RACE AND INVOLVEMENT IN CRIME

For many people, the word crime evokes an image of a young, African American male who carries a weapon and murders, rapes, robs, or assaults someone of another race. These perceptions, which are fueled by the attention the media, politicians, and criminal justice policymakers give to street crimes such as murder and rape, are inaccurate. The typical crime is in fact not a violent crime; the typical criminal offender—that is, the offender who appears most often in arrest statistics—is not African American; and most crimes are intraracial rather than interracial. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, in 2004 there were ten times as many property crimes as violent crimes reported to the police. In addition, whites made up 61 percent of those arrested for violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), 69 percent of those arrested for property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft, and arson), and 66 percent of those arrested for drug abuse violations. Although data on the race of the offender and the race of the victim are more difficult to come by, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported that from 1976 to 2002, 86 percent of white homicide victims were killed by whites, while 94 percent of African-American homicide victims were killed by African Americans.

Using the term typical offender in discussing race and crime is somewhat misleading. First, African Americans make up more than half of all arrests for two particular violent crimes—murder (including nonnegligent manslaughter) and robbery. For these offenses, in other words, the typical offender is African American. Second, although it is true that most of those arrested in the United States are white, the percentage of African Americans arrested for most crimes is disproportionate to their percentage in the population. In 2004, African Americans made up approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for 54 percent of those arrested for robbery, 53 percent of those arrested for murder and manslaughter, 37 percent of those arrested for rape, and 36 percent of those arrested for aggravated assault. For these violent crimes, African Americans were overrepresented (and whites were underrepresented) in arrest statistics. African Americans also were overrepresented in arrests for property crimes (29.4% of all arrests) and drug abuse violations (36.5% of all arrests). In fact, the only crimes for which whites were overrepresented in arrest statistics were driving under the influence (88% of all arrests), liquor law violations (84.8% of all arrests), and drunkenness (83.3% of all arrests). These racial differences are found for both juveniles and adults.

Criminologists have conducted dozens of studies designed to explain the overrepresentation of African Americans in crime statistics. Although many scholars contend that at least some of this overrepresentation can be attributed to racial profiling (that is, the tendency of police and other criminal justice officials to use race as an indicator of an increased likelihood of involvement in crime) and discrimination in the decision to arrest or not, most acknowledge that racial disparities in arrest statistics do reflect racial differences in criminal involvement.

Explanations for the relationship between race and crime generally focus on the effects of economic inequality, community social disorganization, residential segregation, individual- and family-level risk factors, weakened family attachments, weak bonds to school and work, and involvement with delinquent peers and gangs. According to these interrelated perspectives, the higher rates of crime—and particularly the higher rates of violent crime (that is, the number arrested per 1,000 population)—for African Americans than for whites reflect the fact that African Americans are more likely than whites to be poor, to be unemployed or underemployed, and to live in drug-and gang-ridden communities with high rates of family disruption and social disorganization. African Americans, in other words, have higher rates of crime than whites because of the very different economic, social, and cultural situations in which they often live. As Robert Sampson and William Julius Wilson put it, “the most important determinant of the relationship between race and crime is the differential distribution of blacks in communities characterized by (1) structural social disorganization and (2) cultural social isolation, both of which stem from the concentration of poverty, family disruption, and residential instability” (Sampson and Wilson 2005, p. 182).