is extremely controversial and surprising, is that in terms of the multiples, in terms of the greater likelihood to commit a violent crime, The statistical difference between men and women is virtually identical to that between blacks and whites.
So, finally, I will get back to this question of racial profiling.
Racial profiling, of course, is an extremely controversial thing because people do discover when investigating the data that blacks are stopped and questioned more often than whites.
Well, let's imagine...
That I'm a rookie police officer.
And I'm going to go out into the world as a brand new police officer with the assumption that every group is equally likely to commit crime.
Every single group.
And I will make no distinctions whatsoever.
Well, pretty soon, I will discover that young people commit more crimes than old people.
If I spend just as much time pursuing and investigating old people as I do young people, I'm not going to catch as many bad guys.
I'm not going to have time to get my job done.
Likewise, as an idealistic rookie cop, at some point, I'm going to discover that men are more likely to commit crimes than women.
This is across the board in a substantial fashion.
So my idealistic rookie cop discovers that if he spends as much time trying to track down women, stopping them and questioning them, assuming that they've committed some kind of crime,
What I'm telling you is that this rookie cop is eventually going to discover that blacks commit more crimes than whites.
He may also discover that Asians commit fewer crimes than whites.
Well, your job as a policeman I believe that all policemen, all police officers engage in profiling of some kind.
Age profiling, sex profiling, dress profiling, whether or not the fellow ran away when the cop car drove up.
All of these go into the entire gestalt of how an experienced police officer makes a decision.
Now, In the United States today, we are asking police officers to get the bad guys, but ignore race.
I think, in fact, what we're asking them to do is unreasonable and impossible.
It would be like asking them, ignore sex, ignore age, ignore dress, ignore shifty eye movements.
They've got to do their jobs, and the only way they can do them is by using the accumulation of their experience and common sense.
To figure out who is likely to be committing the crimes.
Now, I don't think there's a single police department in this country, as I said before, that does not practice profiling of some kind.
They couldn't get the job done if they didn't.
At the same time, we have such, I believe, an irrational fixation on certain aspects of race that I don't believe there's a single police department that's going to defend racial profiling in the manner that I have just defended it.
So we have put the police in a bind.
In effect, we're saying don't use an important bit of data about a possible subject.
In any case, the purpose of this report, this report was not specifically written about racial profiling, but as it happens, one of the aspects of the report fit in quite interestingly into this whole current controversy about racial profiling,
which is why it's something I've dwelt on here.
But I've probably talked far longer than you all had any interest in hearing me talk, and I would be glad to take any questions you may have about the data, about the conclusions, about the methodology, about possible implications for any of these for law enforcement.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Yes, sir.
Kevin Harris, Knight Ritter Newspapers.
By you not looking at any other variables...
Besides skin color, not economics and education, do you conclude that skin color is the only variable that matters in committing crime?
No, I think there are lots of factors.
What you're asking here is the question of why are there these differences?
Is it something about race?
Is it something about social situation?
Is it something about...
The report does not go into that at all.
It's strictly an investigation as to the numbers.
That we have these differences.
People have an intuitive understanding of these disproportions.
And what this report is saying is that this intuitive understanding is borne out by facts.
Now, the whole question of why these differences exist, I think, is a very interesting one.
But I would be going into speculation if I went into any...
I might have some theories about this.
Why, for example, are Asians...
So much less likely to commit crime than anybody else.
That, too, is a very interesting thing.
Even poor Asians, curiously enough.
In fact, I find this sort of thing quite fascinating myself, and when you look at arrest rates for all the different crimes, you name it, prostitution, forgery, embezzlement, fraud, drunk driving, car theft,
aggravated assault, Asians are always at the bottom, except in one case, and that's gambling.
In gambling, Asians, this just jumps off the page.
Asians are arrested at about two and a half to three times the rate of whites, whereas in every other crime, they're below the white rate.
I think this reflects some sort of cultural difference.
Probably Asians do a lot of gambling.
That's the only explanation that I can think of.
In any case, I've gone further, rather far.
Now, what is the basic, fundamental, underlying explanation of that difference?
I'd just be speculating if I got into it.
Any other questions?
Yes, sir.
Mr. Taylor, you're saying it's hard to believe.
All one has to do is read the daily papers and watch the news on TV, and one sees that most interracial crimes are committed by blacks against whites.
Well, to some extent that's true.
On the other hand, I think that certainly the press in the United States is very, very concerned about not perpetuating negative stereotypes.
And I think that this concern goes too far.
There is a concern that unflattering news about non-whites not be given much treatment.
I'll give you an example that has nothing to do with crime.
The fact that there is very, very persuasive documentation that Martin Luther King plagiarized his doctor's thesis.
This news was very carefully suppressed for quite a long time.
It finally came out in a way that could not be denied, and there's actually quite an interesting book written on the subject that never got reviewed anywhere.
On the other hand, the possibility that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with his black slave Sally Hemings, that, of course, is first-page news, front-page news.
The fact that Martin Luther King may have been a plagiarist, that makes people uncomfortable.
The fact that the third president may have been a hypocrite...
And slept with a woman from a race in which he had noted objections to.
That, of course, is a free game, very interesting.
First page news.
I'll give you another example.
This is a criminal example.
At the time of the first trial of the police who beat Rodney King, while this trial was front page news, there was another trial going on in Miami.
It was a trial of a gentleman by the name of Hulan Mitchell.
I doubt any of you in here know this name.
He went by the name of Yahweh ben Yahweh, and he was the leader of a black sect, a black sect based primarily on hatred of whites.
To be a full-fledged member, you had to kill a white man.
To prove that you had killed your white man, you had to present Mr. Mitchell with a finger or an ear that was cut off the cadaver.
This trial was going on at exactly the same time.
And the fact that probably none of you in this room know a thing about it goes to show you the kind of coverage it got.
Well, reverse this situation.
Imagine a group of whites murdering and mutilating blacks.
You would get the kind of coverage that the Jasper killing quite appropriately got.
But I think we cannot have double standards in this respect.
And the fact that, as you say, If you look at the television, you get the impression, you certainly get the impression that there is an overwhelming amount of black crime.
Well, this is something people are uncomfortable talking about, and the kinds of statistics that I've just presented to you today are the kind that you are almost certainly unlikely to find mentioned the way they are mentioned in this report in any public way.
Yes, sir.
Liberal, conservative, do you have a website?
Do you have a mission statement?
New Century Foundation...
I beg your pardon?
Go ahead.
New Century Foundation does not have a website.
As I said before, we were founded, established in 1994, and when you put together a non-profit organization, the IRS wants to know what it is about.
Well, New Century Foundation is an educational organization.
Whose purpose is to improve racial understanding by trying to get at the facts that underlie race relations.
And this crime report is an example of the kind of work we do.
What are the facts here?
Rather than the emotion, rather than the expectation, what are the facts?
Can I follow up on that?
Yes, sir.
How do you feel presenting these facts will improve race relations?
Implied in your question, I believe, is the assumption that these sort of facts will not help race relations, and in fact, it will make them worse.
I think, first of all, it's absolutely important for us to found policy on truth rather than untruth, no matter how uncomfortable the truth may be.
And as this gentleman pointed out, in effect, he was saying, there's nothing surprising in your report, just turn on the television set.
I think that there are a lot of people out there who have some sense that there are a certain number of double standards in the way news about race is reported.
I think that creates a certain amount of resentment.
The people who are living in Miami, who knew about the Yahweh ben Yahweh, Hulan Mitchell trial, and then realized that nobody else in the country had heard about that, what were they liable to think?
I think the truth about these things, reported and discussed, is far better for any kind of mutual understanding between the races than pretending that they don't exist.
Yes, ma'am.
Alright, so now we know the police is right.
I'm ready for it.
Racial profiling is okay, because obviously it's based on sound statistical evidence, but what do we gain by that?
I mean, I agree with the gentleman back there, because, you know, your study seems to be extremely, the focus of your study seems to be very narrow.
You haven't gone into the reasons why.
Blacks might commit more crimes.
And I think, you know, in order to draw conclusions and promote racial relations, you actually have to go into this, not just...
All right.
Sure. Let me give you an example.
Let's examine this shocking figure of 90%.
90% of interracial crime be committed by blacks against whites.
Does that suggest a certain amount of racial animus?
I think that it does.
I think it cannot help but suggest that.
This isn't an accidental fact.
Why is there racial animus?
I think that it is fed by the zeitgeist in the United States that requires that we explain every failing or disadvantage of a non-white group in terms of white wickedness.
Black people essentially are taught from infancy that anything that goes wrong for them...
Or Hispanics, for example, is the fault of those wicked people over there.
There was slavery.
There was Jim Crow.
There was lynching.
There was segregation.
We are constantly, constantly reminded of this.
And if, after all, if you are taught from infancy that everything that goes wrong is on account of that group, racist bankers, racist teachers, racist police, racist newspapers, racist media, racist this, racist that,
How can you help but eventually end up hating those people?
Are you generalizing this statement to say that all blacks are taught that those people are responsible for committing those?
I think that by and large, not only blacks but whites as well.
That is basically the point of departure of any discussion in the United States about race.
Namely, that if something is going wrong for non-whites, it's the fault of white people, past or present.
That is the unspoken assumption.
And it's very difficult, and you get called all kinds of names if you try to refute that point of view.
And it seems to me that the kind of crime we're talking about here, hate crimes...
Interracial crime, that is the fruit of the kind of policy we have of explaining every possible black failure in terms of white wickedness.
I think race relations would vastly improve if blacks were told, look, just like every other group in this country, you can be responsible for yourself.
What if you were told, as I say, every time you turn around, those people out there are rubbing their hands in anticipation of finding some way to oppress you?
How discouraging is that?
No, I think that the kind of message that we are constantly sending to non-whites about the wickedness of whites is very bad for them and very bad for whites, and the kinds of numbers in this report are the kinds of things that result from it.
Yes, there was another question.
Yes, ma'am.
You talked about how Hispanics are not reported correctly, possibly as whites.
Are you open to the possibility that there could be misreporting among African-American crime?
Well, I'm sure, I'm sure that there is...
I think your figures could be off.
Oh, well, my figures are the government's figures.
Now, the government's figures, I'm sure there's a possibility of misreporting.
The point is, though, in both the Uniform Crime Reports and the NCVS, the National Criminal Victimization Survey, Hispanics don't exist.
The same is true for this hate crime report that I was telling you about.
Hispanics are a victim category, but not a perpetrator category.
They don't even exist.
And so that, whereas American Indians and Eskimos, who are 1% of the population, there is a carefully maintained separate category for them.
But this group that is now 13% of the population, and which, let's face it, in many important respects, considers itself a distinct group from non-Hispanic whites, it's as if these people don't exist, and they are included almost routinely with whites.
Now, one of the things that I did to try to get a handle on Hispanic crime rates was go to state data from the state of California.
That information is reproduced in your report as well.
In California, they make the distinction between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.
However, when they report that data to the federal government, they lump all Hispanics in with the whites.
Now, does this make some sort of sense?
I don't think so.
If we're interested in ethnic relations, then it seems to me we should get our data correct.
Now, obviously...
Sometimes, in a survey report, maybe someone was attacked by a black and says he was attacked by a white or vice versa.
But by and large, I think there's a certain amount of human error in those respects that's going to cancel each other out.
The kinds of misreporting I'm talking about is this whole conceptual, I think, misguided conceptual notion that rules out Hispanics as any kind of perpetrator category at all.
I think that's a completely different thing.
Any other questions, please?
The crime rates between low-income white perpetrators and your data on black perpetrators?
I mean, because wouldn't it make more sense in actually looking at the income status of people?
Well, this report does not contain that information.
In fact, In all ethnic and racial groups you get more crime with lower income.
However, the disproportions continue if you're comparing racial groups.
In other words, a poverty-stricken white is more likely to commit crime than a wealthy white.
But a poverty-stricken white is less likely to commit crime than a poverty-stricken black.
You will find those racial differences not only in the different incomes, but also at every age group as well.
As I said before, age is a very important factor, certainly in violent crime.
In fact, some criminologists who have attempted Many, many different forms of rehabilitation have concluded that really the only thing that can be counted on to rehabilitate violent criminals is the fact that they turn 40 or 50. That almost invariably calms people down.
But, no, there's not specific economic data in this report.
If you say that race is the determining factor, then you should compare the crime rates of...
Say, low-income whites in comparison to high-income blacks, because maybe you will find out that the high-income black, the probability of this group committing a crime is actually lower than the white.
I'm not saying that race is a determining factor.
I'm simply reporting the data as we have found it.
And there's really no speculation in this report as to the origins or the causes of this, except, as I've suggested earlier, I think that the interracial aspect of this, which is quite pronounced, I think cannot help but be the result of our current policies that blame whites for the shortcomings of non-whites.
Now, you say race is not a determining factor?
No, it doesn't.
It does not necessarily determine anything, but it is a statistical factor of very significant importance.
Let's put it this way.
Tall people are more likely to be good basketball players, but that doesn't mean every single tall person is going to be a good basketball player or that every single short person is going to be a lousy basketball player.
We're talking about correlations here, probabilities and likelihoods.
There's something else that might be of interest to you people.
The report doesn't go into this in specific detail.
But on the whole economic question, it is very tempting to conclude that people commit crimes because of poverty.
Well, there have been many very sophisticated analyses of this in criminological journals.
And people will try to hold every other variable constant and then see whether changes in the economy result in greater crime, does improvement in the economy result in less crime, etc., etc.
Very, very difficult to find a satisfying correlation between the two.
And in fact, during the Depression, all Americans, rich, poor, black and white, suffered a quite substantial loss in wealth that did not result in an increase in crime.
The crime wave, the most significant crime wave in the 20th century, took place from about 1960 to about 1970.
We had a huge burst of crime at a time when the economy was doing just fine.
I think that it's simplistic to assume that poverty causes crime.
In fact, you could even make an argument that crime causes poverty.
If you have a crime-ridden neighborhood, people are not going to invest there.
People are not going to have jobs there.
They're going to clear out.
Crime, crime is not something that is salubrious from an employer's point of view, from an investor's point of view.
I think that it may be tempting to conclude that poverty causes crime, but how many criminals do we ever hear about committing a violent crime in order to feed their children?
That's what you would expect to be happening if poverty is the problem.
That's not.
That is not the kind of crime that we see in the United States today.
Yes, sir, in the back.
What other studies have you put out?
This is the first that the Foundation has put out.
How long did it take you to put this study together?
Oh, gosh.
Well, that's a difficult question to answer, partly because I have been very interested in this subject for years, and I'm familiar with all of the sources.
I served as an expert witness once, well, on two different occasions at criminal trials, talking about different crime rates in different groups, by age, by race, etc.
So this is a subject with which I'm familiar and that I'm interested in.
This particular report, given that kind of background and the familiarity with the sources, oh, three or four months, something like that.
Can you give us some details about your background, your professional background?
If that's of interest to you, I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Yale University.
I have a master's degree in economics from the Paris Institute of Political Studies.
I have worked as a journalist and a banker.
I suppose you could call me an economist for my training.
I'm currently the president of New Century Foundation, and I also am the editor of a monthly publication called American Renaissance, which is published by the New Century Foundation.
Can you tell us who funded the New Century Foundation?
Well, for the most part...
I don't take a salary from it at all, frankly.
I have other pursuits that are lucrative, and I don't take a salary from it.
It doesn't require a great deal of funding when the President doesn't take a salary.
We have some other employees who are salaried, but it's not a large organization.
It doesn't require Ford Foundation grants, for example.
Any other questions?
Yes, sir, in the back.
These crime rate patterns across ethnic and racial groups that you found in the general population, do they seem to be reflected also in the population of immigrants coming in?
And if so, how might we consider that?
In a very general way, that is true, but...
There are surprising differences.
First-generation Mexican immigrants, for example, are considerably less likely to commit crimes than succeeding generations.
This is rather an astonishing fact, and it goes counter to the usual pattern of assimilation in the United States.
The first generation shows up here dying to work hard.
They're serious about working hard.
They may not speak good English.
They'll take practically any job, and they work hard.
The next generation becomes Americanized, if you will.
They don't accept the kind of back-breaking work that their parents are willing to do.
They tend to be less likely, as the generations go on, to graduate from college, for example, and more likely to commit crime.
So that is an interesting...
Counter-example to the way immigration has traditionally worked in the United States.
Another example is West Indian blacks.
West Indian blacks are far more likely to own their own businesses, to be entrepreneurs, and the crime rate among West Indian blacks, at least once again in the early generations, is less than that of Native American blacks.
Now, it's another interesting fact as well that many West Indian blacks, the thing they fear most...
Is their children mixing with low-income American blacks?
They are afraid that they will be infected with some of the same kind of behavior.
So, these are exceptions to the rule, but by and large, what you suggested is true.
Immigrants from Korea, for example, or immigrants from Japan, there are not very many of them, immigrants from China.
Those nations themselves have relatively extremely low crime rates.
When they come to the United States, no matter how long they've been here, still have very low crime rates.
As I say, Violent crime, white collar crime, larceny, all very low rates for North Asians.
What do you expect to do with these findings?
Are you going to go around the country and present them to law enforcement groups?
If invited to do so, I would.
But I think that, as I said before, racial policy, law enforcement policy, and in fact the overall sense of how the United States works, all of that...
Is much better off if we know the facts rather than hiding from the facts.
So we're publicizing this material.
A certain amount of radio and television is scheduled as well.
I would prefer not to have to do this.
I would prefer that when the FBI issues a hate crimes report and it lists 241 white people who committed hate crimes against white people, that some sort of bell would ring in somebody's mind.
This seems to me to be rather an astonishing state of affairs.
241 white people committing hate crimes against whites.
Didn't anybody think that there was something odd there?
Well, the fact is, those are Hispanics categorized as whites.
But the report won't tell you that.
Let's get our numbers straight.
Let's get our thinking straight.
That's what New Century Foundation is trying to do.
Any more questions?
Have you exhausted your interest in me?
If so, thank you very much for coming.
And I hope that you will pay further attention to the further activities of New Century Foundation.
Thank you very much.
Next, this week's Road to the White House program featuring Vice President Gore and Ohio Congressman John Kasich.
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