{"id":71165,"date":"2015-07-17T13:09:47","date_gmt":"2015-07-17T21:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71165"},"modified":"2015-07-17T13:10:28","modified_gmt":"2015-07-17T21:10:28","slug":"high-hispanic-crime-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71165","title":{"rendered":"High Hispanic Crime Rate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ann Coulter writes<\/a>: Reason magazine boasts, for example, that El Paso, Texas, has a large Hispanic population and yet El Paso \u201cis among the safest big cities in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, however, El Paso\u2019s \u201csafe city\u201d ranking is based on an outdated FBI crime index that includes only eight crime categories, excluding such crimes as drunk driving, narcotics offenses and weapons violations. When the FBI\u2019s more complete crime index is used, El Paso has a higher crime rate than the national average. . . .<\/p>\n

The second main line of attack on the idea that immigrants are committing prodigious amounts of crime are the apocryphal \u201cstudies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two researchers whose work is cited over and over again for the proposition that immigrants are less criminal than Americans are Alex Piquero, criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Bianca Bersani, sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.<\/p>\n

I looked up some of these alleged studies this weekend. . . . It turns out that neither Piquero nor Bersani compared immigrant crime to \u201cthe overall population\u201d\u2014as the British Guardian recently claimed in an article purporting to prove Donald Trump wrong. Rather, they compare immigrants\u2019 crime rate to the crime rate of America\u2019s most criminally inclined subgroups.<\/p>\n

Thus, for example, once you get past the paywall, you will find that Piquero and Bersani\u2019s joint study, \u201cComparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth,\u201d used as its base group \u201cadolescents who were found guilty of a serious offense.\u201d . . . . Similarly, professor Bersani\u2019s oft-cited, but never-read study, \u201cAn Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,\u201d looked at a population group that included \u201can over-sample of Hispanic and African-American youth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of immigrants who are less crime-prone than our native blacks and Hispanics, we were hoping for immigrants less criminal than our Norwegians.<\/p>\n