Continuing with our discussion of Leuconoe’s questions, today we’re finally going to dive into Poverty, not race, tied to high crime rates in urban communities, Homicide in Black and White (pdf,) and Nazis Can’t Do Math: Reflections on Racism, Crime and the Illiteracy of Right-Wing Statistical Analysis.

I want to begin with a quick note on the nature and effects of crime. Tim Wise, in particular, is highly dismissive of white concerns about black crime, noting that your actual chances of getting murdered by a black person are pretty low (American homicide rates: high when they want to ban guns, low when someone points out the racial composition of murderers.)

But Wise’s focus on homicide trivializes all of the smaller, far more frequent crimes that people are also trying to avoid, like robbery, arson, carjacking, assault, rape, etc. These crimes are thankfully less severe than murder, but they are still horrible.

I am going to share a personal story. A friend’s house was recently robbed. The police received a call from her home alarm, they called her, and she called me to be with her when she got home.

Why me? I live nearby, and she basically has no one else besides her kids–her husband was arrested some time ago for domestic violence and the rest of her family lives across the country. And here was her house–the back windows shattered, glass everywhere, her things scattered everywhere. She collapsed, sobbing and afraid. Why would someone do this? What could she tell her kids? How could they stay in this house, which now had holes instead of windows?

Note: I do not know the race/s of the robbers. This anecdote is not about race. It is about the pain crime causes. It is about a neighbor who has always been kind to me. Tim Wise only looks at homicide, completely neglecting the many other crimes people commit. But crime is not trivial. Robbery is not trivial. Home invasion is not trivial. Once someone has suffered like this, if they can move, there is a good chance they will. Personally, I hate all crime, but this post is specifically in response to questions about black vs. white crime rates and black-on-white crime.

What are a white person’s chances of being the victim of a violent crime if they live in a black neighborhood? Luckily for us, La Griffe du Lion has already calculated the answer:

“John” is just a name La Griffe has assigned to his hypothetical white person.

La Griffe du Lion explains both the math and statistics he used to create these graphs in extensive detail, so if, like Tim Wise, you doubt his ability to do math, (though I must note that La Griffe is probably not a Nazi,) you can go double-check his work. Besides, I strongly recommend the article, if you haven’t read it already.

By contrast, Tim Wise claims:

So if the data say, and they do, that less than seven-tenths of one percent (0.7 percent) of blacks will violently victimize a white person this year and that only about one-quarter of one percent (0.25 percent) of all whites will be violently victimized by a black person this year, that isn’t what matters. … That these incidents — awful though they are — do not a social trend make, seems to escape some people. … After all, for every one of these violent crimes committed against a white person by a black person, there will be at least 4 such crimes committed against whites by other whites. And yet, racists never seem to think much of this; they don’t assume that white criminals represent white America generally, or that their depredations against their fellow whites say anything about the inherent pathologies of their white brothers and sisters.

I mean, there really isn’t a pattern here. It’s just a bunch of dots. I don’t know why anyone would think there is a connection between blacks and crime.

Let’s return to La Griffe du Lion:

The data reveal two causes of white victimization by blacks. First, a black is 3 times more likely than a white to commit violent crime. However, as a neighborhood turns black, this factor could increase black-on-white violence at most by a factor of 3, and then only when a neighborhood is virtually all black. The observed level of white victimization is much too high to blame on general tendencies of blacks to be violent. A more important reason is simply that blacks prefer white victims. The best and most complete evidence comes from the Justice Department. Its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) canvasses a representative sample of about 80,000 Americans, from roughly 43,000 households. From this survey, a picture of crime is painted by its victims. The last full report of the NCVS was issued in 1994. From it we learn that blacks committed 1,600,951 violent crimes against whites. In the same year, whites committed 165,345 such offenses against blacks. Despite being only 13 percent of the population, blacks committed more than 90 percent of the violent interracial crime. Less than 15 percent of these had robbery as a motive. The rest were assaults and rapes. The asymmetry of interracial crime goes still deeper. More than half the violence committed by blacks is directed against whites, 57 percent in 1994. Less than 3 percent of the violence committed by whites is directed against blacks. Population and NCVS statistics reveal that in 1994 a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. In the city, the races live mostly apart from one another, so that the most convenient victims of thugs are others of the same race. Only a hunter’s mentality could account for the data. Given a choice, a black thug will select a white victim. Ironically, so will a white thug.

I’m just going to re-post one of yesterday’s graphs:

That said, Wise does make one good point:

And although interracial homicide in either direction is quite rare, the fact is, any given black person in the U.S. is almost three times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by someone who is black.

There are, as you may have noticed, more white people than black people in this country. If 10% of whites commit crimes against blacks, and 10% of blacks commit crimes against whites, then a lot more black people will be victimized by whites than whites will be victimized by whites. But since there are a lot more whites than blacks, a black person’s chances of being victimized by any particular white, and a white person’s chances of being victimized by any particular black, are exactly the same.

Wise is correct, and this reality is probably quite distressing to black people, who of course don’t like being crime victims any more than anyone else. In the real world, being a minority matters in many ways. But from an HBD perspective, it’s irrelevant–it’s just an effect of the sizes of the populations, not some intrinsic feature of the people involved–and the solution, if you want to solve it, is just to keep whites away from blacks. (Which seems to be the opposite of what Wise desires.)

Additionally, Wise notes simultaneously that whites avoid black neighborhoods (the much-reviled “white flight”) and that whites are not often victimized by black people.

Well DUH. That’s because they’re avoiding black neighborhoods. Whites in high-crime neighborhoods (of any race, obviously) are likely to be victimized.

It’s like when people ask why we’re incarcerating so many people even though crime rates have fallen. They have fallen because the criminals are in prison.

I tried to look up Tim Wise’s address, because the ultimate test of whether he believes what he preaches is whether or not he lives in a poor black neighborhood, but couldn’t find it. I found some posts where people claimed to have his address, but when I popped those addresses into the county tax assessor’s website, found that the property belonged to a totally different person who is probably really annoyed at all of the hate mail they receive. (I don’t blame Tim Wise for not wanting his address to be easily findable on the internet. He, too, would like to avoid violent crime.)

Okay, enough of Tim Wise. You can agree with his numbers, or you can agree with La Griffe’s. Either way, I don’t think anyone wants to live in a high-crime neighborhood.

To be continued…