Race, crime, and (r)

From Explorable:

Statistical correlation is measured by what is called coefficient of correlation (r). Its numerical value ranges from +1.0 to -1.0. It gives us an indication of the strength of relationship.


In general, r > 0 indicates positive relationship, r < 0
indicates negative relationship while r = 0 indicates no relationship
(or that the variables are independent and not related). Here r = +1.0
describes a perfect positive correlation and r = -1.0 describes a
perfect negative correlation.
Closer the coefficients are to +1.0 and -1.0, greater is the strength of the relationship between the variables.


As a rule of thumb, the following guidelines on strength of
relationship are often useful (though many experts would somewhat
disagree on the choice of boundaries).

From Ron Unz:

[O]ver the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of
the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and
“immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general
range of -0.20 to -0.60. Interestingly enough, for most of the last
decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably
less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that
latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.
Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have
steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now
falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

That’s not the interesting part, however. At this point, only a complete idiot or the willfully blind will deny the relative African predilection for crime. What is interesting is his conclusions regarding how the supposedly anti-racist liberals are addressing this very strong correlation and how immigration factors into it:

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely
concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black
populations, including a violent underclass. During the early 1990s,
many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to
its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive
and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of
American homicide capital. In each city, the violence and crime were
overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were
rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support
for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration
of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.
But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI
statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to
commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700%
larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or
Asian immigrants as they are for whites. Thus, replacing a city’s
blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much
as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become
increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious
implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of
Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly
50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C. The
inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population,
which declined, often substantially, in each location. And all three
cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates
falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of
these underlying demographic changes. Meanwhile, the white population
increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford
the sharp rise in housing prices. It is an undeniable fact that
American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost
universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their
possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own
urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping
their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a
prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC. A couple of
years ago he recounted on his blogsite
how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two
young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party. At first
he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually
admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial
practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the
Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our
Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random
violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city. Yet no
respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of
such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a
precautionary measure. Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density
issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would
reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration
is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace
and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that
Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the
incident. Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps
an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological
framework of American elites becomes apparent. The more
conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration,
sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power
structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.
Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some
support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being
targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Indeed. One might reach the same conclusion when looking closely at the consequences of liberal policies on welfare and abortion. Never look at the selling points, look at the consequences. If the course is not subsequently changed in light of a divergence between the two, it is safe to assume that the consequences were planned from the start.

Remember, extrapolating current trends to predict the future is reliably a failure. In 1900, it was widely believed that the black race was inevitably headed for extinction. 100 years later, it looks like the whites are on the way out. But it’s not hard to imagine ethnic cleansing in Europe combined with ethnic strife in the Americas and ruthless Chinese colonization in Africa leading to the revival of concerns for the black race in 2100.