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.

Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.

Immigration - A Question of Quality

It is quite common in the US for the debate on immigration to be split into polar opposites. On the pro-immigrant side is an utterly insane Open Borders group that seems to more or less argue for unfettered immigration into the US. The overwhelming majority of the US business class supports this for the sole reason of cheap and easily intimidated labor.

On the liberal side of the spectrum, many liberals simply feel it is cruel to keep anyone out of the US who wants to come here. Many others have swallowed the pro-diversity propaganda whole. There is a whole industry out there that is promoting diversity and multiculturalism.

These things are human norms, and human societies have been diverse and multicultural since the beginning of time, so it is insane to argue that these things are unnatural, which is a typical White nationalist argument.

The problem is that diversity, while normal, is not necessarily such a great thing per se. For one thing, various immigrant groups can be poor quality and create many problems for a society. Hispanic immigrants and their offspring are vastly more criminal and problematic that other immigrant groups, or than, say, White Americans.

Long-term resident Hispanics often cause few problems, but the recent immigrants and their children have been a total nightmare. New evidence shows that diversity reduces trust at the neighborhood level. It is common sense that high-diversity societies are often more unstable that monocultural societies.

I am not saying any of this to be a xenophobe. I am just pointing out that it makes little sense to shill for diversity as if it were automatically a good thing in and of itself.

We also have minority groups, in particular Hispanics, who are now pro-immigrant simply out of ethnocentrism and for no other reason. On this, the Left is utterly bonkers. Black and Hispanic ethnocentrism is cheered on wildly, while Whites are forbidden to be ethnocentric themselves.

This Identity Politics has been the curse of the Left since the 1960's. It is now backfiring as a new White nationalist movement comes into being. This movement is nothing but the logical result of Whites creating their own Identity Politics movement after the Left fertilized society with this nonsense cult.

Also, now that the Open Borders crowd has, in the past 15 years, cleverly conned society into thinking that anti-immigrant sentiment (even anti-illegal immigrant sentiment!) is de facto racist, you have many guilt-ridden folks, especially liberals and Centrists, who support even illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.

Nearly the entire US environmental movement has gone over to Open Borders, including Earth First and the Center for Biological Diversity. Sierra Club lost its anti-immigrant battle long ago. Since CBD is focussed on endangered species, their position seems particularly insane.

Habitat loss by overpopulation is obviously one of the major causes of environmental damage and the extinction crisis. Anyone who cannot see this is blind. The environmental movement has come out for Open Borders simply out of terror of being labeled racist and for no other reason.

On the opposite side, we have a lot of sensible folks, especially those who want to limit illegal immigration. Even 14 years ago, the debate was much more sensible. In 1994, 40% of California Hispanics voted for Proposition 187 to limit social services to illegals. Now, things have gotten so polarized that I think many of those Hispanics are probably Open Borders folks.

We also have lots of nasty racists, especially White nationalists, on the anti-immigrant side. These people simply do not want any non-White immigration whatsoever, though they are not opposed to the immigration of European Whites (However arbitrarily they may define that group!).

Most of these folks actively dislike everyone who is not White; there are others who do not, but just want to "preserve the declining White race" as if it were an animal subspecies on the Endangered Species List.

There are also the xenophobes. Vdare is a good example of these folks. They just don't like any furriners period. Most people here are not White nationalists at all - they just oppose non-Americans coming to our land.

In general, most of the hardcore anti-immigrant crowd is on the political Right. The Left has granted this entire field to the Right, even on illegal immigration, which, incredibly, almost the entire liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to support.

There may be less ulterior motives for this. Democrats need Hispanics votes to win, and the only way to get those these days is to support amnesty for 12 million illegals. More cynically, Democrats are supporting illegals as a way to get 12 million new Democratic voters into the US, since 80% of Mesoamerican immigrants are voting Democratic.

Hence it is nice to see someone step out of the box on immigration, like this progressive, Randall Burns, on Vdare actually coming out against illegal immigrants, but focusing his anger on the businesses who hire them. He also makes an argument similar to the one I have made - that mass illegal immigration has been a major factor in both the screwing of the US worker and in the wild inequality gap of the past 35 years .

We need some sense on the immigration debate. In particular, we on the Left and in the environmental movement need to open up some space for the progressives and environmentalists to take sane positions on immigration without fear of being called racists.

First of all, not all immigrants are bad news. It is hard to make a case that legal immigration has been a terrible problem for this country, though we need to drop the numbers way down. The "limit" is now something like 1.1 million legal immigrants.

There is not a lot of evidence that even this level of legal immigration has harmed wages, created crime waves, or done much of anything other than harmed the environment. It is dubious whether legal immigrants take jobs for less wages than US citizens. Most legal immigrants come here and want to work for US wages.

H-1B and the gamut of other "temporary worker" visas are often simply outrageous. Businesses do indeed bring in foreign workers for just about every position imaginable generally for the sole reason of cheap labor. These visas are "non-immigrant temporary worker" visas and last for up to six years!

The whole temporary worker visa BS game needs to be pretty much scrapped. There is little evidence of any labor shortage in any field anywhere in this nation. Most stories about such shortages are simply lies.

Illegal immigration is a catastrophe because the immigrants are unscreened.

With legal immigration, we have a very strict process that winnows out a large number of prospective candidates. The process is so long and drawn out that only those determined to assimilate make it through the program. Once in, they need to be on very good behavior and can be deported for the slightest thing. Legal immigrants in general are not a serious problem in our nation.

With illegal immigration, you are simply importing entire slices of foreign countries wholesale. It's madness. We have no idea who these folks are, and many of them are criminals and bad folks indeed. Their whole time they are in the US they are breaking the law every day in myriad ways. Their employer is breaking the law. They are using fake ID.

When you import an illegal, you've just imported a criminal.

Refugees are another problematic group of immigrants, also because they are unscreened.

I do love SE Asians, but we have had quite a few problems here in California with Vietnamese, Lao, Khmu, Khmer and Hmong gangs. These groups also have huge rates of welfare use, even many years on. It's clear that they are hardly paying for themselves. I think most of these folks will eventually work out.

Yet even where SE Asian gangs are a problem, SE Asians have a low crime rate. Fresno is near here, and the city's crime statistics are interesting.

In Fresno, Blacks have a wildly elevated crime rate, the Hispanic rate is about 3 X the White rate, and the "Asian" rate is much lower than the White rate. But most Asians in Fresno are SE Asians. This implies that even with their gangs, SE Asians have a much lower crime rate than Whites.

Nevertheless, there are reports of Liberian and Somali refugees in the US committing a lot of crime and using a lot of welfare. In Australia, Sudanese refugees have been a nightmare.

In one town where many were settled, their crime rate is eight times the normal rate. At a meeting called by a bunch of liberal do-gooders to whitewash the problem of the Sudanese, a Sudanese refugee stole the briefcase of one of the top liberal presenters!

It seems to me that African refugees can be adequately resettled in other African lands. I do not think that many of these people are going to fit in well with our modern society.

It is interesting that other than some Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants, Hispanic immigrants have caused few problems.

We have sizable numbers of Brazilians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans and Bolivians in the US. Other than some Colombian drug dealers, most of these groups are causing few to no problems.

The reason is that they are not flooding in here as refugees or illegals. They are coming in as legal immigrants, and we are probably doing a good job of screening them.

On the other hand, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have been a nightmare. Vast numbers of all of these groups came here illegally, in the case of the Central Americans, as war refugees. So vast numbers of this group were simply unscreened immigrants. Unscreened means low quality, de facto.

Cubans are a problem in that this is an example of an ingrate immigrant. Since we outrageously automatically let them in as soon as they set foot on land since they are fleeing evil Communism, they have little motivation to assimilate.

Hence they have recreated 1958 Havana in Miami, complete with outrageous corruption, and insane gap between the rich and poor, a corrupt government serves only the rich and spits on everyone else, and a city where English is not necessary. One can go into nice stores and hotels in Miami and you will not find anyone who speaks English. The English language has for all intents and purposes disappeared from this vast city.

One gets the impression that almost no other country on Earth would put up with this sort of insane bullshit.

Unfortunately, Puerto Ricans and Samoans have been problem ethnic groups. This is because they are unscreened! Puerto Rico and American Samoa are colonies of the United States in a world that has decolonized. Because they are US colonies, just about any Puerto Rican and American Samoan gets to come to the US as easily as I can move to New York.

Both groups have a high crime rate and have fallen into Underclass gang culture. The solution is to completely decolonize the US. American Samoa and Puerto Rico need to be set free and cut off the welfare gravy train and Puerto Ricans and American Samoans need to get into the normal immigration line like everyone else.

After 1965, huge numbers of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic flooded into the US as legal immigrants. Now, I like Dominicans just fine and have known a couple of them, but the available information indicates that they have caused a lot of crime, ghettoization and an Underclass in Upper Manhattan - Washington Heights and Inwood - and in much of the Bronx, though legal immigrants.

This is a case where mass immigration of a national group, in this case Dominicans, has not worked out well. The only solution is to get a lot stricter about which Dominicans we allow to immigrate to the US.

It's also true that mass legal immigration of Mexicans to the US has not worked out well. The available data show that even in the 4th and 5th generation, Chicanos have very high rates of high school dropout and gang involvement. They have very low rates of college graduation. We obviously are not doing a very good job of selecting legal Mexican immigrants to the US and we need to be a lot more selective.

For Mexicans and Dominicans, studies should be undertaken to determine which ones are likely to work out well and which are likely to join the Underclass. Perhaps even IQ tests could be used to screen. This is a difficult area and I do not have all the answers.

Immigrants to your country are like visitors to your house. If an immigrant group is causing problems, it's time to evaluate our criteria for letting them in, the same way you deal with troublemakers in your home. By definition, legal immigrants should be a benefit to our nation. Groups are likely to create more problems than benefits are not good for America and need to be subject to a more selective immigration process.

There are some Jamaican gangs, but in general, we do not have a Jamaican Underclass seething in our cities. I do not know much about Haitian immigrants. I am not aware that a teeming Haitian Underclass is a threat to the republic.

White nationalist racists like to say that the problem with some immigrant groups is that they are a genetically low quality group. There is nothing to this. Perhaps if we let whole populations flood in unscreened, we could have this discussion.

East Indians, Filipinos and Black Africans are three groups that do not have extremely high IQ's. All of these places are steaming Third World wrecks. Yet Filipino, Black African and East Indian immigrants have been some of the most wildly successful immigrants of them all. The reason is simple - screening.

No ethnic group is "low quality" per se. Certainly, properly screened, one can find immigrant gold in any race or ethnic group. This ought to be a principle of a sane immigration policy.

On the other hand, letting Black Africans and East Indians flood in here unscreened would probably be a nightmare. They would simply tend to recreate Calcutta or Lagos in the US.

Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.