AU

Fair enough. Let’s take this in three stages. The first stage is an evidentiary stage: What evidence do we have that this is true? The second stage is an analytical stage: What explains it? And the third stage is a normative stage: What do we do about it?

So, the first question, which is a very good question, is: How do we know that this is true? How do we know that African Americans are overrepresented in the ranks of criminal offenders? The reason this is a really good question is because we know that police are racist. So, as many academics say, we should be skeptical of crime data that suggests that African Americans commit more crime than do white Americans. That’s a totally reasonable worry. If, say, police decide to patrol more in certain African American neighborhoods and less in white neighborhoods, we’ll observe that African Americans commit more crime, even if underlying levels of offenses are the same. Or, if they deliberately tend to apprehend black offenders but not white offenders, we’d observe a racial disparity that doesn’t reflect differences in behavior. So it’s right to worry about the reliability of police data.

As we explain in the article, what criminologists do to deal with that difficulty is that they cross-check police statistics against statistics we get from other sources. Primarily, we have two other ways of estimating racial disparities in crime commission. The first is through victimization surveys. These are surveys of people who have been victims of crime. The racial disparities that we estimate from these surveys are not that different from the racial disparities we get from police data. The second way is to look at mortality statistics. So, we can look at people who have been victims of homicides. And because we know that most homicides are intraracial, we can use the victimization disparity, which is the ratio of black Americans who have been victims of homicides and compare it to white Americans who’ve been victims of homicide, and use that disparity as an estimate of the disparity in violent offending. That disparity is also similar to the disparity we estimate from police data.

Our best academic work on this subject suggests that the racial disparity is real in an evidentiary sense: most (but not all) of the observed racial disparity in arrests, convictions, and incarceration reflects actual racial disparities in offending.

Once we’ve established that racial disparity is real — that it is a fact rather than simply a concoction of racist policing — we have to ask the second question: What explains it? As I have argued already, and as we argue in the piece, African Americans live disproportionately in neighborhoods in which poverty is highly concentrated, in which jobs are scarce, schools and housing are subpar, and community institutions are under-resourced. It is this inequality that explains disparities in crime. Crime is an index of oppression. Racial disparities in crime are an index of racial disparities in oppression.

We can then ask a third question, which is a normative question: What should we do about it? What is the right policy response? I think the reason that people find the issue of crime so challenging to talk about is because they’re unable to disentangle these three very different questions.

So many people on the Left seem to believe that simply to note the fact of racial disparities in crime is to have argued that impoverished racial minorities are to blame for these disparities. And so, because we want at all costs to avoid victim blaming (or, worse, justifying mass incarceration), we ignore racial disparities in crime.

But this is preposterously bad normative reasoning! Simply noting the fact of racial disparities in crime does not commit you to victim blaming or to supporting mass incarceration. That requires additional arguments, which we reject. In fact, if you take our analysis seriously, our view is that there is only one reasonable response to racial disparities in crime, and that is to demand that the state tackle the racial inequalities that are its root cause, rather than to tackle it punitively once it manifests as crime.