Crime is driven by proximity and opportunity
July 25, 2013 9:41 AM   Subscribe

 
Mod note: consider RTFA, thank you
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:47 AM on July 25, 2013 [15 favorites]


"Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders. Indeed, for the large majority of crimes, you’ll find that victims and offenders share a racial identity, or have some prior relationship to each other."

....

"“Black-on-black crime” has been part of the American lexicon for decades, but as a specific phenomenon, it’s no more real than “white-on-white crime.” Unlike the latter, however, the idea of “black-on-black crime” taps into specific fears around black masculinity and black criminality."
posted by box at 9:51 AM on July 25, 2013 [10 favorites]


Right, so see, the thing with the Darryl Green case is not that it was a "black on black" crime, or whatever Ben Shapiro thinks, but yet another case of gun violence Chicago (previously on Metafilter; Green was even a Harper student). Why can't we all agree that some crimes are racially motivated and others aren't?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:53 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I realise there'd be all sorts of problems with differing specificities but would be interesting to see comparisons of crime stats with other multi-ethnic nations where perhaps residential segregation is less pronounced, as I expect that would bear the basic thesis of this article out (proximity/opportunity).
posted by Abiezer at 9:55 AM on July 25, 2013


Why can't we all agree that some crimes are racially motivated and others aren't?

Because that would be a confusing narrative.
posted by pipeski at 9:55 AM on July 25, 2013 [7 favorites]


It's fairly depressing that a point this obvious even needs to be made, really. (Though I agree, looking at the responses to the Zimmerman trial, that it does.)
posted by oliverburkeman at 9:56 AM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Why can't we all agree that some crimes are racially motivated and others aren't?

Because it serves some people's interests to cloud the issue. That's what "black-on-black crime" is meant to do -- "Oh, sure, maaaybe George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin because he was a black kid in what Zimmerman felt should be a less-black neighborhood, but look at all these 'black-on-black' crimes! White(ish) people aren't killing most black victims, so it's not really a race thing when one does. If you say it is, well, then, you're calling all black people racist, since so many of them kill black people!"
posted by Etrigan at 9:57 AM on July 25, 2013 [11 favorites]


If fewer than 1 in 10 black youths are in gangs or involved in drugs or violent crime, and 1 in 3 black youths are in jail or prison (a statistic seen elsewhere), then roughly 1 in 4 black youths are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.
posted by acb at 10:07 AM on July 25, 2013


But there’s a huge problem with attempt to shift the conversation: There’s no such thing as “black-on-black” crime. Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders.
I'm not sure that floating the thesis on the (admittedly eyeball-catching, but ultimately pointlessly insta-derailing) claim that "there is no such thing as black on black crime" is such a great idea. The real thesis here is that "there is no special tendency of black people to commit crimes on other black people; the high rate of black-on-black crime is simply the predictable outcome of the general tendency of people to commit crimes within a reasonably restrained circle of those close to them."

I imagine that's largely true, although I think the fairly simplistic statistical analysis in the article leaves a lot of questions unanswered. One of the significant differences that the article doesn't address, for example, is the fact that blacks are a much smaller percentage of the overall population than whites. If you suppose that mere propinquity is what drives most crimes, with a certain general spillover into the population at large then you'd also predict that violent "white on white" crime would be higher, overall, than violent "black on black" crime (that is, when whites and blacks commit their proportion of crimes aimed at the "population at large" they should, generally, commit those against whites rather than blacks). That means that the "93% vs 86%" rates that are cited in the article are not quite as comparable as they might appear superficially. There would seem to be something extra that is driving black violent crime back into the black community that is more than simply the predictable consequence of the tendency of social networks to be racially segregated.

I'm also not quite sure that it's true to say that the concern about black-on-black violence is fundamentally a "conservative" one. The great conservative narrative of racial fear has always been rooted in the fear of black-on-white violence, from Birth of a Nation to Willie Horton. It's true that there is a cynical use of affected concern for black-on-black violence that is being exploited in the specific context of the Trayvon Martin case, but it's not really true that the concern in general lies at the root of the "scary black man" mythology that perverts so much of the thinking about race in the US.
posted by yoink at 10:10 AM on July 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


abiezer: A brief look at some data from the UK on this issue. I did not take the time to look at issues of housing segregation. Our UK friends can comment.
posted by rmhsinc at 10:14 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


I don't understand the point of this article. The rate of homicide of black men hugely exceeds that of any other group in the US at about 50 per 100,000 (as compared to 3 per 100,000 for white men.)

But, arguing statistics either way with a lying racist hack like Ben Shapiro is never going to get you anywhere especially when he is dog-whistling to people who want to the see the white-on-black homicide rate increased. Black people are well aware of the blood cost of the drug trade (as versus the prison time cost) but this framing of black-on-black violence isn't framed to appeal to black people.
posted by ennui.bz at 10:15 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm also not quite sure that it's true to say that the concern about black-on-black violence is fundamentally a "conservative" one.

No, but I think it's true to say that the "concern" about black-on-black violence is fundamentally a "conservative" one. That's what Bouie is going for here -- trying to dispel the very notion that it's an actual thing, rather than concern-trolling as a smokescreen.
posted by Etrigan at 10:15 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Our UK friends can comment.
I am one! My impression was always that there's not the same level of residential segregation, but impression is all it is.
posted by Abiezer at 10:18 AM on July 25, 2013


"The idea of “black-on-black crime” taps into specific fears around black masculinity and black criminality—the same fears that, in Florida, led George Zimmerman to focus his attention on Trayvon Martin."

He focused his attention on Trayvon Martin because he was asked by the community to start a neighborhood watch after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.

It was profiling, at worst. but 'fear'?
posted by BlerpityBloop at 10:18 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


That's what Bouie is going for here -- trying to dispel the very notion that it's an actual thing

I guess I'm afraid that that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit. To say "nobody should care about the extraordinarily high rates at which young black men kill other young black men because from time to time conservatives will pretend to care about this issue that they mostly ignore in order to deflect attention from the occasional hot-button story of intra-racial violence" seems counterproductive. The homicide rates that ennui.bz cites above are genuinely horrifying and point to the disastrous and destructive social effects of the legacy of the US's sad history of racial oppression. I don't think it's useful to pretend it's not a real social phenomenon just because occasionally conservative commentators refer to it in disingenuous ways.
posted by yoink at 10:25 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


I managed recently (Just after the Sandy Hook shooting) to get into a "discussion" with a gun-rights enthusiast, and when I mentioned the high number of people killed by handguns every yer, he actually looked at me with a straight face and said "Yeah, buy you have to remember that over 30% of that is black-on-black violence."

I was literally too stunned to respond. People of all colors, shapes and sizes have a basic human right to not be shot, but according to that guy, blacks shouldn't even have been included in the death statistics because gangs.

I don't know what the answer to people like that is, but it's not "conversation."
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:26 AM on July 25, 2013 [11 favorites]


Also, I am (mostly) white, and the 4 or 5 times in my life in which I have had a loaded weapon brandished in my direction, it was by a white person each time.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:29 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


"I don't know what the answer to people like that is"

It would be great if white people would stop killing each other in such high numbers.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:30 AM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Abiezer--I have spent considerable time in the Midlands--I tend to agree with you except for certain Muslim communities( but I am not even sure about that). I just did a bit of research--it would appear that religious identity tends to be a more potent factor in housing segregation that simple ethnicity.
posted by rmhsinc at 10:31 AM on July 25, 2013


I am one! My impression was always that there's not the same level of residential segregation, but impression is all it is.

I'm a Canadian ( who lived all over southwestern Ontario) who lived in Birmingham, UK for seven years and now lives in Chicago. Chicago is shockingly segregated, racially and economically, in a way that neither Canada or the UK are.

The UK was incredibly integrated. For example my next door neighbour in England was a member of the House of Lords (whose children couldn't keep their tennis balls, frisbees and in one instance shoes in their own damn yard) and across the street was what my upstairs neighbour, a police officer, called a DOSS house because it was filled with heroin addicts and hardcore alcoholics renting single rooms.
posted by srboisvert at 10:36 AM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


To say "nobody should care about the extraordinarily high rates at which young black men kill other young black men because from time to time conservatives will pretend to care about this issue that they mostly ignore in order to deflect attention from the occasional hot-button story of intra-racial violence" seems counterproductive.

I don't think Bouie is saying that at all. I think he's saying that what some people call "black-on-black violence" is more accurately described as "poor-on-poor violence" -- per the article's subtitle and this post's title, "Crime is driven by proximity and opportunity." African-Americans tend to live near other African-Americans, be in lower socioeconomic strata, and have less access to security (whether good locks, alarm systems or police presence).

So yes, we should be concerned that a lot of people are killing a lot of other people. But we should look beyond the color of those people's skin on either side of the equation, because if we don't, we let the smokescreen of "But black-on-black violence is the real problem!" cloud the issue at the base of violent crime: poverty.
posted by Etrigan at 10:40 AM on July 25, 2013 [5 favorites]



"People of all colors, shapes and sizes have a basic human right to not be shot"--Devils Rancher

Many Conservative, and some less conservative Americans do not believe that this right exists.

That is what SYG and Castle laws are for. It gives cover for the beliefe that "some people just need killing"

These beliefs are the reason that Joe Horn could declare his intent to kill two people who intended him no harm on a recording with the police and still face no trial.
posted by Megafly at 10:41 AM on July 25, 2013 [7 favorites]


I feel like the "black-on-black crime" meme is beneath contempt, but even if we take it at face value it still got picked apart way back in Richard Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger):
Hated by whites and being an organic part of the culture that hated him, the black man grew in turn to hate in himself that which others hated in him. [...]And when he reached that state, the white people looked at him and laughed and said:

"Look, didn't I tell you niggers were that way?"

[...]I would end up again with self-hate, but it was now a self-hate that was projected outward upon other blacks.
So sorry, concern trolls, American society is still on the hook either way here.
posted by tyro urge at 10:42 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I am a white person who had a gun pointed in her general direction by a drunk uncle who was trying to convince her she should take a lesson in weaponscraft from him as he loaded the gun drunkenly

Not sure how relevant that is, but to say that white people be crazy, just like all sorts
posted by angrycat at 10:42 AM on July 25, 2013


These headline figures sound alike but if the population of the US is 72% white and 12% black (as wikipedia suggests) wouldn't you expect to have considerably higher rates of white on white violence?
posted by biffa at 10:42 AM on July 25, 2013


These headline figures sound alike but if the population of the US is 72% white and 12% black (as wikipedia suggests) wouldn't you expect to have considerably higher rates of white on white violence?

No, because that's what "rate" means -- hence the use of percents in the article:
Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders." (emphasis added)
So even if you have six times as many whites who are killed, the percent is the better comparison.
posted by Etrigan at 10:45 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Huh. This is a new one for me. I always thought the concept of "black on black violence" was more about noticing and objecting to a cycle of violence within a community. Like the way Nas uses it:
Yeah, and can we have another moment of silence?
For brothers who died from black-on-black violence
(It's still maybe not ideal to define the cycle of violence in terms of race, whichever direction it's coming from, right?)

But the conservative spin is obviously not new for Ta-Nehisi Coates. Here he is back in 2009:
Often when a cop comes under scrutiny for shooting a young black man, I hear some version of the following argument, "Blacks are only angry when a cop kills one of there own. But they don't care about black on black crime, which is way more common."

...

It is true that a police killing will draw more headlines--but that has more to do with the MSM considers a story, and what it doesn't, than with what black people care about. The fact that people are pissed that a cop shot a man face down on the pavement, doesn't mean that they also aren't pissed about shit like this. I'm black, and I know I am. Walk and chew gum, people. That's the motto this year.
For your convenience, I bolded the part right before he drops the mic and walks away in disgust.
posted by jhc at 10:56 AM on July 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


Shapiro, echoing many other conservatives, is angry over the perceived politicization of the Zimmerman trial, and believes that activists have ”injected” race into the discussion, as if there’s nothing racial already within the criminal-justice system. Indeed, he echoes many conservatives when he complains that media attention had everything to do with Zimmerman’s race. If he were black, the argument goes, no one would care.

So he's pretty blatantly admitting that to him, it matters more that this case got "unfair" media coverage than that a lot of black people kill a lot of other black people? And the real travesty is the unfair coverage, and not that "no one would care?"

That's super depressing.
posted by nakedmolerats at 10:57 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Walk and chew gum, people. That's the motto this year.

This is my new motto for "Why don't you care about $Other_Important_Thing" derail replies.
posted by jessamyn at 10:59 AM on July 25, 2013 [21 favorites]


I don't think Bouie is saying that at all. I think he's saying that what some people call "black-on-black violence" is more accurately described as "poor-on-poor violence" -- per the article's subtitle and this post's title, "Crime is driven by proximity and opportunity." African-Americans tend to live near other African-Americans, be in lower socioeconomic strata, and have less access to security (whether good locks, alarm systems or police presence).

So yes, we should be concerned that a lot of people are killing a lot of other people. But we should look beyond the color of those people's skin on either side of the equation, because if we don't, we let the smokescreen of "But black-on-black violence is the real problem!" cloud the issue at the base of violent crime: poverty.


Poverty plays a role, certainly, but I don't think it can explain everything here. Even though the poverty rate for black Americans is much higher than for whites, there are substantially more whites in poverty simply because the population is disproportionately white. In table 1 (PDF), 19.0M non-Hispanic whites live in poverty, compared with 9.5M blacks (almost exactly twice as many whites, as it turns out). Yet the CDC data ennui.bz linked above shows that among young males, there were 2545 black male homicide victims. Using that same 2x ratio of whites/blacks in poverty, you'd naively expect there to be 5090 white male homicide victims, but the actual figure is 556. Clearly there is something else going on here. I get Bouie's basic point, and he's completely right that a lot of conservatives approach this quite disingenuously (I think the term "concern trolling" is overused but is apt here). But it's simply not true that the only thing, or even necessarily the primary thing, separating white and black rates of crime victimization is opportunity. As yoink says, ignoring the very real and ongoing impacts of the country's shameful history of race relations just does not do us much good.

Not that Ben Shapiro isn't a tool, of course.
posted by dsfan at 11:01 AM on July 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


The homicide rates that ennui.bz cites above are genuinely horrifying and point to the disastrous and destructive social effects of the legacy of the US's sad history of racial oppression. I don't think it's useful to pretend it's not a real social phenomenon just because occasionally conservative commentators refer to it in disingenuous ways.

I took the author as arguing against the notion that race somehow helps explain why, when a black person kills someone, their victim is so likely to be black.

The question of why crime rates differ among different communities is obviously massively important but it is a slightly different question.
posted by oliverburkeman at 11:08 AM on July 25, 2013


But we should look beyond the color of those people's skin on either side of the equation, because if we don't, we let the smokescreen of "But black-on-black violence is the real problem!" cloud the issue at the base of violent crime: poverty.

Poverty plays a role, certainly, but I don't think it can explain everything here.


I said "the issue at the base," not "the thing that explains everything." Yes, race relations are an issue, but they're mostly an issue because of the economic factors. The vast majority of crime has economics at its base -- kids join gangs because they don't see another way out of their cycle of poverty and poverty-bred violence; they deal drugs because you can make more money doing that than working at a 7-11. And the violence comes (largely) from those factors, and more African-American kids live in poverty than white kids and feel that they can't escape it. Which does have to do with America's shameful history of racial relations, but it's a chicken-and-egg scenario.
posted by Etrigan at 11:21 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Crime is driven by proximity and opportunity

This misses the third element, necessity. Also known as "poverty."

Which seems broadly important to the conversation, to me.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:59 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Another point worth mentioning, I think, is the assumption that black on black gun violence stems from gang activity is also often wrong. We have a big gun violence problem here in Oakland but not a lot of gang activity. If anything, gangs are much more a part of young Latino culture here than a part of the black community. "Gangs" becomes this really racialized construct that stands in for "black" in the minds of a lot of white people.

If you look around here, it seems fairly obvious that shitty schools + zero job opportunities + poverty + legacies of racism + easy gun access + young masculinity leads to the bloody situation we are faced with.
posted by latkes at 12:06 PM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


I think Bouie almost said it better in a tweet than he did in that article: "The prevalence of young black men among criminality ≠ the prevalence of criminality among young black men." Here's the takeaways I got from the whole discussion:

1) To the extent that "black-on-black" crime exists, it is not a matter of racial animus that blacks have for other blacks, it is simply a matter of proximity. Blacks who engage in criminal behavior tend to victimize other blacks, because that's who is nearby. The same thing is true of white criminals.

2) The higher criminal rate among blacks is largely explained by socio-economic factors that are the result of centuries of discriminatory policies that have functioned to keep African-Americans less financially secure and to limit opportunities for advancement. We have not yet overcome those effects. (The other chief contributing factor to the higher crime rate is the reality that a dark-skinned person is more likely to be arrested than a white person for the same crime, and also more likely to be convicted.)

3) Racists trumpet the high rate of black-on-black homicide as a distraction from (probably) racially motivated killings like that of Trayvon Martin, as if to say that "if you really cared about young black men, you'd care more about those killed by other young black men." But that is a red herring because (1) there actually is a lot of energy devoted by activists to improving conditions in high-crime black neighborhoods, (2) the issue with Trayvon's death is that Zimmerman, at first, wasn't even arrested and made to account for his actions. A black man who kills a black man will be arrested, without doubt, if discovered, and then tried and surely convicted. For that matter, if a white man kills a black teen without justification but is arrested and tried, there is no outcry. (Case in point.) Conservatives are conflating a problem of societal inequity with a problem of discrimination in the justice system, all for the purpose of obscuring the racist effects of the justice system.

4) To whit, invocations of "black on black" crime from the right are a shorthand way of saying "the real issue is that blacks are unusually criminal and violent" when the actual issue is that blacks are unusually segregated, deprived of opportunities, arrested and convicted. Crying "black on black" crime is code for "the real problem is them," when the real problem has been and continues to be society as a whole. To believe otherwise you would have to think that there is some genetic predisposition among Americans of African descent to be criminals, which I suppose the dog-whistlers on the far right do.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 12:15 PM on July 25, 2013 [21 favorites]


I always thought the concept of "black on black violence" was more about noticing and objecting to a cycle of violence within a community.

Yes! This.

I can see how that concern would be (and has been) co-opted outside of a community to turn a rallying cry into scorn. And it's a philosophically problematic phrase even in the connotation I've always heard it used.

But it just felt to me like the article was arguing that a thing doesn't exist by proving that the thing does exist.

/me shrugs
posted by pokermonk at 12:19 PM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


If fewer than 1 in 10 black youths are in gangs or involved in drugs or violent crime, and 1 in 3 black youths are in jail or prison (a statistic seen elsewhere), then roughly 1 in 4 black youths are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.

Or they're imprisoned for crimes other than drugs, violent crime, or gangs.
posted by corb at 12:28 PM on July 25, 2013


These headline figures sound alike but if the population of the US is 72% white and 12% black (as wikipedia suggests) wouldn't you expect to have considerably higher rates of white on white violence?

No, because that's what "rate" means -- hence the use of percents in the article:

Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders." (emphasis added)

So even if you have six times as many whites who are killed, the percent is the better comparison.


Biffa's analysis of those numbers is correct.

If God issued an edict that crime rate between racial groups was to be strictly apportioned according to racial proportions in the general population (and that population is 12% black, 72% white), then 12% of killings against whites would be committed by blacks, and 72% would be committed by whites; similarly, 12% of killings against blacks would be committed by blacks and 72% would be committed by whites. The 86% white-on-white and 94% black-on-black rates both indicate there is a pretty strong affinity for being a victim of a crime committed by a member of your own "race". They also indicate that the affinity is much more pronounced for blacks.

None of this should be surprising or controversial; all things being equal there will more crime in a densely populated area with resources to compete over (the largely black urban poor competing for the rich buying drugs) than in a dispersed population with nothing (the largely white rural poor).

I found this article frustrating in a fashion generally reserved for a member of the reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879 that finds himself in a discussion with a member of the reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915.

I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion that black-on-black crime is a political fiction, but the arguments presented in the article to support it seem to me to be based on willful ignorance of mathematics and justice. It's dog-whistles masquerading as reason to an extent that would make Limbaugh proud, and it makes me very sad to see a position I support argued for so ineffectually.

posted by elsp at 12:43 PM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


I don't know what the answer to people like that is, but it's not "conversation."

Perhaps you could shoot him. You'd be going out of your way to communicate with him in his own idiom. He'd appreciate that.
posted by Grangousier at 1:14 PM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


This may also shed light on shooting statistics:

Eliminating Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System (PDF)
Over the past 10 years, under the leadership of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the New York Police Department has aggressively escalated its use of stop-and-frisk polic- ing, a move it credits with maintaining a historic drop in violent crime. In 2011, New York City police officers made 684,330 stops across the five boroughs -- a 14 percent increase over the previous year and more than double the number of stops under the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani...

But stop and frisks are a very localized experience, largely confined to the 10 precincts in the city that are predominantly populated by blacks and Hispanics. Of the 684,330 stops by police in 2011, 87 percent were of blacks or Hispanics; only 9 percent were of whites. Blacks comprised 62 percent of stops and 52 percent of arrests, although only 25.5 percent of the city's population is black...

...This targeting of minority communities for drug enforcement is the principal driver of racial disparities in the city’s criminal justice system, said many conference participants: blacks and Hispanics comprise 50 percent of NYC’s population, but 88 percent of all arrests.
Getting arrested, jailed, not to mention daily abuse by the police, breeds a culture of violence. I am sure that proximity alone is not the only reason for black on black shooting.

If the NYC police took their stop and frisk policy to Wall Street, I am sure we would see a much higher arrest rate, at least initially than those in the the targeted neighborhoods. And if whites were targeted and repeatedly arrested and jailed with the same vigor that blacks are, I am sure that the violent culture of prison would have the same effect on white population that it does on black populations.
posted by snaparapans at 1:50 PM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]




NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has long maintained that the department's controversial stop-and-frisk strategy does not target New Yorkers based on the color of their skin...

True, the stop and frisks are random.. Random stop and frisks that take place in neighborhoods that are predominately black and hispanic. No profiling there, just a sweep of everyone on the streets.
posted by snaparapans at 7:19 PM on July 25, 2013


Our UK friends can comment.

Apparent black-on-black crime is a slightly different issue in the UK for several reasons. The UK is less segregated than the US. It has, relative to its population, fewer black citizens. We have less access to guns, so murder rates are not always a good approximation for violence - there are a significant number of non-fatal stabbings across all communities. There isn't the same baggage of past racial laws nor quite the same rigging of the justice system against young black males (in the sense of especially punitive drug laws or three strikes laws), notwithstanding that there are significant racial issues in the way areas like London are policed.

Violent black-on-black crimes were enough of an issue that in London a special task force was set up in the late 1990s: Trident. Perhaps more importantly, the issue in London less the nature of the crime (i.e. black on black) than the need to investigate these crimes in a different way given that most Met police officers were white and the root of the murders that sparked the establishment of the crime force were largely related to the drug trade among London's Jamaican community. Trident was set up with the support of and at the behest of black community leaders because of the recognition of the need for a different approach to policing, not least in the wake of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence (by white youths) which exposed institutional racism within the Met Police force, and because of longstanding mistrust of the police within the wider black communities.

Trident has now been disbanded, apparently due to budget cuts.

Basically, one can read the statistics two ways: black on black crimes are (in both the US and the UK), as the FPP says, not in a special class when one considers that white on white crime violent crime levels are in percentage terms (aggressor/victim) level or higher. It is broadly correct to say that these crimes are about proximity and opportunity. But this is an incomplete reading because the incidence of violent crime relative to the size of these groups is not the same. If one doesn't recognise this then one gives fodder to racists for not seeing the wood from the trees. More to the point, we're failing the victims and future victims.

From a London perspective whether black-on-black crime is a special class or not is somewhat besides the point, notwithstanding that racists use the idea to point to some inherent moral failure within black communities. I suspect it is felt within those communities - as evidenced specifically by Lambeth, London - as a special issue because the incidence is high, the victims are so young, and often the root cause - turf wars - often nothing to do with the protection of trade - posing as grown up "gang wars" is so senseless in the grand scheme of things. And preventable.
posted by MuffinMan at 1:57 AM on July 26, 2013 [3 favorites]


There isn't the same baggage of past racial laws nor quite the same rigging of the justice system against young black males (in the sense of especially punitive drug laws or three strikes laws), notwithstanding that there are significant racial issues in the way areas like London are policed.

Careful there. There was a systemic bias against Black people in the UK justice from at least the 1950ties (when mass immigration from e.g. the Caraibian got started) to at least the late eighties. Frex, the suss laws which gave police the right to randomly stop and search suspicious people, which were mostly used against Black men (sound familiar) or the Met's Ring of Steel around London that was set up to combat IRA terrorists and which netted a suspiciously large number of Black Irish, as the joke went. Also remember Brixton and the Notting Hill riots, which were not that dissimilar from race riots in e.g. Chicago.

The Met has made steps to clean up its act, especially in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence case, where they basically not bothered to investigate his murder and a lot of the institutional racism was laid bare, but it still has a lot of meatheads on its payroll and there have been a few high profile cases of Black or Asian (subcontinent) police officers being bullied off the force.

There have also been a couple of officially sanctioned police murders (Jean Charles de Menezes comes to mind) to show that the UK police and especially the Met is still well dodgy, plus a tabloid led moral panic about knifecrime and the recent riots to show the UK is not that different from the US in this regard.

Main difference though: far fewer guns used by all parties (police, gangsters, innocent people, stand your ground wannabes) hence far fewer casualties and fatalities.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:26 AM on July 26, 2013 [1 favorite]


of the Stephen Lawrence case, where they basically not bothered to investigate his murder

Wasn't it more that there were very strong links between the police force, organised crime and racist/fascist groups (that is to say at least one of the killers was the son of a local gangster who was close with an investigating officer), and they went out of their way to suppress the investigation, even so far as deliberately seeking information to discredit the Lawrences and their friends with.

That is to say, not so much apathy as outright corruption.
posted by Grangousier at 3:28 AM on July 30, 2013




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