Color of Crime

The Color of Crime

Race, Crime, and Justice in America

Second, Expanded Edition, 2005

Major Findings:

* Police and the justice system are not biased against minorities.

Crime Rates

* Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.

* When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.

* Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.

* The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.

Interracial Crime

* Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

* Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

* Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

* Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

There are existing statistics that found that males, especially the minority youths, were more commonly connected to crime and this caused police to pay much attention to this group. Police profiling is known to maximize the accuracy of the police work as well as their safety, it has been abused. The tendency to patrol high crime areas and neighborhoods, several are in or relatively close to minority residential areas, which led many to assume that the police were "profiling" blacks. In addition, a disproportionate of large number of young black males were been pulled over by police, and were accused of "driving while black" or what is know to be racial profiling. Colored individuals in the United States is lead to assume that many young men were pulled over and arrested because of the color of their skin, but not for any violation or criminal offense of the legal system.