Family secret: What the left won't tell you about black crime

Family secret: What the left won't tell you about black crime - Washington Times
By Jason L. Riley - - Monday, July 21, 2014
(The following is excerpted from “Please Stop Helping Us” by Jason Riley. Copyright ©2014 by Jason Riley. Used by permission of Encounter Books. All rights reserved.)
In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion.
Presi­dent Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to talk about gun control.
The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling.
Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment and the supposedly racist criminal justice system.
But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.
...But their reforms showed an uncanny ability to take bad situations and make them worse.”
Crime rates rose by 139 percent during the 1960s, and the murder rate doubled.
Cities couldn’t hire cops fast enough.
“The number of police per 1,000 people was up twice the rate of the population growth, and yet clearance rates for crimes dropped 31 percent and conviction rates were down 6 percent,” wrote Lucas A. Powe Jr. in “The Warren Court and American Politics,” his history of the Warren Court. “During the last weeks of his [1968] presidential campaign, Nixon had a favorite line in his standard speech.
‘In the past 45 minutes this is what happened in America.
There has been one murder, two rapes, forty-five major crimes of violence, countless robberies and auto thefts.’”
As remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepre­sented among those arrested and imprisoned.
In urban areas in 1967, blacks were 17 times more likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980 blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder, rape and robbery, according to FBI data.
And they were between one-fourth and one-third of all those arrested for crimes such as burglary, auto theft and aggravated assault.
Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. 
Between 1976 and 2005 blacks com­mitted more than half of all murders in the United States. 
The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population.
Blacks as a group are also overrepresented among persons arrested for so-called white-collar crimes such as counterfeiting, fraud and embezzlement.
And blaming this decades-long, well-documented trend on racist cops, prosecutors, judges, sentencing guidelines and drug laws doesn’t cut it as a plausible explanation...