One of the more frustrating things I have seen over the years is the paranoia among whites about black on black crime. This once again surfaced with idiotic statements from Giuliani. The image is of a violent community descending into anarchy. Look, for example, at this article by Time on Ferguson..
And it is all bullshit.
The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice reviewed the evidence on black on black from and concluded:
Since the sainted Fifties, America has seen rapid teenage population growth and dramatic shifts toward more single parenting, more lethal drugs and weapons, increased middle-aged (that is, parent-age) drug abuse and imprisonment, decreased incarceration of youth, decreased youthful religious affiliation, and more violent and explicit media available to younger ages. Horrifying, as the culture critics far Right to far Left—including Obama, who spends many pages and speeches berating popular culture as some major driver of bad youth behavior—repeatedly insist.
And after 50 years of all these terrible changes in American culture? Today’s young African Americans display the lowest rates of crime and serious risk of any generation that can be reliably assessed.
The numbers from California are amazing:
The black youth crime drop is not due to “getting tough”—just the opposite. In 2012, a record-low 231 California black youth were locked up in state correctional facilities, compared to over 2,000 in the mid-1990s, and 800 in 1959, the first year numbers were kept. “Status crime” policing of black youth, reflected in curfew, loitering, and other non-criminal-stops, also has fallen to record lows. Little solid evidence connects policies to reduced crime, except maybe for the correlation with increased college enrollment.
In fact, black youth under 18, the youth who are supposedly a bunch of criminals, account for 2% of all murders in the US.
None of this fits with the portrait being sold. In the telling of the right black youth are to be feared and racial profiling is just a rational reaction to an out of control and lawless group.
But this is not the truth. Not even close. Even Ferguson itself, which is poorer and more African American that the country as a whole doesn't fit the portrait. It's crime rate is about the same as the rest of the US.