The Race Realist Reasons For The Decline In Crime

It’s not just due to better policing

Not everything is getting worse.

America’s murder rate has significantly dropped since 2021. The COVID era witnessed a dramatic spike in violence, with many cities reaching or exceeding previous homicide records set in the early 1990s. As urban America descended into chaos, many feared the 2020s would be a return to the dark ages of the 80s and early 90s where crime was at its worst.

But the murder rate has returned to pre-pandemic levels. We may see the lowest homicide rate in American history this year. Various explanations are given for this change. The obvious one is that cities returned to arresting criminals after a few years of BLM-inspired, criminal-friendly policies. Leftists try to dispute this, and claim woke policies actually brought crime down. One needs a lobotomy to believe that. Some on the Right tout Trump’s immigration policies for the murder drop. That may be true in places where illegal alien gang members proliferated, but the murder spike was primarily caused by young blacks. They’re not the ones getting deported.

Greater law enforcement explains the immediate cause for the crime drop. But it doesn’t fully explain the long-term decline. For that, one has to turn to demographics. Retired criminal justice professor Barry Latzer provided a big-picture argument for the crime decline in a 2022 Wall Street Journal article. Written at a time when it was easy to think the 2020s would be one of the bloodiest decades in our nation’s history, Latzer disagreed with those predictions. He claimed demographic change, which has made many cities less black and our general population significantly older, makes it unlikely for the murderous ‘80s to return. He turned out to be right.

He claimed that there were multiple factors that caused the “crime tsunami” of the late 20th century. But, in his opinion, these demographic elements are no longer present.

The crime tsunami that began in the late ’60s was driven largely by three factors: large-scale rural-to-urban migration of African-Americans and immigration to big cities of Hispanic populations with high violent-crime rates, massive growth in the youth population, and a weak criminal-justice system. One might throw in a fourth: The crack-cocaine epidemic, which sent crime soaring after it began to ease in the early ’80s.

Latzer argued that the “current immigrant population is characterized by low violent-crime rates.” This may sound like a liberal talking point, but he explains that he’s referring to Asians, not Hispanics. He offers data that shows the low level of crime among Asians. With Hispanics, the criminologist rightfully points that their crime rates are higher than Asians, but in proportion with their population numbers. Latzer may be underestimating Hispanic crime as many Latino offenders are counted as white in police databases. Regardless, he knows which demographic commits the majority of murders. “Blacks, who were 13% of the American population, were half of the homicide offenders and 56% of the victims,” he writes.

He argues that black migration out of cities has played a major role in reducing violent crime:

Yet a little-noticed migration trend may reduce crime in the next decade: a significant movement of African-Americans out of big cities. If this trend continues, it could portend reductions in crime. Low-income blacks, especially young males, commit a disproportionate amount of the violent crime in this country. That’s why their migration in the ’60s raised crime rates in cities. A recent analysis of census data by Politico found that from 2010 to 2020 nine of the 10 cities with the highest proportions of blacks (Houston was the exception) were losing minority population. Some declines were dramatic: Detroit lost more than 277,000 of its African-American residents, Chicago more than 261,000 and New York in excess of 176,000. Unless immigration and migration patterns change in coming decades, this factor is unlikely to support a new crime tsunami.

There is one additional change to the black population that could explain a decrease in crime. The native-born black American (NBA) population is in decline. At least one-fifth of blacks now have an immigrant background. Non-NBAs aren’t the same as NBAs and are possibly less prone to crime.

Latzer also takes note of America becoming much older and how that impacts crime:

A second consideration is age distribution. The American population is aging, and the once-violent baby boomers have mellowed considerably. In 2021 more than 21% of Americans were baby boomers and the 65-plus age group is projected to constitute more than a fifth of the population through 2060. Meanwhile, men 18 to 24 are a declining proportion of Americans. In 2020 they were an estimated 4.7% of the U.S. Their proportion is projected to decline to 4.5% in 2025 and 4.4% in 2030.

Latzker was right that crime would eventually decline. America is a very different country from the 1990s. This is mostly a bad thing, but the one positive change is the decline in crime.

There are still many things wrong with modern America. The quality of life is arguably worse, with public places–from malls to cruises–being far more unpleasant than in the past. Immigration is completely changing the country, from big cities to tiny towns. Atomization, drug abuse, political corruption, and many other pathologies infect the body politic. Diversity has not made America stronger. We’re increasingly becoming Brazil, but with a lower murder rate.

The homicide decline is a good thing, but that fact alone doesn’t make America great again.