Blacks and Crime: An Examination

Updated September 14. Note: This post has just been accused of racism. See here for my position on racism.

Black crime rate in the US is approximately 8.1 times greater than the White crime rate. It is about 36.8 times higher than the US Asian rate, which itself is 4.6 times lower than the White rate. It is even 4 times higher than the US Amerindian and Polynesian (mostly Hawaiian) crime rates. It is also 2.4 times higher than the extremely high Hispanic crime rate.

These rates are particularly disparate when one looks at such things as rape. For instance, in 2005, Black criminals raped 37,460 White females, while between 0-10 (they don't even keep records below 10 rapes) Black females were raped by a White man. There is also a suggestion that about 10,000 of those 37,000+ rapes were by groups of more than one Black male (gang rapes).

Figures like this just drive White nationalists up the wall. You know these White racists have always had a thing about "Black men raping our women". Despite all the lynchings of often-innocent Black men, it appears that they were onto something.

However, these figures also leave out that Black women seem to be about five times more likely to be raped by Black male rapists than White women are. As usual with Black criminals (and this point is lost on White nationalists) the truly victimized are Blacks themselves.

Whites get off easy. Any given White woman is five times less likely to be raped by a Black man than a Black woman is. She should thank her lucky stars she is White! And if anything, those figures give the lie to the notion that Black criminals preferentially prey on Whites (a favorite, feverish and mad White nationalist obsession).

These frightening statistics scream out for an explanation. Where can we look? Society? Poverty? Discrimination? Racism? Racism and discrimination have declined tremendously since the 1960's and the Black crime rate rocketed upwards. It's hard to believe that anyone is poorer and more deprived than US Amerindians, so why is the Black crime rate four times higher?

The IQ's of US Blacks (85) are about the same as those of US Amerindians (87) and are the same as US Polynesians (apparently 86?), yet the Amerindian and Polynesian crime rates are 4 times lower than the Black rate. IQ's of US Hmong (82.5 - probably artificially low due to poor English skills) are even lower than US Blacks, yet the Hmong crime rate is probably 18 times lower than the Black crime rate.

Blacks have become much wealthier in the US since liberation in the 1960's. Rising income and declining poverty hardly offer poverty as an explanation for Black crime.

In short, all of the standard liberal explanations of Black crime (poverty, racism, discrimination) do not hold water. The White racist explanation (low IQ) does not appear to make sense either. Something is driving Black crime, and it's not poverty, racism, or IQ.

So what is it?

Let's look at the question in depth.

First of all, Blacks have a high crime rate all over the world. This implies that there is something in Blacks, genetically, as a group, that is causing a lot of crime in modern societies. African village societies often had developed strict cultural mores along with ferocious punishments that kept Black crime at a low level. With the movement to the cities, Black crime in Africa has generally gone through the roof.

Most Caribbean nations have very high crime rates.

Blacks in the UK have a very high crime rate. Only 2% of the population commits fully 20% of the homicides and the vast majority of all gun homicides.

Let's take a look at the UK.

Jamaican immigrants came in the 1950's - there were few before. They were relatively hard working and law abiding. Their kids are a disaster. Black gang and gun culture is new to Britain and has nothing to do with poverty at all. In the near past, Whites in Britain were much poorer, such that they were often malnourished, but they were not as depraved as this new Black Jamaican culture, the children of low-wage immigrants.

Now let's take a look at Blacks in the US.

Fully 50% of black women are overweight - so clearly whether or not US Blacks live in poverty, surely they are not starving. This is a serious point, as capitalist countries all over the Third World cannot seem to figure out how to give folks enough food to eat, and rates of malnutrition are extremely high in the capitalist Third World.

Poverty? The average Black in the US has an income the same as the average Swede - so much for that. Black neighborhoods were safer 50 yrs ago, but in the meantime, blacks have become richer and better educated, yet the crime rate has gone through the roof. A suggestion that genes may contribute to crime comes from reports that criminal parents tend to have criminal kids, even when the kid is adopted away.

Steve Sailer suggests that Blacks, in particular Black males, are big, strong, aggressive and have higher numbers of of testosterone receptors in their bodies, so they have access to more testosterone or they react more to testosterone in their bodies.

I would like to point out that Black crime is often associated with young Black males, and that Black males around 30-45+ have often got it figured out, no matter what they were like as kids. If they settle down, have some kids and own or rent a home, they often relax and are fairly peaceful and easy to deal with.

I say this because my car has broken down a couple of times in the heart of the Los Angeles Black ghetto, and both times Black males around this age came out and worked on my engine to try to get it going again.

Studies of psychopathic personality (broken link) have found that in the US, Blacks and Amerindians have the highest rates, then Hispanics, then Whites, and last Asians. These approximately follow crime rates, except that Amerindian crime rates are far lower than would be predicted by their sociopathy rates.

However, other large-scale studies (broken link) find no difference in Antisocial Personality Disorder by race. They also found no consistent racial differences in traits closely associated with psychopathy, such as sensation seeking and psychoticism, and, contra Richard Lynn's studies, the Psychopathic Deviate scale of the MMPI.

Neither are these negative results on sociopathy by race compatible with Rushton's r/K theory of evolutionary selection, as claimed by Lynn, because Native Americans and Hispanic groups are of Siberian Mongoloid origin in the case of the former and mixed Central American Amerindian and Spanish Caucasian in the case of the latter.

Steve Sailer points out that whatever the sociopathy rates really are, Blacks are simply more aggressive than other races (I would say primarily younger Black males). Blacks have .3 standard deviation excess in aggressiveness across surveys (actually, that is not a tremendously elevated rate of aggression), including Interpol.

Sailer points out that there is no discrimination involved in higher black suspension rates in schools. I would agree with that, and add, as a former teacher who taught in Black inner city schools for years, that the only discrimination is probably that far fewer Black students are suspended than ought to be.

I would also add that Black 11th and 12th graders, even in the ghetto, are exceptionally well-behaved, all of the idiots being out of school, in jail, juvey or boot camp, or dead, by then.

In death row sentencing, Sailer notes that the only bias is towards White inmates and this applies even to the South. What Sailer means by that is that Whites are actually more likely than Blacks to get the death penalty for the same crime, even in the South. Obviously, the days of White racist hanging juries are pretty much through in this country, even in the South.

Gene Expression (not my favorite blog at all), quoting Le Griffe Du Lion (not my favorite White racist academic at all) on violent crime:

Le Griffe messes around with some figures and comes up with a .84 correlation of % of Blacks and Hispanics in a neighborhood and violent crime rates. That's incredibly high in social science, and is almost a perfect fit. The more Blacks and Hispanics in a given neighborhood, the more violent crime, period.

I must point out that Le Griffe Du Lion is an academic lab coat racist, and a true White Supremacist, with a stated agenda of getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws in the US.

Yet Black crime rates are not adequately explained on a global basis merely by presence of Blacks.

For instance, the Miami Herald (dead link) quotes the World Health Organization saying that Latin America, with a mixed Caucasian-Amerindian population, has a higher homicide rate (27.5 per 100,000) than even Black Africa (22 per 100,000), lily-White but organized crime-overrun Eastern Europe (15 per 100,000) and Industrialized nations - generally speaking, the West (1 per 100,000).

Furthermore, other studies show that the mixed Caucasian-Amerindians of Latin America, with only 8 percent of the global population, account for 75 percent of the world’s kidnappings.

Clearly, there is something other than pure genetics at work in high Latin American crime rates.

I know it's heresy in these free market times to mention this, but perhaps, could an insane gap between rich and poor, among the worst on Earth, have a might bit to do with this?

Gini coefficient map for Latin America.

Oh no, of course not, capitalism doesn't cause any problems, and all societal problems are caused by too much socialism. How do I know this? Wikipedia told me 10,000 times so far, and Wikipedia is God, you know.

Shall we end this on a upbeat tone? Please do.

Given the genetics that Blacks bring to the table, Black crime rates can either be relatively higher or relatively lower, depending on societal variables. A recognition that Blacks bring a different genetic set to the table, which may make them more susceptible to crime, is essential in devising societal actions to reduce Black crime.

What works for other races with different genetic sets may not work for Blacks with their own mental toolbox.

This is why race realism or racialism is so important.

One suggestion I would like to make as a socialist is that socialism seems to dramatically reduce Black crime.

Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, has a homicide rate 50% the US rate. Dominica is a country that is almost 100% Black, and the US is merely 13% Black. Dominica is a country characterized by a relatively equitable distribution of wealth. Most don't have much, but they tend to all be poor together, and that may be easier for Blacks to take.

In Mozambique in the 1980's there was a Communist regime under one of my heroes, Samora Machel. The crime rate was almost nonexistent. They were all poor together. According to a resident, anyone, male or female, native or foreigner, could walk across the all-Black capital city, Maputo, in the middle of the night, with scarcely a worry.

Abiola Lapite, one of my least favorite human beings on Earth, does note that there is a tribe called the Dioula in Burkina Faso who have a homicide rate of 1.3/100,000, nearly as low as Japan's rate of 1.1/100,000.

Why don't we get some Western criminologists over to Burkina Faso to study the very Black Dioula? Until there is a recognition of the existence of race as a salient variable in human diversity, and that races may differ genetically and biologically on behavioral outcomes, this will never occur.

Genetics provides the clay. Culture or society is the sculptor.

No Black population anywhere is doomed to an insane crime rate. If the Dioula can do it, so can any Blacks anywhere.

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