When Black Lives Don’t Matter

I n 2020, the year that Black Lives Matter took to the streets in protest, 243 African Americans were shot to death by police. Also that year, though BLM took no notice, over 13,500 black people were murdered by private citizens (according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data), the overwhelming majority of whom undoubtedly were black. (Relevant FBI data for 2020 are not yet available, but data for 2019 indicate that 89 percent of black homicide victims were killed by blacks.) That’s nearly 56 times the number of African Americans killed by police. And a recent survey found that more than half of black Americans (54 percent) or someone they know had experienced gun violence in the past five years.

This carnage among black Americans continued in 2021. In Chicago, for instance, 81 percent of the killings took black lives. In Baton Rouge, 79 percent of the victims were African American males, and in Louisville, 68 percent. In Baltimore, 92 percent of the homicide victims whose identities were known were black. As for 2022, the murder data are very preliminary, and it’s too soon to discern a national trend.

The New York Times recently covered year-to-date shootings in Philadelphia, noting that as of August 11, over 1,400 people had been shot. That figure is similar to the one produced for 2021 (dated August 16) by the Philadelphia Police Department. The newspaper also reported 322 homicides so far in 2022, very close to the tally for 2021. My research (relying on the same 2021 PPD report and current-year data) found a 1 percent uptick in homicides in the period from January 1 to August 23 as compared with the same period in 2021.

But the Times’ analysis leaves a lot unspoken. Significantly, the reporter, Campbell Robertson, failed to discuss the race or ethnicity of the homicide victims or their assailants, although the accompanying photographs and other clues make the inference obvious. Cryptically, Robertson notes that the shootings occurred “in certain neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia, places that were left behind decades ago by redlining and other forms of discrimination and are now among the poorest parts of what is often called the country’s poorest big city.”

So, in case you missed the point, Philadelphia’s shootings and murders overwhelmingly involved African Americans, and the causes were (surprise) poverty and racism. A bit more digging would have revealed the flaw in this analysis.

It turns out that the Hispanic population of Philly is poorer than the black population, and though Latinos also face discrimination, they engage in much less violent crime. Hispanics have the highest poverty rate in the city, at 38 percent, followed by blacks at 31 percent. Moreover, a higher percentage of Hispanics than of blacks live in concentrated poverty areas — neighborhoods in which 40 percent or more of the residents are poor.

Despite the adversity differences, African Americans are arrested and jailed at much higher rates than Latinos. Blacks, who were 42 percent of the city’s population in 2020, were nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of the jail inmates. Hispanics, by contrast, who were 14 percent of the 2020 population, were 17 percent of the inmates. As I explained in The Roots of Violent Crime in America: From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, cultural differences in the use of violence to resolve interpersonal disputes are at work here.

The main focus of the Times article is the enormous problem of handgun availability, and the media is right to emphasize this. There is little question that the outsized murder rates in American cities are sustained by the extremely easy access, both legal and illegal, to handguns.

But the solutions to the handgun problem are not obvious. Philadelphia’s woke district attorney, Larry Krasner, refuses to prosecute for illegal possession, arguing that such prosecutions don’t reduce shootings and killings because police resources are diverted from shootings to the less serious crime. Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Danielle M. Outlaw, disagrees. “There have to be consequences for those who are carrying and using these guns illegally,” she told the Times. “If I go out and get this gun, knowing nothing’s going to happen to me, why would that preclude me from doing anything else illegally with a gun?”

The commissioner is right for one simple reason: There are no other effective disincentives for the young, unattached males responsible for the vast bulk of the shootings. Some claim that carrot-and-stick interventions with gangs could work, but even these solutions rely on arrests and prosecutions — the stick portion of these programs.

Whatever the solution, one thing is clear: If we really care about black lives — unlike BLM — we won’t be looking for ways to limit the police.