Transcription
All right, we're transitioning into another book called The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America, written by criminologist and legal scholar Dr. Barry Latzer, and it was published in 2016. Now, this book is perfect to introduce right now because we left off in the 1965 Moyahan report discussing crime. And this book here provides more data and more insight into the statistics of violent crime from around the mid 1900s. And it also discusses the causes of how violent crime increased as Negroes migrated into urban areas. And you really cannot talk about black history without dealing with the topic of violent crime and coming to terms with it because it has been such a a significant part of that journey. And although the black street level crime isn't as bad in 2026 as it was in the 60s through the 90s, it is still a major issue of concern. Okay.
Now, one thing that I like about this book is that the author does not beat around the bush or circle around the issue. He gets to the point of it and he calls it out for what it is. There's a lot of scholars on these sensitive topics that don't really do a good job of getting to the bottom of things because they fear backlash and others just refuse to see the obvious because of whatever agenda they may have. But Dr. Latzer doesn't do that in this book, which I appreciate and I believe that many of you will appreciate that as well. So, let's crack open the book and let's get a quick introduction to the topic.
All right, here we go. This book begins with the 1940s, but in some respects, this is the middle of the story. To fully understand violent crime, its genesis and development must be studied within the context of the nation's history. The forces that shaped contemporary America begin to fall in place about 135 years ago in the 1880s when the United States developed an industrial economy, formed great metropolitan centers, received mass influxes of immigrants from all over the world, and first experienced migration of African-Americans from the south to other regions of the country.
Now, one thing first is that he's retroactively calling them African-Americans. But as we know, I like to keep the approach of calling people by the name that they called themselves. And in the case in the 1880s, it was mostly negro and black. The African-American identity didn't get cemented into the consciousness of their descendants until the late 1980s. So, I want to point that out at the jump because he does use African-American interchangeably with negro and black when he's talking about those who lived prior to the 1980s. So, he's naming the 1880s as a pivotal point in the making of modern America. This is when the industrial centers in the cities were forming. A lot of immigrants were coming to the country and negroes were relocating out of the south and going to other parts of the country. And he's using this here as a starting point to kind of set the scene to lay the foundation for his argument on crime going forward.
>> The study of crime going back to the late 19th century gives us a different perspective on its causes. Some of the factors that loomed large in recent decades, poverty, economic downturns, urban environments, and ethnic and racial bias, begin to diminish in importance. >>
He's going to explain why he sees those as not being the most important as we continue in the book. By contrast, long-term analysis reveals that the propensity for violence of various subcultures, whether they be ethnic, racial, religious, or regional, seems to generate high violent crime rates over fairly long time periods. The culture of specific groups, meaning the way people think, the manner in which they behave, what they value, how they respond to conflict, their attitudes towards another person's life, etc. All of these shape violent behavior more than circumstances like poverty and racial bias and the other things that he mentioned. For instance, white and black southerners, each of which has a distinctive culture, have had high rates of interpersonal violence for well over a century. Dr. Thomas Soul talked about this in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. And Dr. Grady Mcwiny in his book, Cracker Culture, also talks about how the white southerners were violent. And we know that Negroes were reared around white southerners in slavery. So the idea is that they at least picked up violent tendencies from the surrounding whites.
>> In the case of southern whites, violent tendencies can be traced back to the 18th century Scotch-Irish migration. >>
Uh-oh. The wild ones bringing a certain violent mentality from Europe over to the States.
>> For African-Americans, the pivotal period for the increase in violent crime was between 1880 and 1900, the notorious Jim Crow era. We discussed that in the 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro by Dr. Web Deo. He showed that the violent entity was increasing itself within the Negro community and it was it was small at that time, but it was noticeable. Other cultural groups that immigrated to the United States have had quite variable records in terms of violent crime. >>
Like who? In the 19th century, crime rates were high for the Irish and Chinese, but low for German and Scandinavian immigrants.
>> So, the Chinese and the Irish came in hot, but the Germans and the Scandinavians did not. >>
Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians, who arrived at roughly the same time, between 1900 and 1910, and settled in the same place, New York City, had very different rates of violence. The European Jews had low rates of violence while the Italians had high although they lived in the same environment.
>> Likewise, in the 1920s, Mexican migrants had elevated violent crime rates while Japanese entrance did not. >>
Los Mexico were quick with the knife while the Japanese were not. And here's the kicker. Given that nearly all of these cultural groups arrived in poverty and suffered shameful mistreatment because of their race, religion, or national origin, the variation in violent crime rates is puzzling.
>> That's the argument against poverty alone being the cause of violence. The point here is that all of these groups were poor when they arrived. And if poverty alone was the cause of high violence, then each of these groups should have had high rates of violence. But that wasn't the case. You have places like McAllen, Texas, that had a poverty rate of around 20% in 2025, and it had a homicide rate of only 0.7 per 100,000. They had one murder out of 150,000 residents and that's considered a a poor city. And then you have places like Mumbai, India with 50% of the people living in slums which are magnitudes worse than any ghetto in America. And Mumbai had a homicide rate in 2023 of only two per 100,000 people, which is less than the homicide rate of any major city in the US. And we know that the living conditions are way better in the United States than in Mumbai. And if violence were based mainly on living conditions, then Mumbai, the homicide rate there should be through the roof in comparison. But that's not the case. The people in Mumbai don't have a violent culture, so they navigate the slum conditions in a much more peaceful way. It raises profound questions regarding the standard assumptions about crime and suggests that cultural influences may be more important than social deficits in explaining high or low levels of violence. >>
And that's what we've been talking about over many commentaries. The culture is the most important piece because it determines how uh people and how groups handle a situation or how they interact with an environment. Now, I grew up poor according to American standards. We were on welfare. We had food stamps. We lived in homeless shelters. We slept outside on the streets, slept in the car, all types of things like that. But not once did that make me get an idea to turn uh into a violent criminal and start robbing and killing people. I only seen my mom doing honest work and she would repeat multiple times how she wouldn't sell herself out just for money and that was the standard in the house. So the poverty in this instance motivated me and I had a job the first week that I turned working age. Now on the other hand, I know people with both parents who had a decent income who were not on welfare that ended up robbing and killing. So it can't be the poverty alone that's causing the violence. Think about that.
Another criminological convention adopted for this book is the differentiation between organized or mob crime. Even though it sometimes produces significant violence and ordinary or street crime, organized crime and street crime are motivated by different concerns. The former seeks to enhance and perpetuate the illegal organization. The latter is born of impulsive anger and personal disputes. In addition, organized crimes victims are usually rival gangsters and not except inadvertently members of the general public. Consequently, organized crime doesn't generate the same public fear as street crime.
>> Because the organized criminal goes after specific people who are in the underworld right along with them. But the street criminals often target random people at any time and that's what creates the fear in public. The people start imagining themselves as the the the person that could have been the victim since the the the attack was random. It is often said, at least anecdotally, that residents of neighborhoods in which mob leaders reside feel perfectly safe, even in periods of high crime. Organized crime is discussed in this book, especially in chapter 4, which examines the brutal crack cocaine gang warfare, but the main focus is common crimes of violence committed by individuals operating alone or in small ad hoc groups. Acts motivated by pedestrian causes such as sexual gratification or jealousy, avarous personal offenses and the like. >>
And that's what we'll be dealing with more in this book. And we'll follow the trends and we'll follow the history and we'll see how criminal activity at the street level by Negroes in particular plagued the US. Okay, so let's stop right here and we're going to pick up with some more in the next commentary. I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael and I'll see you in the free world.