Blacks Have High Crime Rates, What About Hispanics? Blacks Have High Crime Rates, What About Hispanics?

AmericanConservativeIn a recent American Conservative article, Ron Unz argues that hispanics should not be mentally linked with blacks as a "high-crime minority." Instead, Unz suggests that there is very little difference in crime rates between "whites" and "hispanics." Why do I place "whites" and "hispanics" in quotes? Because when it comes to ethnicity, classification is everything. US government sources for crime statistics are notoriously averse to providing valid ethnic data on hispanic crime. The FBI Uniform Crime Report, for example often conflates the categories "white" and "hispanic" together, making ethnic comparisons for such crime rates impossible.

Unz assumes that he solves this problem by using incarceration statistics from the Bureau of Justice (BJS). Unz assures us that correctional officials keep scrupulous records of inmate ethnicity, and provide the aggregate data annually through the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Unfortunately, even the BJS is getting away from a scrupulous ethnic accounting of prisoners -- forcing Unz to use 2005 statistics instead of the more recent 2008 statistics, which fail to provide the ethnic data. Unz proceeds to look at age-adjusted crime data which seems to show that (age-adjusted) hispanic crime rates are much less elevated above white crime rates than popularly believed -- and in some cases hispanic crime rates are lower than white crime rates when adjusted for age. Counter-intuitive? Certainly.

A reasonable question arises: are all of these crime rates actual, or might they be statistical artifacts produced by widespread underreporting of crime in heavily Hispanic areas? We cannot absolutely eliminate this possibility, but for homicides the reporting rate is always close to 100 percent, and since for all these cities the homicide and other serious crime rates tend to follow very similar patterns, there is no evidence that any of these racial patterns were warped by substantial underreporting.

...The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age. _Unz

Unz makes an interesting argument. But can his data be trusted? Al Fin statisticians recommend caution when accepting BJS numbers at face value -- particularly when government bureaucracies are decades deep within an unscrupulous political correctness. Misclassification errors are common in the FBI database, and it is not unreasonable to expect misclassification to be involved in the BJS database of incarcerations.

US Census numbers provide another likely source of error, when calculating crime rates by ethnicity -- as anyone who has had any dealings with the Bureau of Census would know. In addition, the likely under-reporting of crime from hispanic neighborhoods is another reason to doubt the numbers. Then there is the often-huge discrepancy between crime and incarceration. As long as a Mexican immigrant can easily flee across the border to escape prosecution, he will be less likely to appear on any US incarceration rolls.

There are other reasons to hold Unz' findings in doubt with regard to the underlying statistics. Unz sometimes refers to crime rates and sometimes to incarceration rates. His numbers come from a variety of sources and are treated as equally reliable. And since "hispanic" is a linguistic classification rather than an ethnic one, the entire basis of comparison teeters ludicrously on the brink of unreliability.

It may be impossible to clean up the problems in Unz' analysis. Government agencies are making it ever harder to compare characteristics of different population groups -- whether by IQ, crime, or any other pertinent variable.

But in the end, it is possible to hold onto some hope from Unz' blatant advocacy journalism. "Hispanics" are the fastest growing population group in the US. Although average IQ among "hispanics" is significantly lower than among more European derived populations, if crime rates are not significantly higher then future US societies may have reason to hope.

In other words, you should not expect to see many rocket scientists or Nobel Prize winners among US "hispanic" groups. But if you can expect to also see relatively low crime rates among the same groups, then all is not lost.