Comment: Steve, did you read this paper – Steffensmeier et al, “Reassessing Trends in Black Violent Crime, 1980-2008″?
We know that black males and females whose race was identified are responsible for over 50% of nation’s homicides. But there’s a huge problem with official assessments and conclusions about trends in violence based on national statistics published annually in the FBI’s UCR.
In federal statistics an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Hispanic population is classified as White (93%), whereas 4% of Hispanics are considered Black. Also crime-reporting programs typically record Hispanic arrests as White arrestees, failing to separate ethnicity from race – in particular, failing to separate Hispanics from non-Hispanic Whites. This does not only limit understanding of ethnic involvement but also hides the true disparity between White-Black crime rates (when ethnicity is NOT considered the disparity between the two races is less extreme) and tends to inflate White rates and deflate Black rates. It is called the “Hispanic effect”.
After creating estimates of “clean” White and “clean” Black arrest counts that do not include Hispanics, Steffensmeier et al. discovered that the Black share of violent crime was enlarged from 51% to 64% for homicide category and from 59% to 70% for robbery. As far as ratios are concerned, the average Black–White ratio for homicide was 7:1 using official FBI’s figures and jumped to almost 12:1 after adjusting (after separating Hispanics from non-Hispanic Whites). Same for robbery: ratio jumped from 10:1 to 15:1.
64%!
In essence, classifying Hispanic arrestees with Whites (or Blacks) deflates the Black fraction of arrests and deflates the Black–White arrest rate ratio, particularly for the more reliably reported offenses of homicide and robbery.
