And Nothing Seems to Change: Ad Hoc Statistics of Black Crime - Part 2

By Patrick Hall

It’s been over six years since the release of Heather MacDonald’s book The War on Cops. Similarly, as I wrote 25 years ago in Commonweal Magazine in an article entitled Black and Blue, violent crime within the urban Black populace has grown exponentially.  It has especially taken off in many of America’s largest cities according to MacDonald and other urban policy analysts after twenty years of relative decline.  Black homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities. Of course, the perpetrators and victims in these murders were over 81% African Americans. Both FBI and DOJ stats confirm that this was the largest one-year increase since 1993.  Dr.  Mac Donald first identified the rapid growth in Black criminality nationally as the "Ferguson effect."  Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals have become emboldened.  Many in law enforcement, who want to “serve and protect” everyone regardless of ethnicity have been hesitant to enforce the law out of fear of being dragged into court by Progressive Liberal (mostly Democrat) Prosecutors. Furthermore, the canonization of George Floyd after his death was used by professional victim industrialists (i.e., NAACP, Black Congressional Caucus, Democratic Party, and liberal intelligentsia and their media) to further hamstring law enforcement. Their efforts have only managed to get more black people killed.

I don’t mean to sound redundant, but the biggest killers or victimizers of black people are black criminals.  Once more, blacks kill blacks.  It is not the Klan, white supremacists, or those nasty rotten Republicans and their racist MAGA supporters.

Data Point #6
This bears being repeated. Black crime is even more prevalent in the country’s largest cities and counties, such as New York, Los Angeles, and New York.

Data Point #7
In Chicago, blacks committed 76% of all homicides despite composing 35% of the city’s population.

Data Point #8
Blacks also account for 78% of all juvenile arrests. White youth who are 28% of Chicago’s population committed 4 % of its homicides and 3.5% of its juvenile arrests.

Data Point #9
Here is a sidebar from Dr. Macdonald’s research. Less than 26% of murder cases in Chicago were solved. Remember blacks in Chicago commit 76% of these murders, and will most likely continue to practice their deadly trade on innocent black residents.

Data Point #10
Let’s consider the city of Los Angeles, California. Blacks are only 10% of the city’s population but commit 42% of its robberies and 34% of the city’s felonies. Whites make up 29 % of Los Angeles’ population and commit 5% of its robberies and 13% of its felonies.

Data Point #11
In the city of New York, blacks committed 75% of all shootings, 70% of all robberies, and 66% of all violent crimes.  Blacks are only 23% of New York’s population.

Data Point 12
Additionally, since 2009, the Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers show that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders, and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties. These numbers haven’t varied all that much since the 2009 benchmark. It is also troubling that Statista, a German online platform that collects a myriad of data from over 150 countries shows similar statistics.

Data Point #13
Here is another disheartening sidebar. In 2015 almost 6000 blacks were murdered by other blacks nationwide. Compare this with American military personnel lost in post-9/11 war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We lost over 7000 soldiers in these conflicts.   The 6000 blacks killed just in our nation’s inner cities, illustrates the utter perfidy, lawlessness, and cultural anomie systemic to many black communities. By contrast, less than 260 blacks were killed by police gunfire in 2015.  

Our “Fathers”

It has been a lack of fathers or some reasonable facsimile of a two-parent household that has led to the carnage taking place among a large segment of the Black community. It is not racism that has caused this murderous dislocation. Black crime rates were lower in the 1940s and 1950s, when black poverty was higher, and racial discrimination was rampant and legal. Economist Thomas Sowell, as well as Heather MacDonald in their research, have concluded a straight line can be drawn between family breakdown and youth violence.

They point out that before the 1960s "most black children were raised in two-parent families." Currently, 72% of blacks are born out of wedlock. In Cook County and the Chicago area, 79% of blacks were born to single mothers, while only 15 percent of whites were born to single mothers.  Also, according to one study authored by the National Center for Fatherlessness:

• 85% of youths in prison come from fatherless homes
• 71% of high school drop-out come from fatherless homes
• 90% of all homeless runaways come from homes where the father is missing
• 73% of black-on-black homicides are perpetrated by individuals from fatherless homes
• 60% of youth suicides come from fatherless homes
• Once again, Blacks are overrepresented in most of the above categories.

The study also makes this salient observation. Many young men join gangs because the gang leaders provide the male leadership they desperately crave. The gang leaders become surrogate fathers. A really bad one, yes! But they’re surrogate fathers nonetheless.   Black criminality will remain toxic until the larger Black community seriously looks at their culpability in the devolution and decay in many urban communities.