The Distorted Exaggeration of Black-on-Black Crime Ignores Much of America's Criminality

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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/distorted-exaggeration-black-black-crime-ignores-much-americas-criminality

Ongoing protests against police brutality have revealed how distorted the American discourse on crime is. The biggest myth animating this discourse is black criminality: the notion that black people commit more crime, and therefore deserve more heavy-handed policing. Just a few weeks ago, on NBC’s Meet the Press, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani chided the network, saying, “I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks.” Persistent black-on-black crime “is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community,” he continued. After a heated exchange with author and commentator Michael Eric Dyson, who pushed back against his arguments, Giuliani responded, “White police officers won't be there if you weren't killing each other 70 percent of the time.”

This myth relies on shaky evidence and a selective definition of crime that ignores crimes committed by powerful institutions and the people who run them, many of whom are white men.

Blaming the crime problem on black people is unfair and ill-founded. On one hand, according to FBI homicide data, African Americans commit more homicides than other racial groups. In 2013, there were 5,375 black homicide offenders versus 4,396 who were white and over 4,000 whose races were unknown. However, that is a very small percentage of the national black population, which is over 40 million people. The vast majority of black people do not commit any crimes.

Moreover, so-called black-on-black crime has decreased over the decades. In the past 20 years, black-on-black homicides decreased by 67 percent—a sharper decline than white-on-white homicide—and "[a]mong black youth, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are the lowest in more than 40 years," according to Demos. Throughout the country, crime has continuously fallen since the 1990s. Plus, black-on-black crime is hardly unique. Most crime is intra-racial. Around 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black offenders, while white people kill each other at roughly the same rate.

[Live and Learn]

1. Desperate people will do whatever it takes to live.

That explains why poor people of any color are most often considered criminals.

But what about the most costly crimes which are corporations verse the public? There are no statistics on that and we all know that their crimes are responsible for 90% of the other,

People given no chance to succeed will resort to crime to do so. And I can actually understand that. Those that already have everything and still resort to it are the real criminals.