The data doesn't lie. African Americans are responsible for 52% of homicides, and yet make up just 12% of the population. This group are prone to violent criminal behaviours. The unequal level of police interaction - of all kinds - with African Americans must be read within this context. Were African Americans less predisposed to dangerous behaviour, police time would not be so unevenly spent on shielding the public from them. Proponents include CUNY Criminology Professor Barry Latzer, who notes high black incarceration rates “are best explained not by race bias, but by exceptionally high African American crime commission rates and the imposition of prison sentences for conduct previously punished by jail or probation.”
The argument
Statistics from both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI have illustrated that African Americans, usually men, commit the highest number of crimes across all racial groups. Victim reports also often corroborate these statistics, which weakens the claim that these statistics are the result of a racist criminal justice system. The issue of “black on black” crime is often overlooked or undiscussed in liberal politics due to efforts to appease their voter base, but the issue continues to plague African American communities. This might be due to a higher tolerance for violence within African American culture. There have also been studies that report a higher number of African American men possess a gene that is linked to aggressive or violent behavior. Historically there has been support by African American community leaders for the expansion of the criminal justice system during the 1960s through the 1980s which saw an increase in crime rates related to drugs and disorder, often within African American communities.
Premises
Counter-arguments
African Americans are not predisposed to criminality because there is no scientific evidence to indicate that race is an indicator of criminal behavior. Statistical analysis of the FBI and BJS data is often cherry-picked to support the ‘black on black’ crime issue. While there are many factors that influence crime, poverty being a large one, there is no scientific basis to support that race plays any role in why people commit crimes in general. ‘Black-on-black’ crime is considered an offensive term among left and left-leaning political groups, believing it has been used to label African Americans as more criminally inclined when many crimes are intraracial across racial and ethnic groups. The study claiming that the MAOA or ‘Warrior Gene’ is found in African American males also states that it is present at nearly equal or higher levels in Maori, Taiwanese, European, and Chinese males, debunking the theory that African American men are somehow more aggressive than men in other racial groups.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Arrest and conviction figures record enforcement outcomes rather than offending. Where officers are deployed determines a great deal of what gets recorded, and victim reports cover only crimes reported to police, so the data cannot settle the question of bias because policing practice is one of the things producing them. [Rejecting P2] There is no scientific basis for a racial predisposition to crime. The MAOA variant the argument invokes is found at equal or higher frequency in Maori, Taiwanese, European and Chinese men, so it cannot support a race-specific claim; 'cultural tolerance for violence' is asserted without evidence; and poverty and concentrated disadvantage account for the observed pattern, with crime overwhelmingly intraracial in every group. [Rejecting P3] Community support for tougher enforcement in that period was a demand for protection from crime that residents were disproportionately suffering. It was not a judgment that policing was unbiased, and many of the same leaders later opposed the enforcement practices that followed. [Rejecting C] Even if every premise held, none of them bears on the conclusion. Whether police practice is racially disparate is a question about how officers behave, which is not answered by claims about who commits offences.