Something else to consider too, and that is WHERE these high crime rates are and who perpetrated it.
They are not throughout the city, or through out all black neighborhoods. They usually concentrate in a few blocks of a neighborhood that has exceedingly high violence rates and an ineffective policing strategy.
Most serious urban violence is concentrated among less than 1 percent of a city’s population. So why are we still criminalizing whole areas?
www.bloomberg.com
In our
forthcoming study of serious violence in over 20 cities, we found that
less than 1 percent of a city’s population—the share involved in what we call “street groups” (gangs, sets, and crews)—is generally connected to over 50 percent of the city’s shootings and homicides. We use “group” as a term inclusive of any social network involved in violence, whether they are hierarchical, formal gangs, or loose neighborhood crews. In city after city, the very small number of people involved in these groups consistently perpetrated and were victimized by the most serious violence.
To be clear: The number of group-involved people actually committing homicides or shootings is still far smaller than the less-than-1-percent of a city’s population in these groups.
This held true even in areas considered chronically “dangerous,” like parts of East Baltimore. There, the group member population totaled only three quarters of a percentage point, even as they were connected to 58.43 percent of homicides. Shootings tend to be even more concentrated than homicides. In Minneapolis, we found that 0.15 percent of the population was determined to be involved in groups,
but this population was connected to 53.96 percent of shootings—a proportion over 350 times higher than their population representation.
So, if I understand this correctly you are looking at an incredibly small percentage of people responsible for a significant amount of crime. In a city like Chicago, which is 29% black, even if the majority of the perpetrators are black…it is only fraction of the black population. It is difficult to claim they support crime and violence or are inherently more criminal (as some here claim).
It is also difficult to claim it is all dependent on which political party is in control when it is driven by factors often unique to a city. Detroit for example is a city which lost much of it’s manufacturing base and has been losing population, leading to huge numbers of abandoned housing which run down neighborhoods and lead to increased crime. Tulsa OK, Oklahoma City OK, Fort Worth TX, Fresno CA and Miami FL have all seen a surge in crime…and they are Republican.
