Black Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but 33 percent of the victims of reported violent crime. The statistics on homicide are even worse. Over 50 percent of homicide victims are Black, and a Black person is seven times more likely to be murdered than a white person in America. Most of those murders are never punished.
In a society where public and political discourse often centers on racial inequity, why isn’t the problem of disparate Black victimization center stage? Everyone wants to talk about systemic racism, but nobody wants to highlight the systemic lack of policing and punishment that leaves Black Americans murdered and robbed at higher rates and with greater impunity than other Americans. If we care about justice, equality or equity, we need to talk about disproportionate Black victimization.
We must first recognize that disparate Black victimization is not caused by racist criminals. Most crime (around 66 percent) is intra-racial, and hate crimes, while always troubling, are a tiny percentage of crimes (far less than 1 percent). Also important is the fact that police, prosecutors and judges are not driving a cycle of Black victimization by over-policing and over-punishing Black offenders. This popular myth has led progressive activists to push de-policing and de-prosecution with disastrously counterproductive results.
Consider the original progressive policing reform: limiting police pedestrian stops to prevent supposedly racially biased police decisions. When these limitations on police were introduced in Chicago in 2015, murders surged 58 percent the next year. Most of the victims were Black.
The same thing happened with progressive de-prosecution efforts. One study found progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s non-prosecution policies caused 75 extra murders each year in Philadelphia. Most of the victims were Black.
Or consider the effects of Black Lives Matter de-policing in 2020 when 20 major cities slashed their police budgets and police-free zones sprang up in cities such as Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis. Murders surged 30 percent nationwide. Most of the extra 5,000 murder victims were Black.
These counterproductive policies were based upon the misguided notion that Black communities would benefit by going easier on Black criminals.
This leads to a final key point: so-called “Black-on-Black” crime is not an excuse for government inaction.
Some on the political right have been tempted to dismiss disproportionate Black victimization as a “Black-on-Black” crime problem that reveals a cultural problem in Black communities. They might argue that a subculture in Black communities glorifies criminality, which then can lead to more Black victimization. This “rap music theory” of Black victimization is an attractive way to take responsibility off the government, but it makes the same mistake that underlies the counterproductive progressive reforms: treating Black criminals and Black victims as one group. Whatever motivates the small minority of Blacks toward criminality, it hardly excuses the government from failing to protect the vast majority of innocent Black community members.
If a small group of white criminals was smashing and killing its way through Chicago’s North Side, no one would throw up their hands at the “white-on-white” crime problem or claim punishing the criminals would hurt the white community. The government would forcefully intervene, even if it meant spending more on police and prison to control crime and protect the innocent community members.
But when a small group of mostly Black criminals does the same thing to Chicago’s South Side every day, the government seems paralyzed. If all the criminals from Chicago’s South Side spent even a single day terrorizing the North Side, it would be a political crisis. In the South Side, it’s just another Tuesday.
The same is true in cities across America. Innocent Black community members are abandoned to routine victimization by Black offenders because intervening to end the crime wave would be seen as “oppressive” or “racist.”
Why? Because, with their insistence that Blacks must be seen as a group, separate and apart from the rest of society, the progressive left makes their Blackness more important than their honesty or criminality. They unwittingly embrace the oldest racist lie in the book: that Black criminals are the Black community.
During Jim Crow, police were often directed by a racist government to make sure crime stayed within Black neighborhoods because it was considered only natural that Blacks would victimize each other, and the government cared little about Black lives. This vile equation of Blackness with criminality has somehow found its way from the Klan to the classroom and is now taught in universities and pushed by progressive activists who view punishing Black criminals as attacking the Black community. Today’s progressives ignore Black victims in favor of supporting the old Jim Crow policy of leaving crime unpunished in Black neighborhoods.
That Black Lives Matter activists support such racist policies would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.
So, what is the solution to disproportionate Black victimization? Simple: abandon the racist notion that Black criminals are the Black community and devote whatever government resources are required to give innocent Black community members the same protections received by the innocent White community only blocks away. If this means higher taxes and more criminals in prison, so be it. The government has a fundamental duty to provide security for all its citizens and to punish those who victimize them.
It is time for the local, state and federal governments to live up to that duty to Black Americans.
Paul Robinson is the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law and Jeffrey Seaman is a Levy Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. They are the authors, most recently, of the just published “Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away with Murder and Rape.”
