Race Problem or Crime Problem? Too many poor Americans, especially blacks, live in places where law is absent

By Holman Jenkins. Excerpts:

"You’ve heard that a black American is 2.5 times as likely as a white American to be killed by police, but maybe not that a white homicide victim is 2.5 times as likely as a black homicide victim to have been killed by police. A black person is so much more likely to be a homicide victim generally that police killings are actually a smaller proportion of total black killings.

In the catalog of racial disparities, a black American is 50% more likely to suffer hypertension, 16% more likely to die of cancer—and nearly 500% more likely to be murdered and 600% more likely to become a murderer.

These homicide-related disparities not only are “historic and pervasive,” write Columbia University’s Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi in a 2010 paper, but weirdly disproportionate to every other black-white disparity associated with crime, including being poor, being a high school dropout, living in an urban neighborhood, being from a single-parent household, and even being a victim of a lesser assault."

"A widely praised 2015 book by Los Angeles crime reporter Jill Leovy cited the embattled community of Watts and argued that “where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.” In the Economist, a reviewer likened the result to a “parallel culture of rough justice that operates independently of the legal system, like other ‘vengeance cultures’ from Northern Ireland to South Africa.”

Starting in the 1980s, researchers identified 880 census tracts (out of 56,000) where social disorder made a law-abiding life difficult. About two million people, including many who are not black, lived in such places in 2005. In other words, except in the media and popular culture, and perhaps in the minds of police officers, these neighborhoods hardly represent the experience of 41 million African-Americans."


"the thrust of public policy in recent decades has been to keep them in place, partly because doing so maintains some of the safest seats in American politics. Among the unhelpful gestures: elite opposition to charter schools, high marginal tax rates on people moving from welfare to work, and housing subsidies tied to downtrodden and jobless neighborhoods."