Does the racial gap in arrests lessen as the crimes get more serious?

Monday, June 21st, 2021

Steve Sailer reviews Charles Murray’s short, lucid book Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America about the essential factors influencing society — intelligence and violence:

After The Bell Curve, the great and good made immense efforts to Close The Gap, if only to prove Murray wrong. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, pushed by George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, mandated the Lake Wobegonization of America: Every single public school student must score “proficient” by 2014.

That didn’t happen.

Similarly, Bill Gates poured huge sums into, first, the “small learning communities” fad of the 2000s and then the “Common Core” whoop-de-do of the 2010s. Neither accomplished anything noticeable.

Today, after 55 years of vast spending to eliminate the race gap on tests, the optimistic centrist education reformers of the “All We Have To Do Is Implement My Favorite Panacea” school are finally out of fashion, leaving Ibram X. Kendi and Charles Murray as the last men standing. One or the other must be right: either Murray (blacks, unfortunately, have problems because they tend to be less smart and more violent) or Kendi (any disparities demonstrate that whites are evil and therefore must pay).

[…]

But, The Establishment no longer really believes that race gaps can be reduced. Instead, the new conventional wisdom is Kendi’s: Tests must be abolished. This will make the problems caused by lower black intelligence go away for Underpants Gnomes reasons.

[…]

Murray, however, has uncovered newly available arrest statistics from the Open Data Initiative by race (with Hispanics usually broken out) and type of crime for thirteen cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

For property crime, Murray finds, Latinos were arrested 1.5 times as often as whites, a modest difference especially considering the disparity in average age.

[…]

Blacks in these thirteen cities were arrested for property offenses five times as often per capita as whites.

Are cops just racistly arresting blacks for ticky-tack property offenses like, say, taking an extra newspaper from the rack?

One way to get a clue about this is to look at more serious incidents, such as violent crimes. Does the racial gap in arrests lessen as the crimes get more serious?

No. Hispanics were arrested for violence about 2.7 times as often as whites, while blacks were arrested almost ten times as much.

How about murder, the most diligently investigated of all crimes?

Latinos are arrested for murder about five times more often per capita than whites, while blacks are about twenty times more likely than whites to be arrested for murder.

[…]

Whether Facing Reality will inspire a desperately needed national conversation on the reality of racial differences, or whether it will be deep-sixed like Human Diversity, remains to be seen.

But Murray has given it his best shot.

Comments

  1. VXXC says:

    Are these really the most important things in America? ‘intelligence and violence’

    Intelligence: we are elevating a trait as virtue, the highest virtue, whilst wondering why we are lorded over and abused by intelligent psychopaths? Perhaps we should go back to worshipping Tall Men? Or Tall Women? At least they have a better chance in a fight which brings us to…

    Violence: presumably we mean crime? Most crimes are committed by a tiny number of people, including yes a tiny number of black people. In any given city or burg most of the crimes are committed by a tiny number well known to the police and usually the locals. They’re not hard to find, they have long arrest records. Crime by the way doesn’t run through races it runs through families.

    The obsession with violence by the Intelligent brings up something else I’ve noticed: The Intelligent tend to be COWARDS about physical violence.

    Why do normal people care about either? Our Intelligent overclass are psychotics and no one should listen to or trust them, our underclass violent and to be avoided. To the extent you cannot avoid the underclass you go about armed and alert. If you are armed and alert your chances of being a victim of crime are low and your fate is in your hands.

    As for the intelligent…

    And for both no amount of education does anything but breed a more skilled criminal.

  2. Altitude Zero says:

    No, these are not necessarily the most important things in America, but for the last sixty years America has been tearing at itself like a sick dog over differences in these areas, and it makes a huge difference if the “disparities” in these areas are innate or a result of systemic juju of some kind. Also, crime is a much larger issue of you are older, weaker, and/or living in a bad neighborhood that you can’t get out of. Telling people in this situation that crime isn’t that big a deal is kind of like telling a Marine on Iwo Jima in 1945 that only about 3% of global population will die in WWII, so it’s not that serious. Also, our current overclass is trying to make it as hard as possible to avoid the underclass, or for that matter to remain armed, so yeah, it’s kind of important.

    I’d be happy to ignore the overclass and avoid the underclass, if they would ignore/avoid me. This is getting harder and harder, and that’s by design.

  3. Goober says:

    “I’d be happy to ignore the overclass and avoid the underclass, if they would ignore/avoid me. This is getting harder and harder, and that’s by design.”

    Well stated. This reminds me of Lewis’s quote about the tyranny of the well-intentioned…

    …they will endlessly and ceaselessly torment you without qualm, because they are doing so with the assurance that what they are doing is the moral choice.

    I think that the biggest gap we’ve got in America right now is the reality gap. You’ve got people on every side spinning yarns about “what America truly is” that hold only a tenuous concurrence, or worse, no concurrence, to reality at all.

    As the OP pointed out, this is often because the reality of these situations is really quite uncomfortable. Even attempting to discuss the reality of many of these issues may very well lead to professional and social suicide.

  4. VXXC says:

    The overclass is not well intentioned. Fixed it. Nor are their ‘designs’.

    As for the difficulty of being armed…ah..sir..no it isn’t. It may be difficult to LEGALLY be armed, but it is not difficult to be armed. Perhaps the salutary example of the “Underclass” in this regard can suggest a course of action? They only call the police if they have no choice, another salutary example.

    Laws: you don’t have a legal right to exist anymore. As far as weaker…see Sam Colt’s universal size. Older? Can’t help you, but Sam Colt can. If you want legal, call a lawyer. ROFL. Again, see the salutary examples of the ‘underclass’.

  5. Sam J. says:

    VXXC says, “Intelligence: we are elevating a trait as virtue, the highest virtue, whilst wondering why we are lorded over and abused by intelligent psychopaths?”

    Very true.

    “Our Intelligent overclass are psychotics and no one should listen to or trust them, our underclass violent and to be avoided. To the extent you cannot avoid the underclass you go about armed and alert.”

    Yes double true.

    “If you are armed and alert your chances of being a victim of crime are low and your fate is in your hands.”

    I have a problem with this one. Not because you are wrong but because they have set the system so that if you do defend yourself you are persecuted. Look at this idiots that chased after Kyle holding an AR-15 and all the while saying they were going to kill him and he shot them. Rightly so but they are persecuting him for a clear, video documented aggression on his person. They want us to be defenseless.

    So in fact the answer is not really clear.

    Altitude Zero says, “Also, crime is a much larger issue of you are older, weaker, and/or living in a bad neighborhood that you can’t get out of. Telling people in this situation that crime isn’t that big a deal is kind of like telling a Marine on Iwo Jima in 1945 that only about 3% of global population will die in WWII, so it’s not that serious. Also, our current overclass is trying to make it as hard as possible to avoid the underclass, or for that matter to remain armed, so yeah, it’s kind of important.

    I’d be happy to ignore the overclass and avoid the underclass, if they would ignore/avoid me. This is getting harder and harder, and that’s by design.”

    Yep, there’s the rub right there. You covered the vast majority of the problem.

    They made section 8 to pack these people much more inclined to violence and trouble into stable neighborhoods telling us it will stabilize them but all it did was destabilize the places they put them. These people eat housing and cities like locust eat vegetation. And they are accelerating the process building whole apartments complexes full of instability. If you try to stop them they don’t jail them they jail you.

    If you do have to deal with these savages make sure it’s as far away public as you can get, hide your face shoot them then run away. Don’t hang around.

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