During the summer of 1993, between my junior and senior years of college, I worked as an intern at USA Today. The newspaper’s offices were located in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., but I stayed with an aunt and uncle who lived on the other side of the District, in Maryland. I owned a car and drove to the office, and since I was assigned to the sports desk I often didn’t leave work until well after midnight, once the West Coast baseball games had been completed.
The fastest way home was straight though D.C., though my uncle had warned me that it wasn’t the safest route at that time of night. In the early 1990s Washington was dubbed the “murder capital” because it led the country in per capita homicides. But then, 21-year-old males aren’t exactly known for being risk averse or heeding advice from their elders. Sure enough, one night after work, around 1 a.m., I was sitting at a red light when no fewer than four squad cars converged on me, lights flashing and sirens screaming. Seconds later police officers were pointing guns at me as I sat cowering in my Volkswagen Fox. I was ordered to exit the vehicle, to face away from it, and to place my hands on my head. I was not-so-gently pushed to the pavement facedown, then handcuffed and searched, along with the car, while two officers kept their weapons trained on me. When the police finished I was told that I had fit the description of someone they were after, something about me having New York license plates and problems with gunrunners from up North. They apologized and were gone as fast as they had arrived.
I remember getting back into my car and just sitting there in a daze, sweating. The engine was off and the windows were up and it was a muggy summer night. Eventually another car pulled up to the light behind me and honked because I wasn’t moving. I pulled over to the curb, collected myself and the items from my glove compartment (mostly cassette tapes) that D.C.’s finest had left in the passenger seat and on the floor, and then I drove home. I changed my route home the next day and never doubted my uncle again.
It was certainly the most terrifying encounter I’d had with the police, but it wasn’t the first or the last. Growing up in Buffalo, New York, in the 1980s I was stopped several times by the cops while walking alone through white residential neighborhoods where friends lived. When the police asked what I was doing there and I told them, sometimes they wanted the family’s name for verification. As a youngster I wondered if these neighborhoods were so well policed that cops really did know the names of everyone who lived there, or whether they just wanted me to think that they did. I don’t know if the police stopped me of their own volition, or whether a neighbor looking out his window had spotted an unfamiliar black kid and dialed 911. I never asked.
The summer I graduated from high school my father helped me buy a car—the aforementioned VW—and the first thing I did was head over to the home of a former classmate to show him my new ride. I noticed a police car following me as I turned off the thoroughfare and headed into my friend’s neighborhood. I had to make several more turns to reach his block, and the cop turned every time I did. Naturally, I started getting nervous. Finally, about four houses from my destination, he hit the siren. The officer walked up to my car and asked me where I was headed. I pointed to the house. Then he looked at the temporary registration on my windshield and asked, “What’s that?” I said the car was new and that I was still waiting for the permanent registration to come in the mail. The officer told me to wait while he checked out my story. So I waited.
It was a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon. People—white people—were outside. Neighbors were chatting. Kids were playing in their front yards. And now everyone had paused to stare at me, this young black guy who’d just been pulled over by the police. When homeowners look outside and see cops, they get curious. When they see cops stopping a black kid, they get nervous. The officer finally came back to the car and told me I was free to go, but I no longer had any interest in showing my friend my new car. I just wanted to get out of that neighborhood, which is probably what that cop wanted, and thanks to him, probably what everyone else on that street who witnessed our encounter wanted. I obliged.
These episodes would continue in college. While attending the University at Buffalo, where I lived off campus, I was stopped regularly while driving through the main drag of a tony suburb on my way to morning classes. I would hand over my license and registration and then sit in the car for ten minutes or so while the officers did whatever they do while you wait. I was never ticketed during these stops, or even told that I did anything wrong. I didn’t ask why I was being pulled over and the officers didn’t feel the need to volunteer an explanation. Sometimes I wouldn’t be pulled over, just tailed by a police cruiser until I reached the town line. But I was stopped often enough that I eventually started taking a different route to campus, even though it added ten to fifteen minutes to the trip.
Like so many other young black men, I was also followed in department stores, saw people cross the street as I approached, and watched women clutch their purses in elevators when they didn’t simply decide to ride a different one. It was part of growing up. As a teenager I didn’t dress like a thug or go around scowling at people. I tucked in my shirts, embraced belts, and had no pressing desire to show others my underpants. My closet was full of khakis, button-downs, and crew-neck sweaters (still is), and when I donned a baseball cap it was turned the right way. My VW looked like a VW. It wasn’t tricked out with chrome rims and tinted windows. When I played music in my car, it ran to De La Soul and Talking Heads rather than Ice Cube, and in any case could not be heard several blocks away. All of which is to say that my suspicion-raising features, when it came to cops or pedestrians, obviously were my race and my age (and I gather mostly the latter, since the harassment stopped decades ago and I’m still as black as I was at 17). Was I profiled based on negative stereotypes about young black men? Almost certainly. But then everyone profiles based on limited knowledge, including me.
In high school I worked as a stock boy in a supermarket. The people caught stealing were almost always black. As a result black shoppers got more scrutiny from everyone, including black workers. During college I worked the overnight shift at a gas station with a minimart. Again, the people I caught stealing were almost always black. So when people who looked like me entered the store my antenna went up. Similarly, when I see groups of young black men walking down the street at night I cross to the other side. When I see them on subways I switch cars. I am not judging them as individuals. Why take the risk? If I guess wrong my wife is a widow and my children are fatherless. So I make snap judgments with incomplete information.
My attitude and behavior are hardly unique, even among other blacks. Like white cabdrivers, black cabdrivers have been known to avoid picking up black males at night, something I also experienced firsthand upon moving to New York City after college. Black restaurant owners ask groups of young black diners to prepay for their meals, seat them away from the exit, or take other steps to make sure that the bill is settled. And the lady who is nervous about sharing an elevator with a black man might be black herself. Describing her numerous conversations about racial perceptions with other black women, former Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole wrote, “One of the most painful admissions I hear is: I am afraid of my own people.”1
Some individuals who avoid encounters with black youths may indeed be acting out of racism, but given that law-abiding blacks exhibit the exact same behavior it’s likely that most people are acting on probability. “If I’m walking down a street in Center City Philadelphia at two in the morning and I hear some footsteps behind me and I turn around and there are a couple of young white dudes behind me, I am probably not going to get very uptight. I am probably not going to have the same reaction if I turn around and there is the proverbial black urban youth behind me,” Theodore McKee, a black federal judge, told an interviewer in the 1990s. “Now, if I can have this reaction—and I’m a black male who has studied martial arts for twenty some odd years and can defend myself—I can’t help but think that the average white judge in the situation will have a reaction that is ten times more intense.”2 (When the interviewer, Linn Washington, also black, was asked on C-SPAN to respond to the judge’s remarks, he said, “I can relate to it because I ride the subways in Philadelphia late at night.”)3
My encounters with law enforcement growing up were certainly frustrating; I was getting hassled for the past behavior of other blacks. But that doesn’t necessarily make those encounters arbitrary or unreasonable. After all, perceptions of black criminality are based on the reality of high black crime rates. I say that as though it’s a given, and it is a given in the real world. But in the alternate universe of academia and the liberal mainstream media, there is still a raging debate over whether people’s fears of young black men have anything at all to do with the actual behavior of young black men.
Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, has written an entire book, The New Jim Crow, that blames high black incarceration rates on racial discrimination. She posits that prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to a war on drugs that was launched by the Reagan administration in the 1980s for the express purpose of resegregating society. “This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system,” wrote Alexander.4 “What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetrating racial hierarchy in the United States.”5 Liberals love to have “conversations” about these matters, and Alexander got her wish. The book was a best seller. NPR interviewed her multiple times at length. The New York Times said that Alexander “deserved to be compared to Du Bois.” The San Francisco Chronicle described the book as “The Bible of a social movement.”
But the conversation that Alexander wants to have glosses over the fact that black men commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes in the United States. The New Jim Crow is chock-full of data on the racial makeup of prisons, but you will search in vain for anything approaching a sustained discussion of black crime rates. To Alexander and those who share her view, the two are largely unrelated. Black incarceration rates, she wrote, result from “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control.”6 The author seems reluctant even to acknowledge that black people behind bars have done anything wrong. In her formulation, blacks are simply “far more likely to be labeled criminals”7 and are as blameless as slaves in the antebellum South. “When we say someone was ‘treated like a criminal,’ what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature,” Alexander wrote. “Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages.”8 Really?
When I say that someone is being treated like a criminal, I mean that person is being treated like he broke the law or otherwise did something wrong. (When I want to say someone is being treated as less than human, I say that person is being treated like an animal, not a criminal.) Her chattel slavery and Jim Crow analogies are similarly tortured and yet another effort to explain away stark racial differences in criminality. But unlike prisons, those institutions punished people for being black, not for misbehaving. (A slave who never broke the law remained a slave.) Yet Alexander insists that we blame police and prosecutors and drug laws and societal failures—anything except individual behavior—and even urges the reader to reject the notion of black free will. “The temptation is to insist that black men ‘choose’ to be criminals,” she wrote. “The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted.”9 What Alexander and others who buy her arguments are really asking us to resist are not myths but realities—namely, which groups are more likely to commit crimes and how such trends drive the negative racial stereotypes that are so prevalent among blacks and nonblacks alike.
In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment, and the supposedly racist criminal justice system. But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.
Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the Michelle Alexanders of that era, as well as by liberal politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals. Progressives said that eliminating poverty and racism is the key to lowering crime rates. “You’re not going to make this a better America just because you build more jails. What this country needs are more decent neighborhoods, more educated people, better homes,” said Hubert Humphrey while campaigning for president in 1968. “I do not believe repression alone can build a better society.”10 Popular books of the time, like Karl Menninger’s The Crime of Punishment, argued that “law and order” was an “inflammatory” term with racial overtones. “What it really means,” said Menninger, “is that we should all go out and find the niggers and beat them up.”11
“The lenient turn of the mid-twentieth century was, in part, the product of judges, prosecutors, and politicians who saw criminal punishment as too harsh a remedy for ghetto violence,” wrote the late William Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard.
The Supreme Court’s expansion of criminal defendants’ legal rights in the 1960s and after flowed from the Justices’ perception that poor and black defendants were being victimized by a system run by white government officials. Even the rise of harsh drug laws was in large measure the product of reformers’ efforts to limit the awful costs illegal drug markets impose on poor city neighborhoods. Each of these changes flowed, in large measure, from the decisions of men who saw themselves as reformers. But their reforms showed an uncanny ability to take bad situations and make them worse.12
Crime rates rose by 139 percent during the 1960s, and the murder rate doubled. Cities couldn’t hire cops fast enough. “The number of police per 1,000 people was up twice the rate of the population growth, and yet clearance rates for crimes dropped 31 percent and conviction rates were down 6 percent,” wrote Lucas A. Powe Jr. in his history of the Warren Court. “During the last weeks of his [1968] presidential campaign, Nixon had a favorite line in his standard speech. ‘In the past 45 minutes this is what happened in America. There has been one murder, two rapes, forty-five major crimes of violence, countless robberies and auto thefts.’”13
As remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepresented among those arrested and imprisoned. In urban areas in 1967 blacks were seventeen times more likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980 blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder, rape, and robbery, according to FBI data. And they were between one-fourth and one-third of all those arrested for crimes such as burglary, auto theft, and aggravated assault. Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is still typically two to three times their representation in the population. Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud, and embezzlement. And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines, and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation.
“Even allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic 1985 study, Crime and Human Nature. “Every study of crime using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades before the authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades later. “The overrepresentation of blacks among arrested persons persists throughout the criminal justice system,” wrote Wilson and Herrnstein. “Though prosecutors and judges may well make discriminatory judgments, such decisions do not account for more than a small fraction of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison.”14 Yet liberal policy makers and their allies in the press and the academy consistently downplay the empirical data on black criminal behavior, when they bother to discuss it at all. Stories about the racial makeup of prisons are commonplace; stories about the excessive amount of black criminality are much harder to come by.
“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”15 The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by blacks.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald is one of the few journalists who has been willing to write about race and crime honestly, despite the unpopularity of doing so. In books, op-eds, and magazine articles she has picked apart the media’s disingenuous coverage of the issue. The New York Times, for example, regularly runs stories about racial disparities in police stops while glossing over the racial disparities in crime rates. “Disclosing crime rates—the proper benchmark against which police behavior must be measured—would demolish a cornerstone of the Times’s worldview: that the New York Police Department, like police departments across America, oppresses the city’s black population with unjustified racial tactics,” wrote Mac Donald. In one instance, the Times made a very big deal of the fact that in 2009 blacks were 23 percent of the city’s population but 55 percent of those stopped by the police. By contrast, whites were 35 percent of the population but accounted for only 10 percent of stops. What the story left out, noted Mac Donald, is that
blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, thought they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown.16
Critics insist that blacks are overrepresented among those arrested because police focus on black communities, but data consistently show little if any difference between the rate at which victims report the racial identities of their attackers and the rate at which police arrest people of different races. As Mac Donald noted, “No one has come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.”17 Nor is there any evidence to support the claim that prosecutors are overcharging blacks—or that judges are oversentencing blacks—for the same crimes committed by nonblacks. Mac Donald wrote:
Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades—and the prize remains as elusive as ever. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.18
What about the contention that racist drug laws are driving black incarceration rates? Might that help explain why blacks are 13 percent of the population but half of all prison inmates? In 1986, in response to the crack cocaine epidemic that was crushing American inner cities, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which instituted harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses than for powder cocaine offenses. For sentencing purposes, the law stipulated that one gram of crack cocaine be treated as equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine. Because crack cocaine offenders tended to be black and powder cocaine offenders tended to be white, critics of the law denounced it as racially biased in hindsight. But it’s worth remembering that black lawmakers led the initial effort to pass the legislation. The harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including New York Representatives Major Owens of Brooklyn and Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities, and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. “Eleven of the twenty-one blacks who were then members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the law which created the 100-to-1 crack–powder differential,” noted Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. “In light of charges that the crack–powder distinction was enacted partly because of conscious or unconscious racism, it is noteworthy that none of the black members of Congress made that claim at the time the bill was initially discussed.” Kennedy added: “The absence of any charge by black members of Congress that the crack–powder differential was racially unfair speaks volumes; after all, several of these representatives had long histories of distinguished opposition to any public policy that smacked of racial injustice. That several of these representatives demanded a crackdown on crack is also significant. It suggests that the initiative for what became the crack–powder distinction originated to some extent within the ranks of African-American congressional officials.”19
Despite this history, the crack–powder sentencing disparity would, over the next quarter century, become one of the left’s favorite examples of America’s racist criminal justice system. Barack Obama criticized the law while running for president in 2008 and early in his first term moved to lessen the differential. That effort culminated in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which lowered the ratio to 18 to 1. This was no doubt great news for criminals, but what’s been lost in the discussion is whether such a change leaves law-abiding blacks better off. In 2009 blacks were 85 percent of crack offenders, and sentences for crack offenses averaged twenty-four months longer than those for powder cocaine. Civil rights groups and others who equate racial disparities with racism have used such data to decry the sentencing guidelines as racially unjust, yet they don’t seem overly concerned with whether blacks in the main are helped or hurt when crack dealers are locked up longer for pushing a substance that has devastated urban black neighborhoods. Why is their sympathy with the lawbreakers?
Celebrated left-wing academics like Michelle Alexander reluctantly acknowledge that “some black mayors, politicians, and lobbyists—as well as preachers, teachers, barbers, and ordinary folk—endorse ‘get tough’ tactics” by police and the courts that facilitate the high black incarceration rates that she laments. But is it any great shock that black people without advanced degrees have less sympathy for black thugs? The black homicide rate is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90 percent of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Why should we care more about black criminals than their black victims? Still, Alexander dismisses tough-on-crime blacks as ignorant and “confused.” Of course, the very fact that so many blacks support locking up black criminals undermines her Jim Crow and slavery analogies, since those institutions never had anywhere near the same level of black support. But Alexander is not about to let such petty details stand in her way. “The fact that many African Americans . . . insist that the problems of the urban poor can be best explained by their behavior, culture, and attitude does not, in any meaningful way, distinguish mass incarceration from its [slavery and Jim Crow] predecessors,” she wrote.20
Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on black victims. Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. In 2006 blacks were 37.5 percent of the 1,274,600 people in state prisons, which house 88 percent of the nation’s prison population, explained Heather Mac Donald. “If you remove drug prisoners from that population, the percentage of black prisoners drops to 37 percent—half of a percentage point, hardly a significant difference.” It’s true that drug prosecutions have risen markedly over the past thirty years. Drug offenders were 6.4 percent of state prison inmates in 1979 but had jumped to 20 percent by 2004. “Even so,” wrote Mac Donald, “violent and property offenders continue to dominate the ranks: in 2004, 52 percent of state prisoners were serving time for violence and 21 percent for property crimes, for a combined total over three and a half times that of state drug offenders.” Drug-war critics like to focus on federal prisons, where drug offenders climbed from 25 percent of the inmate population in 1980 to 47.6 percent in 2006. “But the federal system held just 12.3 percent of the nation’s prisoners in 2006,” noted Mac Donald. “So much for the claim that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because of the war on drugs.”21
The black inmate population reflects black criminality, not a racist criminal justice system, which currently is being run by one black man (Attorney General Holder) who reports to another (the president). Black crime rates are vastly higher than white crime rates. And it’s hard to see how wishing away this reality, inventing conspiracy theories to explain it, or calling those who point it out “racist” will help improve the situation.
Perceptions of black criminality aren’t likely to change until black behavior changes. Rather than address that challenge, however, too many liberal policy makers change the subject. Instead of talking about black behavior, they want to talk about racism or poverty or unemployment or gun control. The poverty argument is especially weak. In the 1950s, when segregation was legal, overt racism was rampant, and black poverty was much higher than today, black crime rates were lower and blacks comprised a smaller percentage of the prison population. And then there is the experience of other groups who endured rampant poverty, racial discrimination, and high unemployment without becoming overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
“During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under $4,000 per year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing in any area of the city,” according to the social scientists Wilson and Herrnstein. “That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.”22
Those who want to blame crime on a lack of jobs cannot explain why crime rates fell in many cities during the Great Depression, when unemployment was high, and spiked during the 1960s, when economic growth was strong and jobs were plentiful. Indeed, the labor-force participation rate of young black men actually fell in the 1980s and 1990s, two of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in U.S. history. Shouldn’t ghetto attitudes toward work at least be part of this discussion?
Gun control is another issue that the left raises to avoid discussing black behavior. After the Zimmerman verdict, Obama and Holder called for a reassessment of stand-your-ground laws, which allow people to use force to defend themselves without first retreating. “I know there’s been commentary about the fact that stand-your-ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense of the case,” said Obama. “On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed has a right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit the situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?”
But do such laws, as the president and others have suggested, make us less safe? According to John Lott, a former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission, states with stand-your-ground laws (also known as castle doctrine laws) in place between 1977 and 2005 saw murder rates fall by 9 percent and overall violent crime fall by 11 percent.23 “The debate has everything backwards over who benefits from the law,” Lott told me in an e-mail exchange shortly after the Zimmerman verdict. “Poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas are not only the most likely victims of crime, they are also the ones who benefit the most from Stand Your Ground laws. It makes it easier for them to protect themselves when the police can’t be there fast enough. Rules that make self-defense more difficult would impact blacks the most.”
Lott noted that “blacks make up just 16.6 percent of Florida’s population, but they account for over 31 percent of the state’s defendants invoking Stand Your Ground defense. Black defendants who invoke this statute to justify their actions are acquitted 8 percent more frequently than whites who use the same defense.” None of this is to suggest that there is a causal link between stand-your-ground laws and gun violence, though liberals like Obama seem certain that one exists. If they’re right, it’s an argument for more such laws, not fewer.
Gun deaths fell by 39 percent in the United States between 1993 and 2011. Justice Department data from 2013 show that “In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns.”24 More remarkable is that this drop in gun violence happened at the same time that firearm purchases were increasing. In 2012 background checks for gun purchases reached 19.6 million, an annual record, and an increase of 19 percent over 2011. Some of the most violent cities in America, like Chicago and Baltimore, already have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet the political left continues to insist that disarming ghetto residents improves safety in those communities.
Liberals like to obsess over how many people America incarcerates. They say that the number of inmates is simply “too high” or “excessive” without acknowledging the benefits of prison—benefits that accrue especially to the most likely crime victims: poor blacks. The relevant issue is not how many people we imprison per se but whether our higher arrests and conviction rates and longer prison terms affect behavior, wrote John Lott:
Many blacks have their lives disrupted by the criminal justice system, but the lives and property of many blacks are also protected by that same system. . . . Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks. For example, in 2007, 90.2 percent of black murder victims were murdered by blacks. To go even further, poor blacks commit crime against poor blacks. Is it less racist to care about the victims or the criminals?”25
The reality is that locking up lawbreakers has worked better than going easy on them, and has worked best for law-abiding black people. After incarceration rates began to rise in the 1980s, crime plummeted. “The rate of reported crimes in the United States dropped each year after 1991 for nine years in a row, the longest decline ever recorded,” wrote Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “And crime dropped all over the United States—in every region, in the country as well as the city, in poor neighborhoods as well as rich neighborhoods. By the start of the twenty-first century, most serious crime rates had dropped by more than 35%.”26
The homicide figures are particularly noteworthy. Between 1964 and 1974 the homicide rate more than doubled, and in the late 1980s was at 1974 levels. Then in the 1990s it fell consistently. “Even with more than 2,800 killings from the attack on September 11, 2001, the homicide rate that year was more than 30% lower than the periodic peak rates that were the top portions of the 20-year cycle that began in the mid-1970s,”27 wrote Zimring. According to the Justice Department, the 1990s also saw declines of between 23 percent and 44 percent in rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft, and larceny. Again, the benefits of less crime are not spread evenly throughout the population. Zimring explained:
The crime decline was the only public benefit of the 1990s whereby the poor and disadvantaged received more direct benefits than those with wealth. Because violent crime is a tax of which the poor pay much more, general crime declines also benefit the poor, as likely victims, most intensely. And impoverished minority males in big cities also benefited from less risk of both victimization and offense.28
The professor added that the sharp decline in crime that big cities like New York, Dallas, Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia experienced in the 1990s “could not have happened if crime was an inherent byproduct of urban disadvantage.”29
For all the talk on the left that unemployment drives crime, the recent recession has not reversed trends. Between 2008 and 2010 the jobless rate doubled to about 10 percent, yet “the property-crime rate, far from spiking, fell significantly,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
For 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported an 8% drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17% reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. Big-city reports show the same thing. Between 2008 and 2010, New York City experienced a 4% decline in the robbery rate and a 10% fall in the burglary rate. Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles witnessed similar declines.30
Factors other than incarceration rates can impact lawbreaking, of course. Criminologists agree that, for instance, the age structure of the population also matters, since young people commit more crimes. But there is no doubt that putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has contributed significantly to lowering crime rates in the United States. There is also no doubt that proactive policing and tough-on-crime policies that the left derides have led to fewer black deaths. In 2013 a federal judge in New York City declared the police department’s use of stop and frisk unconstitutional, and appointed a monitor to reform the practice. The move was supported by Attorney General Holder. “To be clear, I’m not ordering an end to the practice of stop and frisk,” wrote the judge, allowing that the Supreme Court has found the practice permissible. “The purpose of the remedies addressed in this opinion is to ensure that the practice is carried out in a manner that protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much-needed police protection.” For the judge, however, as well as the ACLU, the NAACP, the Obama administration, and others on the left who cheered the ruling, the measure of whether a police stop is permissible is whether it comports with population data, not crime data. The judge didn’t like the fact that blacks were stopped more often than whites and Asians. During the trial, police testified that they stopped people when they witnessed suspicious behavior and suspected criminal activity. They said that the disproportionate number of stops in black neighborhoods reflected the amount of crime in those neighborhoods, not anti-black bias. The judge was unpersuaded, ruling that police were conducting stops in a “racially discriminatory manner” that amounted to “indirect racial profiling.”
It did not matter to critics that police cited stop and frisk as an important crime-fighting tool or that crime rates bore this out. Beginning in the 1960s, New York’s murder rate rose steadily, peaking at 2,245 deaths in 1990. By 2012 the number had dropped to 419, a forty-year low. Former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly credited stop and frisk and other kinds of proactive policing as a major reason for the decline. Again, the biggest beneficiaries of this trend were blacks, who comprised 60 percent of murder victims in the Big Apple in 2012. “No police department in the country has come close to achieving what the NYPD has,” wrote Heather Mac Donald. “New York’s crime drop has been twice as deep and has lasted twice as long as the national average since the early 1990s. Today, 10,000 minority males are alive who would have been killed by now had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early-1990s levels.”31 To the extent that soft-on-crime rulings like this result in less effective policing, blacks will suffer most.
The black civil rights leadership is fully aware that black criminality is, at root, a black problem that needs to be addressed by black people reassessing black behavior and cultural attitudes. But the civil rights movement has become an industry, and that industry has no vested interests in realistic assessments of black pathology. The NAACP responded to the Zimmerman verdict by announcing a series of national legislative initiatives. Ben Jealous, the head of the group at the time, said its goal was to “end racial profiling, repeal stand your ground laws, form effective civil complaint review boards to provide oversight of police misconduct, improve training for community watch groups, mandate law enforcement to collect data on homicide cases involving non-whites, and address the school to prison pipeline.”32 The NAACP, in other words, is way more interested in keeping whites on their toes than in addressing self-destructive black habits.
“The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism,” wrote Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict.
The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.33
In the days following the Zimmerman verdict, Bill O’Reilly used his Fox News program to call attention to “the disintegration of the African America family,” which he identified as the ultimate source of “so much violence and chaos” in black communities. So long as 73 percent of black children are born to single mothers, said O’Reilly, blacks will find themselves overrepresented among delinquents. To his credit, Don Lemon, the black host of a program on CNN, applauded O’Reilly’s remarks, and then added that O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough.” Lemon went on to make five simple suggestions for black self-improvement: pull up your pants, finish high school, stop using the n-word, take better care of your communities, and stop having children out of wedlock. The NAACP’s agenda is about deflecting blame away from blacks and maintaining the relevance of the NAACP. Lemon’s agenda is about personal responsibility. The social science, of course, overwhelmingly supports what both O’Reilly and Lemon are saying, even though many liberals want to ignore it and attack the messengers.
“The most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home,” concluded William Comanor and Llad Phillips after examining data from a national longitudinal study of young people. Black boys without a father were 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father. James Q. Wilson put an even finer point on what’s at stake:
If crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character; if weak character is more likely among the children of unmarried mothers; if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods; if boys become young men with no preparation for work; if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having “sold out” to a dominant white culture; if powerful gangs replace weak families—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing by plan and in the near future the crime rate of low-income blacks are slim.34
The stark racial differences in crime rates undoubtedly impact black-white relations in America. So long as they persist, young black men will make people nervous. Discussions about the problem can be useful if they are honest, which is rare. Liberals don’t help matters by making excuses for counterproductive behavior. Nor does the media by shying away from reporting the truth.