Twitter brought me this link this morning and it's full of facts that might surprise you.
In the last 20 years in particular, the FBI reports, rates of crime among African American youth have plummeted: All offenses (down 47%), drug offenses (down 50%), property offenses (down 51%), serious Part I offenses (down 53%), assault (down 59%), robbery (down 60%), all violent offenses (down 60%), rape (down 66%), and murder (down 82%).New, 2012 figures from California’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center reveal that the state’s black youth show the lowest level of homicide arrest since statewide racial tabulations were first assembled in 1960. Nearly every type of offense—felony, misdemeanor, and status—is much rarer among black youth today than in past generations.
There's more. The drop in crime hasn't followed get-tough policies. The number of black youths jailed in California, for example, has dropped sharply. The numbers in the article by Mike Males at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice are staggering. I'd be interested in some similar comparisons in Arkansas between 1990 and today.
Males contends that this is big news that runs counter to the narratives from every media and public official. Why doesn't it get attention?
The sad reality is that authorities, academic experts, politicians, and geriatric-media reporters (the average age of news consumers is well over 50) of 2013 simply do not know how to deal with a young black population that is not committing shootings, robberies, drug mayhem, and gangsterisms in mass numbers—let alone one that is dramatically less criminal than the older generations deploring them....
America’s warped crime and social policy establishment badly needs black youth to be killers and thugs, to retreat into the comforts of 1990, nostalgia for a past that never existed, and smug, politically and fiscally profitable prophecies of demographic doom. In America of 2013, just as in 1913, feared scapegoats on which to blame social problems remain a hotter commodity than scientific analysis and effective policy.
I should note that a quick check shows government-compiled arrest rates among black juveniles remain higher, but they are nonetheless dropping. (Some have theorized — if you're looking for another surprising idea — that a contributing cause could be the higher exposure among poor kids to lead-based paint.) Still eye-opening.