On Race and the Measurement of Crime.
Université de Paris 8
(What follows is a post to the group Anthro-L contributing to the discussion that occurred after Philippe Rushton had posted there on the relationship between race and crime)
Social scientists have been well aware for some time that the crime statistics that are published by the police or by central government leave much to be desired. To begin with, it is quite clear that they underestimate the amount of violence and of dishonest behaviour that actually occurs ; it is by no means clear that the relationship between recorded crime and what some criminologists refer to as the Dark Figure is constant, so that attempts to compare data for one historical era with data for another are fraught with problems.
It is difficult to know how much of the apparent rise in crime statistics that has been recorded since the 1950s in most urban societies is to be explained by changes in the real levels of violence and of dishonesty, and how much can be attributed to the greater sensitivity of the measuring devices. Most authorities would agree that the latter factor is of some importance, but there is some argument as to how much.
Just as differences between one moment and another are difficult to explain, so differences between one social group and another, between one geographical area and another, are not easy to elucidate ; it is likely that some of the difference between rural and urban crime rates, for example, is due to discordancies in recording practices, rather than to differences in criminal behaviour. Low rates of violence for Asian groups, in Great Britain, may be due - as many British police officers believe - to a strong tendency to keep such matters ‘within the family’. It seems likely that domestic violence is even less frequently reported by Asian women than it is by their European and Caribbean peers.
Social reaction to violence is at least in part determined by context ; activities which would call down the wrath of the police officer and the magistrate when indulged in by the working-class football supporter may go unremarked when committed by members of a University rugby team. Populations who spend their leisure hours in public places are subjected to a greater degree of surveillance by the forces of order than are those who play their games in private - those who commit their crimes on the street are more likely to be entered upon an official register than are those who live their lives, whether criminal or not, outside the public domain.
This being the case, we should make any remarks about the general ‘criminal tendencies’ of one group or another with some care. However, it does seem clear that some such generalizations can be made, and there is little reason to flinch from them. As I have argued here before, the best measures of violence are those that actually leave bodies to be counted - although even murder may be under-recorded ; Radzinowicz cites a chief of the Parisian police who opined that if the Seine were to be drained, the murder rate would leap by a considerable margin. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that, at the present time, the murder-rate among young black males in the United States is exceptionally high, and that the perpetrators are themselves young black males.
Once this has been said, however, there are a number of caveats that must be made if we are not to rush into baseless theorizing. First, this exceptionally high murder rate is just that : exceptionally high. Although murder rates amongst American blacks have been consistently higher than amongst whites as a whole, they have been lower than they are today - between 1940 and 1960, the rate for men classified as black dropped from 79.9 to 56.2, and for women so classified from 18.5 to 15.6 per 100,000.
These rates began to rise dramatically from the mid 60s, to reach 95.9 in 1970 and up to 108.3 in 1972. The male rate than sank back to 78.1 in 1978 - I do not have subsequent figures to hand. (Daly and Wilson note that homicide rates amongst young males are particularly changeable, and conclude that this group is particularly vulnerable to changes in the economic field).
I would note that these figures are far higher than for inner-city black populations of Caribbean origin in the UK. This suggests that the present high rate is to be explained by something other than the innate characteristics of ‘blacks’, and we would expect that a radical change in the circumstances in which American blacks find themselves would lead to a radical drop in the murder rate. And indeed, this is what happens ; those black people who have moved out of the inner cities, and who have found for themselves steady middle-class jobs, do not share in the pathologies of the ghetto.
Second, there are also other groups within American society who have exceptionally high rates of violence ; because these groups are melted into the white population as a whole, they do not stand out in the statistics. Also, they are often rural, rather than city-dwelling, and so may attract less media attention to themselves. They share certain characteristics with the young black males who kill each other in the inner cities; they have little schooling, their chances of mobility are blocked for one reason or another, and they are poor. Once again, this suggests that innate explications of levels of violence are unlikely to account for a great deal of variation.
It is, then, extremely difficult to establish a rate for the violence of black Americans - even assuming that such a categorization is meaningful - that holds for all times and in all places. It is, I will suggest, even more difficult to compare any such rate with the figures given for violent behaviour in other countries. Exactly what the murder rate may be in any African country I do not know. It is unlikely that the measuring devices in any of them are similar to those used in most states in the USA. Ethnographic evidence suggests that, at least in small-scale African societies, rates of violence are similar to those found in other such societies wherever they may be - these figures in general appear to be relatively high by modern North American standards, but it should be remembered that they usually include cases which, in our own societies, would be regarded as either acts of war or self-defense, and would not be traceable in the statistics on criminality*.
The pressures that urban populations in Africa labour under may have similar effects to those which lead to very high murder rates in European cities during the period of urbanisation in that continent - rates which have since dropped considerably. A striking example of this would be Naples ; in 1861, the province of Naples saw 4300 murders, in a population of 6,900,000 ( a rate of around 62/100,000, which is in the same region as figures for black Americans). By 1880, the figure had dropped to 636, while the population had grown by 20%. In Italy as a whole, the average figure dropped from 13/100,000 in the thrity years preceding 1880 to 2 .
How much confidence we can have in the crime figures for China, VietNam or Cambodia, I would not like to guess. The figures for homicide in Japan are low - that is to say, that they are about the same as those for the UK, for France or Sweden. Spain, Greece and Belgium all had lower figures (my statistics here are for 1976/8). By and large, the figures for all the developed nations fall within the same range, except the United States, which is a special case. I will not here venture an opinion as to why that should be so.
Apart, then, from the problems that have been raised here over the classifications advanced by Dr. Rushton, there are further questions to be raised over his use of the statistics on violent crime.
Regards Timothy Mason
* If we were to add into the ‘white’ total those acts which are classified as either ‘acts of war’ or ‘self-defence’, the picture might become even more difficult to read.