Transcription
It is also noteworthy that African-American youth, at least in big cities, were disproportionately delinquent. Disproportionately meaning represented more than their population size. And delinquent meaning lawbreaking behavior by minors like fighting, vandalism, robbing, and other unlawful acts. So, minors identified in the negro/black group engaged in delinquent behavior at higher rates than their population size would suggest. So if you're 10% of the population but accounting for 30% of an activity, then that's disproportionate regardless if it's getting PhDs, working in certain occupations or earning a certain share of achievements. In this case, it was delinquency.
A classic study by criminologist Marvin Wolf Gang tracked a birth cohort. Nearly 10,000 boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 up to their 18th birthdays in 1963. Anyone older than 18 at the time of an offense would no longer be classified as a juvenile. What did he find?
Wolf Gang found that race is one of the most significant variables in this analysis. Race is the category created during colonial times and it attempts to lump people with similar ancestry or similar skin color into one group and then to force people to use that as their primary means of identification. So they created the rules for race and they created the racial categories. Right now race isn't biological. It's not a biological category like male and female. It's a social category which means that it can be changed. It can be reorganized. It can be redone at any time just as it has been done multiple times in the past. Meaning you can change who counts as a black person like they did with the one drop rule. And you can even change the category name like negro, black, Africanamean or rich brown or melanated etc. It just depends on how society embraces the change. So what Wolf Gang found was that the racial group played a significant variable in delinquency. And here's what he found.
Non-whites make up 29% of the birth cohort, but 50.2% and 2% are recorded delinquents. Whites are 71% of the cohort, 29% of whom are delinquent. The non-white rate, he found, was three times as high as the white rate. And even more worrying, black youth committed 2.4 times as many UCR index offenses, the most serious crimes in the FBI's uniform crime reports. So, the youth from the black groups engaged in a much higher rate of delinquency than the white group. The black youth did much more than their fair share of delinquency relative to their share of the population.
Although juvenile violence was a growing concern, the two most significant developments in crime during the 1950s were big city crime linked to the African-American migration and the ongoing dilemma of southern violence. Negroes coming into the city from the south during the migration. Along with them came the violent entity which enlarged itself in the big city. The big city environment was like food for the violent entity. That's where it was able to grow larger and spawn itself inside of more human vehicles, especially in the black community.
From 1900 to the late 1950s, New York City homicide rates were lower than those for the United States as a whole. Moreover, in the United Kingdom and Europe, some of the biggest cities had extremely low crime rates. In the 1950s, when New York City was enjoying what Americans think of as a crime honeymoon, with homicide rates around 4.0 per 100,000, the rates in London were 0.7, roughly 16th of Gothams, which are pretty decent numbers. 0.7 homicides per 100,000 people for a densely populated city like London. That's pretty good. And what it shows is that people could live very close to each other and not kill each other at high rates. And obviously we know that issues occur whenever humans live so close to each other and they have to interact with each other. But the difference is how certain people and certain groups resolve problems. That's the difference between a a petty street argument ending up with both of the parties just walking away versus someone getting shot and killed. And this is regardless if people are financially poor or rich.
Table 2.6 shows the difference in crime rates between the biggest urban areas and the rest of the United States at roughly the beginning and end of the 1950s. rates for large cities were considerably higher than national rates for each offense. So you can see that the bigger cities had much more crime than the rest of the USA. And that's because there are more opportunities for crime there and also more people willing to act on those opportunities and actually commit the crime because just because the opportunity is there that doesn't mean that people are going to take it. It depends on the mindset that they have. So you need opportunity and a human that's willing to act on the opportunity which the big cities in the USA had.
Moreover, the differences between the urban rates and those of the rest of the country grew greater by the early 1960s, a harbinger of developments to come. Table 2.7 shows that generally speaking, the more populous the municipality, the higher the crime rates. In towns with populations between 10,000 and 25,000, for example, the 1960 murder rate was only 2.4 per 100,000, just over one-third the rate of the largest cities, which was 6.8.
Here's table 2.7. You can see that as the population size decreased, the rate of crime also decreased along with it. And that was true just uh for about each category um uh for murder, robbery, and aggravated assault for each of the decades from 1940s going into the 1960s. But this is not true in all instances because what also matters is the quality of people that live in that area. because I could show you some cities that have very small populations like Belglade, Florida, around 15,000 people and Pokei, Florida, around 5,500 people. And both of those cities have very high crime rates. And we already know who mostly lives there. We don't even have to bat an eye or ponder on the question. We already know. So, it's not just about the population size. It's also what type of people live there. Not skin color. That's not the thing. It's what type of people live there, what mentality and culture they have. But smaller uh populations in general provide less opportunity for crime, especially if those cities are not very dense.
Table 2.7 also shows that trends in violent crime during the 1950s were mixed. Rates for murder and assault in the largest cities did not rise between 1950 and 1960s while robbery rates for the same municipalities climbed by 1/3. That's right here on the table with the murder rate in the 1950s and60s staying pretty uh the same at 6.8. But the robberies shot through the roof from 88 to 117 per 100,000 people. This bears out the assertion that violent crime was essentially flat in the 1950s. But it also tells us something very interesting about robbery, the quintessential urban crime. Robbery is the taking of property, theft by force or the threat of force, a mugging in common parliament. Such a crime usually is perpetrated by strangers. Consequently, it generates great fear among urban populations because it's random and people start to imagine themselves as potential victims, which summons the fear entity from within.
A disproportionate number of robberies, undoubtedly intra-racial in the main, were committed by lowerass African-Ameans. blacks in the lowest parts of the lower realm, the ones who should be allowed to keep the name black, while others move away from it. As the black migration to cities accelerated after World War II, the number of urban robberies by blacks increased. In the large sample of arrests compiled by the FBI in 1950, 35.7% of the total robbery apprehensions were of blacks who comprised at the time only 10% of the population. a disproportionate number, 10% of the population and being arrested for 35% of the robberies, which generate great fear in the public, like we talked about earlier. Now, here's the figure that shows the black uh robbery arrest rate. In the 1950s, it was about 35%. But then year by year, it began to grow. That's the violent entity growing larger in the black community in the city. Then it reached over 55% in uh 1960. And even if you adjust for police biases, which they're most certainly were, the rates are still going to be through the roof. That that's for sure. By 1960, robbery arrests of blacks jumped to 55.5% of the total. sample limited to cities of 2500 or more while the general population was 10.5% African-American. So the robbery arrests were increasing significantly while the black population was barely growing. Now come on with it.
The increase in robbery arrests undoubtedly reflected the enormous black migration to urban areas where more potential victims with more valuables and the anonymity of the big city encouraged predators. Just like we talked about, much more opportunities, but also more people coming into the city willing to act on those opportunities.
Insufficient data exists to state with certainty that blacks were responsible for the upward trend in urban robbery. But figures show that in the 1950s, the black urban population rose enormously, big city robbery rates climbed, and there was growing black involvement in the offense. So he's saying that all the data isn't airtight and conclusive on the increase in robberies, but from what is available, it points to the black population increase in the city as a major factor. And here's why. The connection between black urban migration and rising robbery rates is perhaps best demonstrated by a study of more than 100 cities with populations over 50,000 which found that from 1950 to 1960 each 3% increase in the non-white population correlated with 100 more robberies per 100,000 people. So the connection was there. Now, this certainly includes other groups like Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans who were also quick with the knife, but blacks more were um more than likely the most responsible for this, right? It just is what it is. All right, so we're going to stop right here. Hopefully, you have learned a thing or two, but we are not done yet. Not even close. So, we're going to pick up with some more information in the next commentary. All right. And so, I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael and I'll see you in the free.