The crime victimization rate is higher for blacks than other races, and lower for Asians than other races.
But the progressive career staff of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights deny this reality, falsely claiming in a recent report about crime that blacks, whites, and Hispanics all have equal rates of being victimized by violent crime. (The Commission’s report does concede that “Black Americans are 12 times as likely as White Americans to die by firearm homicide,” “homicide is the leading cause of death for young, Black men,” and “Racial disparities in homicide are especially pronounced in large, metropolitan areas”, but it minimizes the significance of that by saying that “Homicides comprise a small share of all violent crimes”).
The career staff got away making this false claim that overall crime victimization rates are the same, because the Civil Rights Commission is split between four conservative commissioners and four liberal commissioners. That keeps the conservatives from having enough votes to fire the Commission’s left-wing staff director, who oversees the reports the Commission issues, and hires the left-wing staff who write the Commission’s reports.
As criminologist Rafael Mangual explains, the Commission’s “membership is split 4-4,” so “its final report—compiled by unelected, unappointed staff—did not come close” to an accurate picture of crime and racial disparities:
What did it find? Consider this boldfaced takeaway from the report’s accompanying two-page “fact sheet”:
“When considering all forms of violent crime, aggregated at the national level, there are no differences in the risk of victimization for White, Black, and Latino people.”
Such a claim reflects willful ignorance, at best. Indeed, the commission’s report, which profiled five cities (Denver, Houston, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Seattle), documented in each city significant racial disparities in nearly every violent-crime measure across the four-year study period. Exceptions were few. For example, Houston’s black residents saw higher victimization rates in each of the violent-crime categories studied (rape, robbery, homicide, and aggravated assault) in 2018, 2019, and 2020. While white residents experienced higher rates of rape and robbery than blacks in 2021, the city’s blacks that year were killed at more than double the rate of whites.
Moreover, this claim ignores Asians, who undeniably have a lower crime victimization rate than other races. Violent crime is mostly between members of the same race, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, so races with lower rates of perpetrating violent crime tend to have lower rates of crime victimization as well. As the Bureau of Justice Statistics explains, crimes are committed mostly between members of the same race, and this is true for “rape or sexual assault,” “simple assault,” “aggravated assault,” and indeed, “all types of violent crime except robbery.” (See Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012-2015.)
Asians are much less likely to commit crimes than blacks, even when they are poor recent immigrants. For example, Asians are 15% of California’s population, but only 2% of its jail population — a huge racial disparity. Nationally, less than 2% of the jail population is Asian or Pacific Islander, even though they account for more than 6% of the U.S. population.
Black-on-black crime accounts for a disproportionate share of all crime. As the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics noted in Homicide Trends in the United States, “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders….The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).”
Rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. In 2019, 6,425 black people committed homicide, compared to only 4,728 white people, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.
The higher black arrest rate is not due to overpolicing of black people. A 2021 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than people in general, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates: “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018).
The U.S. actually has fewer police than Europe does, compared to its population, and spends less on police as a percentage of its economy. Police catch a much smaller percentage of offenders than police do in most of Europe. The U.S. solves only about half of all murders. By contrast, more than 90 percent of all murders are solved in Germany. In the U.S., black-on-black murders usually are not punished. Chicago solves only 47 percent of cases when a murder victim is white, 33 percent when a victim is Hispanic, and a wretched 22 percent of cases when the victim is black, according to NPR. As a result of low clearance rates, “America incarcerates fewer people per homicide than countries like Australia, Japan, Switzerland, and Austria,” according data provided by Professor Justin Nix.
