Violent crime is down in New York and many ther cities, but there are two big reasons to keep the champagne corked. One is that murder, rape, robbery, and assault remain at historic highs: the streets of Manhattan, like those of Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, remain much less safe today than in the 1950s and 1960s. Worse, though policing and prison policies matter, nothing affects crime rates more than the number of young males in the population--and by the year 2010, there will be about 4.5 million more males age 17 or under than there were in 1990: 8 percent more whites and 26 percent more blacks. Since around 6 percent of young males turn out to be career criminals, according to the historical data, this increase will put an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades. Numerous studies show that each succeeding generation of young male criminals commits about three times as much serious crime as the one before it: the occasional fatal knife fight of 1950s street gangs has given way to the frequent drive-by shootings of 1990s gangs.  These predictions of worsening crime did not come true. TG

The second reason to keep the champagne corked is that not only is the number of young black criminals likely to surge, but also the black crime rate, both black-on-black and black-on-white, is increasing, so that as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males. Also did not come true.  But just when we need to think most earnestly about black crime, the space for honest discourse about race and crime is shrinking. The evidence of that shrinkage is everywhere: in the lickety-split O.J. verdict and its racially polarized aftermath, in the utter certitude of many blacks that the justice system is rigged against them, in the belief of many whites that violent crime is synonymous with black crime and the fear they feel of every young black male passerby not wearing a tie or handcuffs.

What has made our views on race and crime so polarized--and often so out of touch with reality? What are the facts about race and crime? And what are Americans, blacks and whites together, to do about it?

Many blacks, and some whites, believe that the justice system is biased against blacks, at worst purposefully racist or even "genocidal." Take a recent New Yorker article, in which Henry Louis Gates Jr., leader of Harvard University's black studies program, chronicled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," namely, the acquitted O.J. Simpson. Gates writes: "Perhaps you didn't know that Liz Claiborne appeared on Oprah and said she didn't design her clothes for black women--that their hips were too wide. Perhaps you didn't know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient to sterilize black men. . . . Perhaps you didn't know these things but a good many black Americans think they do. . . . Never mind that Liz Claiborne has never appeared on Oprah, [or] that the beleaguered Brooklyn [soft drink] company has gone as far as to make an FDA assay of its ingredients. . . . If you wonder why blacks seem particularly susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories, you might take a look at a history in which the official story was a poor guide to anything that mattered much, and in which rumor sometimes verged on the truth. Heard the one about the L.A. cop who hated interracial couples, fantasized about making a bonfire of black bodies, and boasted of planting evidence?"

Gates, like the renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson, one of the prominent black Americans whose views of the O.J. verdict he cites, was convinced that O.J. was guilty. But he recounts a story Wilson told him about once being stopped near a small New England town by a policeman who wanted to know what he was doing in those parts: "There's a moving violation that many African-Americans know as DWB: Driving While Black," notes Gates. As "older blacks like to repeat," when "white folks say 'justice,' they mean 'just us.'" In other words, blacks really do experience enough casual, reflexive racism from law enforcement officers to make them understandably fearful that racism permeates the criminal justice system.

A point well taken. But then Gates's article goes astray: it never makes plain that, in spite of these reasonable anxieties and resentments, some ways of "looking at a black man"--at any man--are right and reasonable while others are wrong and malicious. Some of the people who burst into jubilation over the O.J. verdict were celebrating the release of a man whom they believed to be innocent. With due regard for the fact that two families have lost loved ones, that's okay. But other blacks partied to a he-killed-the-blonde-and-got-away-with-it tune. For example, a sign held by a woman whose picture appeared in the New York Times Magazine read: "Guilty or Not We Love You O.J." Gates quotes film director Spike Lee as follows: "A lot of black folks said, 'Man, O.J. is bad, you know. This is the first brother in the history of the world who got away with murder of white folks, and a blonde, blue-eyed woman at that.'" Lee, Gates reports, "wasn't happy" at the verdict. But some black folks were thrilled--and for morally indefensible reasons that Gates needs to condemn, not artfully explain.

Nevertheless, the ambivalence and mistrust that many blacks feel toward the justice system is a social reality that whites can't ignore. The Weekly Standard's deputy editor, John Podhoretz, wrote in the magazine about the O.J. verdict and race relations under the double-meaning heading "Yes, We Do Understand": "How can most black Americans believe (or say they believe) that O.J. Simpson is innocent of a crime science tells us there is a one-in-a-billion chance he did not commit? . . . We--that is, we upper-middle-class whites--must, by a process of study and observation, come to understand. And it will be 'white' institutions, from the Ford Foundation to the New York Times to America's corporations, that will insist on fostering this understanding. . . . For the American liberal establishment, this has become the stock response after a public outrage that divides Americans by color. . . . Is black America so lost in its own resentment . . . that they feel closer kinship to a killer because of his skin color than to the killer's victims? I can understand how this has happened, but it makes me sick."

Like Gates, Podhoretz never arrives at the right moral point. The point is that to understand is neither to forgive any criminal his crime nor to sit still when "racism" is used as an all-purpose excuse for morally abhorrent or socially pathological behavior. Like Podhoretz, I have little patience with liberal elites of whatever color who are nothing better than well-funded nihilists. I could not care less about understanding what they have to say, and I would not be the least bit concerned--if they were the only ones saying it.

But they aren't. All of us, "upper-middle-class whites" included, are morally required to understand and ponder what so many black folks have to say--not only the knee-jerk liberal pundits and politicians, but also world-class professors (like Wilson), plumbers, postal workers, paramedics, prosecutors, preachers, and (in my case) former students. Many of them are saying that they feel the justice system is as much a foe as a friend. As I will summarize below, I find almost nothing in the empirical research literature on racial disparities in sentencing to justify their fears and frustrations. But that does not mean their fears and frustrations are without any sort of empirical basis, including the kind that, for most of us, counts more than any other--our own lived experiences and those of our family and friends.

As Gates recalls, Norman Podhoretz, the father of John Podhoretz and until recently the editor of Commentary, wrote a famous soul-searching 1963 essay, "My Negro Problem, and Ours." Gates describes the essay as "one of the frankest accounts we have of liberalism and race resentment," a plainspoken tale of "a Brooklyn boyhood spent under the shadow of carefree, cruel Negro assailants, and of the author's residual unease when he passes groups of blacks in his Upper West Side neighborhood." In one key passage, the elder Podhoretz noted: "I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them."

But I knew. Growing up in rough-edged, white-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s, I knew--as all the kids I grew up with knew--that when push literally came to shove, the police would be "working for me and not for them." Each morning on my way to high school, I stood by myself at a bus stop, surrounded mainly by black teenagers from adjacent neighborhoods. I was by myself, but I was not alone. I knew that the cop in the cruiser was looking out for me in case "they" started trouble that I could not handle.

My old neighborhood had its biracial, but strictly segregated, parks and playgrounds. When interracial fights did break out, everyone ran when the cops came. But we white boys knew that if we got caught and showed due deference to the officers (never mouth off to a panting cop), we'd get lectured, get our hair pulled, or (at most) get our fathers called. We also knew the black boys would get that and worse--slapped, clubbed, and maybe arrested.

Once when I was unloading 100-pound flour bags at a downtown pizzeria where I worked, the cops came zooming up the sidewalk, got out of their cruiser, and pushed my pal and co-worker, Willie Brown, against the wall. They did not touch me. Willie, an illiterate black man then in his forties, had done nothing. I protested, and the cops sped off as quickly as they had come: "Sorry, kid, we got a call that somebody was stealing." But the only "somebody" they grabbed was the black man, and the only apology they issued was to the white boy.

I recall the second time my father, a retired deputy sheriff, ran a citywide race for sheriff and appointed me his manager (mainly to teach me something about politics before I "bought whatever they think they know about it at Harvard"). He ran on a real rainbow-coalition ticket with former deputy mayor Charles Bowser, Philly's first major black mayoral candidate. We lost the election (no surprise) as well as good relations with some neighbors (sad surprise), one of whom loudly scolded me that "we'll never be safe from crime if they're in charge of it."

Even though I am now a card-carrying elite professor and "upper-middle-class white," I have stayed close to home. I hang out with the same white working-class relatives and friends I've known all my life. I live a few minutes by car from some of Philadelphia's worst black neighborhoods. So I have a very different perspective from that of most white intellectuals, both on the white ethnics who turn into the cops blacks fear and on the everyday reality of life in black communities. And as little as the white policy elites, liberal or conservative, know about "the black experience," believe me, they know less about what race means in the lives of those Italian-American bricklayers, Irish-American gas pumpers, and Polish-American salesclerks whom the U.S. Census bureaucrats have baptized "non-Hispanic whites." We need to understand these folks, too--and especially how their experience of black-white relations leaves a tangle of powerful contradictions and ambivalences, as I know vividly from my own experience.

I indelibly remember taking a jump shot on the playground when I was ten. As the ball left my hand, instead of invoking, for luck, the name of a white star (as was customary), I unthinkingly shouted the name of a black star. "Nigger lover!" snapped a scandalized playmate. But the following week, the same kid punched out a white schoolyard bully for bothering a black girl who wandered by. I'll never forget how much, when my frail grandmother got kicked, punched, and robbed in broad daylight for the third time (on her way to church, no less), the fact that her assailants were (once again) black boys got under my white skin. The memory of the anger is still there--along with the image of her in her hospital bed, imploring her strapping grandsons, some of us cops, to "love all God's people."

So it's no mystery to me that blacks tense when they see a white cop coming: they know the Willie Brown experience well enough, and how could they possibly know the sense of justice regardless of race, even the Christian caritas transcending race, that can lie beneath the blue uniform and the white skin? Just that white ambivalence is as familiar territory to me as it was to Norman Podhoretz. I grew up with it; I know that casual racism is there; I know the anger and shame you feel at seeing it all around you--and I know the competing anger, no less familiar: the anger at the knowledge that when real violence erupts, all too often the assailants are (once again) black.

Honest blacks know this, too. In a recent issue of The New Republic, Boston University economist Glenn Loury writes of inner-city black communities: "'What manner of people are you who live like this?' The question is unavoidable. . . . It does no good to say that these are a minority of black persons; that there are good and sufficient reasons for their troubling behaviors; that others, who are not black, have also fallen short." Of middle-class blacks, he admits: "We are afraid to go into these communities. We do not recognize these kids as us; the distance is great and difficult to bridge."

My black crime problem, and ours, is that for most Americans, especially for average white Americans, the distance is not merely great but almost unfathomable, the fear is enormous and largely justifiable, and the black kids who inspire the fear seem not merely unrecognizable but alien. Not that we can't understand where they come from, when we stop to consider. After all, the child is father to the man: and think how many inner-city black children are without parents, relatives, neighbors, teachers, coaches, or clergymen to teach them right from wrong, give them loving and consistent discipline, show them the moral and material value of hard work and study, and bring them to cherish the self-respect that comes only from respecting the life, liberty, and property of others. Think how many black children grow up where parents neglect and abuse them, where other adults and teenagers harass and harm them, where drug dealers exploit them. Not surprisingly, in return for the favor, some of these children kill, rape, maim, and steal without remorse. And around goes the negative feedback loop: reasonable fear feeds unreasonable white race hostility, whose reality in turn feeds unreasonable black paranoia about the justice system.

Is there anything social science research can do to help dispel all the ambivalence and confusion crowding around the subject of race and crime? At least it can tell the truth, as the data disclose it, about the reality of black crime and black punishment. The bottom line of most of the best research is that America's justice system is not racist, not anymore, not as it undoubtedly was only a generation ago--in spite of the Driving While Black experience. If blacks are overrepresented in the ranks of the imprisoned, it is because blacks are overrepresented in the criminal ranks--and the violent criminal ranks, at that. Yes, there are ways in which the justice system is failing all Americans, including black Americans. But to the extent that the justice system hurts, rather than helps, blacks more than it does whites, it is not by incarcerating a "disproportionate" number of young black men. Rather, it is by ignoring poor black victims and letting convicted violent and repeat black criminals, both adult and juvenile, continue to victimize and demoralize the black communities that suffer most of their depredations.

Consider the data. A 1993 study of the racial impact of federal sentencing guidelines found that the imposition between 1986 and 1990 of stiffer penalties for drug offenders, especially cocaine traffickers, did not result in racially disparate sentences. The amount of the drug sold, the seriousness of the offender's prior criminal history, whether weapons were involved, and other such valid characteristics of criminals and their crimes accounted for all the observed interracial variations in prison sentences.

Similarly, a 1991 RAND Corporation study of adult robbery and burglary defendants in 14 large U.S. cities found that a defendant's race or ethnic group bore almost no relation to conviction rates, sentencing severity, or other key measures. In 1995, federal government statistician Patrick A. Langan analyzed data on 42,500 defendants in the nation's 75 largest counties and found "no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites."

A 1985 study by Langan of black-white differentials in imprisonment rates demonstrated that "even if racism exists, it might explain only a small part of the gap between the 11 percent black representation in the United States adult population and the now nearly 50 percent black representation among persons entering state prisons each year in the United States." An otherwise typically liberal-leaning 1993 National Academy of Sciences study voiced the same basic conclusion.

It is often asserted that the 1980s war on drugs resulted in a more racially "disproportionate" prison population. The data tell a different story. In 1980, 46.6 percent of state prisoners and 34.4 percent of federal prisoners were black; by 1990, 48.9 percent of state prisoners and 31.4 percent of federal prisoners were black. In 1988, the median time served in confinement by black violent offenders was 25 months, versus 24 months for their white counterparts. The mean sentence lengths were 116 months for blacks and 110 for whites, while the mean times actually served in confinement were 37 months for blacks, 33 months for whites. These small differences are explained by the fact that black violent crimes are generally more serious than white ones (aggravated rather than simple assaults, weapon-related crimes rather than weaponless ones).

Indeed, the evidence on the race-neutrality of incarceration decisions is now so compelling that even topflight criminologists who rail against the anti-drug regime, mandatory sentencing laws, three-strikes laws, and other policies with which they disagree are nonetheless careful to contend that racial biases are "built into the law," are "America's dirty little secret," or constitute "malign neglect." In other words, they do everything but challenge the proposition that blacks and whites who do the same crimes and have similar criminal records are now handled by the system in the same ways.

In this vein, liberal experts contend that the penalties for crack cocaine possession and sale are excessive compared with powder cocaine penalties. I concur. And liberals are also right that blacks are far more likely than whites to use and sell crack instead of powder cocaine. But they go badly wrong on two key counts. First, they feed the conspiratorial myth that federal anti-crack penalties were born of a white conspiracy led by right-wing Republicans. Go check the Congressional Record: in 1986, when the federal crack law was debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) supported it, and some CBC members pressed for even harsher penalties. A few years earlier it was CBC members and other Democrats in Congress who pushed President Reagan, against his considered judgment, to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy (better known as the drug czar's office). And it was President Clinton who recently refused in no uncertain terms to change the federal penalty structure for drug crimes.

Second, liberal experts and advocates of drug legalization cloud the facts about who really goes to prison for drug crimes. As I and several other researchers have concluded, society gets little return on its investment in locking up low-level offenders who possess or even traffic in small amounts of drugs and commit no other crimes. But most drug offenders, both those behind bars and those who have served their time, do not fit that description.

As a recent study funded by the National Institute of Justice and other federal agencies acknowledged, in "an important sense the label 'drug offender' is a misnomer." Few "drug offenders" are in prison for mere possession. In 1991, for example, only 2 percent of the 36,648 persons admitted to federal prisons were in for drug possession. Moreover, as for imprisoned drug traffickers, most have long and diversified criminal records--only their latest and most serious conviction offense is a drug-trafficking offense. Even in the much-maligned federal system, few convicted drug traffickers, whether they handle crack, powder cocaine, or pot, are black college kids or white white-collar types arrested on the interstate by a state trooper who found a small stash under the driver's seat. The average quantity of drugs involved in federal cocaine trafficking cases is 183 pounds, while the average for marijuana traffickers is 3.5 tons.

------  material left out here that can be found on the original file ----

What should be done with cold-blooded killers of whatever race? Like most other Americans, the majority of black Americans favor the death penalty. Yet around that punishment swirls the most acrimonious of all racial disparity controversies. Here too, though, the data disclose no trace of racism.

Reviewing the evidence in 1994, Professors Stanley Rothman and Stephen Powers concluded that after controlling for all relevant variables, one finds simply no evidence of racial disparities in post-1972 capital sentencing. The crucial variable is the severity of the crime. Though the vast majority of murders are committed by someone of the same race as the victim, black-on-white murders are more likely than black-on-black murders to be cases of strangers killing strangers and to "involve kidnapping and rape, mutilations, execution-style murders, tortures, and beatings," according to Rothman and Powers. "These are all aggravating circumstances that increase the likelihood of a death sentence."

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Recently a page-one story in the Wall Street Journal tackled the question of "jury nullification" in cases involving black defendants. It is increasingly common for black jurors to "side with African-American defendants against a mostly white-dominated justice system," even to the point of acquitting black defendants whom the jurors know to be guilty on the legal merits--and even when the victims are black. More black jurors "are choosing to disregard the evidence, however powerful, because they seek to protest racial injustice and to refrain from adding to the already large number of blacks behind bars." The story noted that in the Bronx, where juries are more than 80 percent black and Hispanic, black defendants are acquitted in felony cases 47.6 percent of the time--three times the national acquittal rate of 17 percent for all races. In Washington, D.C., where virtually all defendants and 70 percent of jurors are black, 28.7 percent of all felony trials end in acquittals. Similar patterns hold in Detroit and several other cities where black jurors predominate. Paul Butler, a black criminal-law professor at George Washington University, was quoted as arguing that in cases involving black defendants charged with nonviolent crimes, black jurors should "presume in favor of nullification."

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In 1993 the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA), an advocacy group that opposes mandatory sentencing and favors making a greater use of probation, parole, and rehabilitation programs, publicized its finding that "43 percent of all young black men in Washington, D.C.--and 56 percent in Baltimore--are firmly in the grip of the justice system." The press broadcast the numbers far and wide. As was later revealed in an analysis by the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, the statistics were a bit inflated, but even after appropriate correction, the NCIA study would still have found about 35 percent of Washington's young black men in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole. Indeed, in a highly publicized 1995 report, the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based counterpart of NCIA, found that nationwide about one in three black males age 20 to 29 was under some form of correctional supervision. As the Sentencing Project reported, in 1989 about 610,000 black males in their twenties--23 percent of the cohort--were in custody. But by 1995 that number had risen to over 827,000--32.2 percent of the nation's twenty-something black males. One could quibble with the estimates, but the finding is valid; in fact, my own estimates would indicate that the number is already closer to 50 percent in some places, and that nationally it will be nearer to a half than a third by the year 2000.

As the Sentencing Project boasts, "the report has had a major impact in the media and among policymakers." Oddly, however, its "major impact" has been to divert attention from the big truth that one in three young black males is under correctional supervision because young black male rates of serious crime are so high. Instead it has focused attention on the half-truths and outright distortions long purveyed by the Sentencing Project, other anti-incarceration advocacy groups, and their funders and allies in the drug legalization movement, the liberal foundations, the politically correct universities, and the elite media. The mantra goes like this: how shameful to America that one in three young black males is in custody . . . most of those in custody are in for petty drug crimes . . . revolving-door justice is a right-wing myth . . . the justice system is racist . . . America has been on an imprisonment binge . . . prisons don't cut crime in the least . . . imprisonment is not only an ineffective response to crime but a racist one.

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What if, for argument's sake, one swallows the notion that the system now "over-punishes" black drug dealers, and that most of these "drug dealers" are not, in fact, plea bargain-gorged persons with long adult and juvenile records of criminal mischief against persons and property? What then? Which drug-crime 911 calls from black neighborhoods are the police to ignore? Which black drug dealers should be released back to their communities tomorrow morning?

You can't have it both ways--protesting that police are less responsive to black crime victims than to white ones in one breath, charging that "too many" black victimizers get caught, convicted, and sentenced, in the next; spinning out conspiratorial theories of white acquiescence in letting drugs flow into black communities in the morning, complaining that efforts to crack down on the drug trade are motivated by racism in the afternoon.

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