The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report today on racial disparities in crime victimization. The report’s publication is the culmination of a multi-year struggle between conservative commissioners on the one hand and progressive commissioners and many of the commission’s career staffers on the other.
From the moment in 2022 that I proposed that the commission examine crime in America, the progressive commissioners vehemently opposed even examining the extent to which black Americans, in particular, are disproportionately victimized by crime. My conservative colleague, Christian Adams, then took up the effort to address the matter, and, as detailed in his dissenting statement, every possible objection and parliamentary maneuver was marshaled to prevent the commission from adopting the topic for examination. Progressives adamantly refuse to credibly address the topic.
The commission released the report today without the fanfare that normally accompanies a commission study, clearly hoping that it would disappear without a trace. The common thread throughout the report is an obvious desperation to avoid any connection between the Black Lives Matter protests and accompanying riots and increasing crime rates. There’s a similar desperation to remove responsibility for crime from the criminals (particularly black criminals) — instead placing responsibility for crime on society at large.
My conservative colleagues and I had a simple motivation for proposing this study: Black Americans are victims of crime, particularly violent crime (and especially homicide), at rates far disproportionate to their share of the population. Yet Democrats — and progressives generally — refuse to honestly address the phenomenon, to the grave detriment of Democrats’ most loyal voters.
The results are devastating. As the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual testified at the commission hearing:
- The 2020 spike in homicides resulted in an additional eight deaths per 100,000 black residents in the U.S., while the white homicide rate resulted in an additional 0.5 deaths per 100,000 residents;
- The share of the nation’s homicide victims constituted by whites declined by 2.4 percentage points in 2020, while the share constituted by blacks and Latinos increased by 2.2 percentage points;
- This pushed the black homicide victimization rate in the U.S. up to 25.3 per 100,000 in 2020 from 19.5 per 100,000 in 2019, making the black homicide victimization rate nearly ten times higher than that of whites.
- Between 2017 and 2021, the rate at which black victims were robbed was 75 percent higher than it was for whites, and blacks’ violent crime victimization rate was 25 percent higher than the white rate.
A 2022 study published in Preventive Medicine Reports found that black men were persistently overrepresented among victims of violent offenses. Among the findings are the following: black men have an average level of victimization more than two times greater than their white and Hispanic counterparts and more than five times higher than white women; although the majority of white men experience no victimization, only 28 percent of black men fall into this category; and about 22 percent of black men are exposed intermittently to serious violent victimization, 60 percent higher than for white men.
As former prosecutor Tom Hogan testified regarding the 2020 violent crime increase, “A young man living in the most dangerous zip codes in Chicago or Philadelphia is at greater risk of being violently killed than a soldier in combat on the battlefield.”
The progressive response to crime has been to make it easier for criminals to get out of jail, reduce and demoralize the police, and refuse to prosecute criminals. The consequences are borne by all Americans, but especially black Americans. Trump recognizes this. Kamala Harris lies about it.