By Barry Latzer
Friday,
September 09, 2022
In 2020, the year that Black Lives
Matter took to the streets in protest, 243 African Americans were shot to death
by police. Also that year, though BLM took no
notice, over 13,500 black people were murdered by private citizens (according
to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data), the overwhelming majority
of whom undoubtedly were black. (Relevant FBI data for 2020 are not yet
available, but data for 2019 indicate that 89 percent of black homicide victims were killed by
blacks.) That’s nearly 56 times the number of African Americans killed by
police. And a recent survey found that more than half of black Americans (54
percent) or someone they know had experienced gun violence in the past five years.
This carnage among black Americans
continued in 2021. In Chicago, for instance, 81 percent of the killings took
black lives. In Baton Rouge, 79 percent of the victims were African American
males, and in Louisville, 68 percent. In Baltimore, 92 percent of the homicide victims whose identities were known were black. As
for 2022, the murder data are very preliminary, and it’s too soon to discern a
national trend.
The New York Times recently covered year-to-date shootings in Philadelphia, noting that as of August
11, over 1,400 people had been shot. That figure is similar to the one produced for 2021 (dated August 16) by the Philadelphia Police Department.
The newspaper also reported 322 homicides so far in 2022, very close to the
tally for 2021. My research (relying on the same 2021 PPD report and
current-year data) found a 1 percent uptick in homicides in the period from
January 1 to August 23 as compared with the same period in 2021.
But the Times’ analysis leaves
a lot unspoken. Significantly, the reporter, Campbell Robertson, failed to
discuss the race or ethnicity of the homicide victims or their assailants,
although the accompanying photographs and other clues make the inference
obvious. Cryptically, Robertson notes that the shootings occurred “in certain
neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia, places that were left behind
decades ago by redlining and other forms of discrimination and are now
among the poorest parts of what is often called the country’s poorest big
city.”
So, in case you missed the point,
Philadelphia’s shootings and murders overwhelmingly involved African Americans,
and the causes were (surprise) poverty and racism. A bit more digging would
have revealed the flaw in this analysis.
It turns out that the Hispanic population
of Philly is poorer than the black population, and though Latinos also face
discrimination, they engage in much less violent crime. Hispanics have the
highest poverty rate in the city, at 38 percent, followed by blacks at 31
percent. Moreover, a higher percentage of Hispanics than of blacks live in
concentrated poverty areas — neighborhoods in which 40 percent or
more of the residents are poor.
Despite the adversity differences, African
Americans are arrested and jailed at much higher rates than Latinos. Blacks,
who were 42 percent of the city’s population in 2020, were nearly
three-quarters (74 percent) of the jail inmates. Hispanics, by contrast, who
were 14 percent of the 2020 population, were 17 percent of
the inmates. As I explained in The Roots of
Violent Crime in America: From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression,
cultural differences in the use of violence to resolve interpersonal disputes
are at work here.
The main focus of the Times article
is the enormous problem of handgun availability, and the media is right to
emphasize this. There is little question that the outsized murder rates in
American cities are sustained by the extremely easy access, both legal and
illegal, to handguns.
But the solutions to the handgun problem
are not obvious. Philadelphia’s woke district attorney, Larry Krasner, refuses
to prosecute for illegal possession, arguing that such prosecutions don’t
reduce shootings and killings because police resources are diverted from
shootings to the less serious crime. Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Danielle
M. Outlaw, disagrees. “There have to be consequences for those who are carrying
and using these guns illegally,” she told the Times. “If I go out
and get this gun, knowing nothing’s going to happen to me, why would that
preclude me from doing anything else illegally with a gun?”
The commissioner is right for one simple
reason: There are no other effective disincentives for the young, unattached
males responsible for the vast bulk of the shootings. Some claim that
carrot-and-stick interventions with gangs could work, but even these solutions
rely on arrests and prosecutions — the stick portion of these programs.
Whatever the solution, one thing is clear:
If we really care about black lives — unlike BLM — we won’t be looking for ways
to limit the police.
No comments:
Post a Comment