Ever since the 1960s, we’ve heard from the Left that if we want to reduce high crime rates in black neighborhoods, the key is to fight poverty and racism. Is there really a connection, though?

In this Liberty Unyielding article, Hans Bader argues that this idea is badly mistaken. He writes, “To the extent that they admit the black crime rate is higher than the white crime rate, progressives blame it on society, saying it is due to the higher black poverty rate. But this argument is contradicted by the fact that when Asians were poorer than whites — because many Asians were dirt-poor immigrants from communist countries — Asians still had a lower crime rate than whites. And this was true even in places and times where Asians were subject to more discrimination than blacks are subject to today.”

Asian populations have rapidly become wealthier despite also being subject to discriminatory laws and receiving no racial preferences.

Leftists use a number of weak arguments to try to save their position, such as that blacks are subject to “overpolicing.”

Bader responds:

Racism and overpolicing are not why the black arrest rate is higher than the arrest rate for other races. A 2021 study by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than people in general, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates: “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018). Far from being overpoliced, the U.S. is actually less policed than most of the world, with fewer cops than Europe. As criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.”

The Leftists will never concede this argument because it gives them an excuse to do what they love to do, namely redistribute wealth and create government programs that provide jobs for members of their tribe. And high crime rates just can’t have anything to do with culture because all cultures are equally good — or so they say.