Crime happens because of poverty not Race.
That's something I've never really tried to look into. There's no source of really neat data I know of that I can look at and query as can be done with respect to standardized test scores with that National Assessment of Educational Progress site. A quick Google told me that there are probably different opinions.
Like I found the paper at
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~roos/Course ... ssp802.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. All I've done is read the abstract and take a quick look at variables used in her model (page 355 of the journal, page 7 of the on line document itself). She took socioeconomic status variables including poverty rate into account. A lot of other things too. The conclusion stated in the last sentence of her abstract is, "The analysis reveals that all of the white-Latino homicide differential and half of the white-black homicide gap could be reduced if the characteristics of minorities were improved to levels currently exhibited by whites."
I was able to find that the actual white-black reduction she got is 47%. You can see that near the bottom of Journal page 363. Obviously the inverse of the Statement she made is that she considered all kinds of variables and was able to account for slightly less than half of the gap. She couldn't make the white-black difference "go away" like she was able to do with the white-Latino difference.
I found another paper at
http://www88.homepage.villanova.edu/lan ... overty.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; that appears to be a manuscript the authors prepared for submission for publication. I interpret the authors as saying the results support the concept of "racial invariance." In the paragraph below they describe what "racial invariance" is and also describe a situation in which there is disagreement on whether or not the idea is correct:
The social disorganization and anomie perspectives generally suggest that poverty’s criminogenic effect is racially invariant. These perspectives imply that policies that alleviate economic deprivation will equally reduce rates of violent crime in neighborhoods that are predominately white and neighborhoods that are predominately black. In contrast, several social commentators have suggested that alleviating poverty will be a relatively ineffective crime reduction strategy in predominately black areas.
I think that it is very complicated. I think it even depends on the set of violent crime types you look at. I think it likely that if you throw everything in and consider all "violent crime" you'll get substantially different results than you will if you look at specific serious violent crimes. Like looking at all "violent crime" vs. looking at "homicide."
I guess my bottom line outlook after taking a quick look is that we don't know that poverty accounts for all of the difference between white and black violent crime rates in the United States.
