Crime
by Jared Taylor

from National Review magazine, May 16, 1994

“IT HAS now become acceptable to discuss black crime,” writes Mr. Ed Koch, former Mayor of New York City. I’m not sure this is a compliment to those of us who have been doing it for years — Patrick Buchanan, Samuel Francis, and especially Professor William Wilbanks of Florida International University, to mention just a few. But we welcome Mr. Koch into our midst nonetheless.

In fact, the significance of black crime is even greater than Mr. Koch realizes, for without it, the level of violence in the United States would not be appreciably greater than that of the European nations with whom we are most often compared.

As the chart at the bottom of this page shows, Americans as a whole are more violent than Europeans: twice as likely as Frenchmen to commit murder and more than five times as likely as Germans to commit robbery. However, as is clear from the separate calculations for American blacks and whites, it is very high rates of violent crimes by blacks — eight times as high as whites for murder and more than ten times for robbery — that yield this result.

These figures actually overstate the white crime rate, since the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports classify Hispanics as “white.” About 9 per cent of the population is Hispanic, and jurisdictions that treat them as a separate category report that they are two to six times as likely as whites to commit murder and robbery.

These figures have a bearing on the debate over gun control. White Americans, who have easy access to guns, are less likely to kill each other than are the British, who are almost completely disarmed. Would gun control be so widely advocated if America were less violent than Britain?

This comparison with Europe suggests that the United States has neither a unique “culture of violence” nor inadequate gun laws. It has a high rate of violent crime because it has a large number of violent black criminals. Let us hope Mr. Koch will agree that it is now respectable to say so.

CRIMES PER 100,000 POPULATION

A-Britain B-France C-Germany D-Italy E-U.S.A. F-American Whites G-American Blacks

Murder: A-7.4 B-4.6 C-4.2 D-6.0 E-9.3 F-5.1 G-43.4

Robbery: A-62.6 B-90.4 C-47.4 D-68.6 E-263.0 F-126 G-1,343

Source: Uniform Crime Reports for U.S. data, The Economist for European data. European data for 1990; American data for 1992

Mr. Taylor is the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. He is also the Editor of American Renaissance magazine, a publication dedicated to telling the truth about race, racial differences and their meaning.