"The Connection Between Race and Crime"

The shooter responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean national and Virginia Tech senior majoring in English.

Cho’s identity now means we can add the topics of immigration and ethnicity to the cacophony that has already exploded throughout the media and the internet. Have at it, folks.

Meanwhile, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko yesterday posted what he called a Rambling Duke Post reflecting on what he took to be something wrong about the “comparative lack of coverage of the James Giles versus the Duke lacrosse case” and the concluding with “the fact that so many conservatives seem to have walked away from the [Duke] case thinking ... that we aren't doing enough to vilify black people, and that rich white people are the real victims here.”

Well, now.

Actually, I agree with much that Balko writes between those two quotes and most of where I don’t agree with him or don't agree entirely isn’t worth much argument. Moreover, I’m not a conservative, let alone an apologist for some of the conservatives he samples and links to in his post. I did, however, write with some passion about the sort of racism I take to be a motive force behind the deplorable behavior of Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong and I have never written about the James Giles case or the many other cases of wrongful convictions and cases of criminal injustice and police misconduct which Balko, to his great credit, reports on regularly.

What I want to say here, however, is that, while it is true that some in the largely conservative end of the media and blogosphere have made dubious comments about the “black crime rate,” just as many in the liberal end have made many dubious comments about the black incarceration rate in America, I’m not sure it follows that the former has especially been urging, as Balko puts it, the notion that “the media doesn't do enough to tell us about how black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.” (Emphasis in original.)

Some, no doubt have. We call such people racists. Some of them may be ignorant racists (“As opposed to what, Ridgely? Well informed racists?”) in the sense that they literally do not know, as Balko points out, that if you adjust for class and income the crime rate among whites and blacks is about the same. They may be oblivious or indifferent as to how, as Balko also points out, our idiotic War Against Drugs and some of its most insane policies drive up urban (mostly poor, mostly black) crime. Even so, it is one thing to note or decry that the incident of crime is higher among blacks as a percentage of the general population, with or without taking such factors into consideration, and quite another to claim or be accused of claiming that “black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.”

Take the Heather MacDonald City Journal piece to which Balko linked, for example. It is a column sympathetic to the New York Police Department and its officers and, by implication, sympathetic toward the subjective reasonableness of their perceptions and fears as they encounter what I will call (though MacDonald does not) the statistical realities of New York’s crime rates. MacDonald does indeed use the phrase “the connection between race and crime” and further states that “blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes” and even, in what I would call a poorly worded disclaimer, says “most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection.” (Don’t all black residents, law-abiding or not, deserve police protection?)

Of course, I’ve reprinted those quotes out of context, but I don’t read them individually or collectively, out of context or in context or, for that matter, the entire MacDonald column as stating or implying anything about blacks being inherently more criminal than whites. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that in that one example and on that one small but important point Balko is reading more between the lines than may really be there. Then again, maybe not. I have no more of a window into MacDonald’s mind or soul than I do into Balko’s or anyone else’s.

The thing is, race makes us all crazy. The War Against Drugs (if not drugs, themselves) makes us crazier still. When Homer Simpson calls alcohol "the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems," we laugh. When a young black man living in the inner city considers crack cocaine the cause of and answer to all of life’s problems, it isn’t funny at all. Does the Left truly want to lower the incarceration rate among black men in America? Does the Right truly want to lower the crime rate in the inner city?

Easily done. Legalize drugs.

Urban (black) crime rates will plummet as will incarceration rates, and not only the mere but far too many criminal convictions and incarcerations for possession and use but all the violent crime directly resulting from the illegality of such possession and use in the first place.

Or, if you can’t bring yourselves to support drug legalization, at least recognize that, for example, the criminal penalties attendant to possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine do more harm than good.

But let’s get back to race for a minute. Is there any reader here, is there anybody anywhere who, upon hearing yesterday of the horrible shooting spree at Virginia Tech thought to himself, “I’ll bet it was a Korean”?

Of course not. And no one thought to himself it was probably a black man, either. We all thought, at least I sure as hell did until later information emerged that the shooter was a white guy. Is that sort of subliminal racial profiling racist?

Perhaps it simply is beyond our meager powers of reason and reasonableness to think sensibly about race, itself a dubious and poisoned concept, or to think sensibly about how other people think about race. Perhaps we are like the divorcing couple whose rage at each other has blinded them both to any hope of seeing any remnant of good faith on the other’s part.

Some of us, indeed I would suspect the majority of those of us who have written, even in anger, at the travesty of the Duke lacrosse student prosecution did not do so because of some idiotic sense that rich white males are society’s new victims. Except, maybe, in this one highly limited sense: whatever the realities of racial profiling by the cop on the beat or the investigating officer at a crime scene may be, racial or class bias on the part of the prosecutor’s office is as ugly and inappropriate when it rushes to judgment against a rich white man as it is when it does so against a poor black man. Nothing more, but surely nothing less.

Of course, DNA testing should be performed wherever possible to exonerate the unjustly convicted, and perhaps the urgency of our moral imperative to do so is especially acute precisely because the majority of such men are black and poor and the criminal justice system has for too long been and still too much remains an institutional injustice to black men collectively.

But neither black men collectively nor white men collectively commit crimes. Individual men do that, one man and one crime at a time. And, yes, that is true even in the case of organized crime or criminal gangs – they are comprised of individual men, regardless of race or color or class, not the warped Platonic ideals of White Man, Black Man, Rich Man, Poor Man, etc.

We may try to understand the “underlying social causes and conditions” of inner city life that leads to high crime rates among young black men or we might find utterly incomprehensible the underlying mental causes and conditions leading to the horrific acts of a mass murderer. In the end, however, it remains that a single individual does what he does. In that sense, the racial accidents and even the socioeconomic class or status of his birth are entirely irrelevant. Or should be.

Which means, in turn, that just as MacDonald allows as how black (law-abiding) inner city residents deserve police protection, so too do rich white college students deserve unbiased coverage by the media and dispassionate and unprejudiced treatment from prosecutors.