Race, Crime, and Loathing in Minnesota

Paul Kersey recently called to my attention some statistics on race and crime from the Minneapolis Police Department that cover the period 2009 to 2014. Every table explains that “Victim race is determined by reporting officer, suspect race in determined by the crime victim, arrestee race is determined by arresting officer.”

First, here is the racial breakdown of the Minneapolis population from the 2010 census:

White: 63.8 percent
Black: 18.6 percent
American Indian: 2.0 percent
Asian: 5.6 percent
Two or more races: 4.4 percent
Hispanic (of any race): 10.5 percent

As usual with government statistics, Hispanics are said to be of “any race,” which is why the total comes to 110 percent. Please note that in the pie charts below, there is no category for Hispanics. Most are probably classified as “white,” but lumping whites and Hispanics together makes it impossible to draw conclusions about crime rates for either group. This stupid practice has gone on for decades.

Here are the numbers for homicide with a firearm:

Here are the numbers for homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault combined:

Here are the numbers for non-fatal shootings:

Here are the numbers for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson put together.

As these pie charts show, violent crime in Minneapolis is overwhelmingly black — even though blacks are not even 20 percent of the population. A simple calculation of proportions shows that blacks are 16 times more likely than non-blacks to kill someone with a gun. (It is not possible to make a direct comparison with whites because we can’t tell whites from Hispanics.) They are 9.7 times more likely than non-blacks to commit an aggregate of the most violent crimes: homicide, robbery, rape, and aggravated assault.

The usual apologists pretend that these huge disproportions mean only that the Minneapolis police are biased against blacks, but a comparison of the percentage of suspects who are black to the percentage of arrests of blacks should dispel that silly notion. If the figures are similar, it means the police are doing their job; they are arresting the people who commit the crimes.

Most murder victims don’t survive long enough to tell you the race of the killer and some never got a good look at him in the first place. However, someone who is raped, robbed, or assaulted is very likely to be able to tell you what the attacker’s race was. And since he wants the swine caught, he is not likely to lie about it. Furthermore, blacks are far more likely than people of other races to be victims of crime. Since the victim reports race of perp, blacks are often the largest group making the report. Are they lying when they say the assailant was black?

Therefore, consider the numbers we just looked at for homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Of that combined number, homicide is likely to be a tiny fraction, so we can be confident that most victims got a good look at the perp — and 74 percent of them said he was black. However, only 69 percent of the people arrested for these crimes were black.

Furthermore, although only 7 percent of the perps were identified as whites, 15 percent of the arrests are of whites. That’s twice as many. Does this mean the police are prejudiced against whites? No. Whites are less likely than blacks to commit violence against total strangers; since the victim is more likely to know attacker there is more likely to be an arrest.

It is also worth noting that American Indians commit a disproportionate amount of crime. If we return to the pie charts for major violent crimes — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — Indians are 4.3 times more likely than non-Indians to be arrested for these crimes.

And yet Minnesota as a whole, and Minneapolis in particular, standout for their unique devotion to “social justice” nonsense.

Last year, for example, after a non-white police officer (Jeronimo Yanez) shot and killed a black suspect (Philando Castile), just about every state politician groveled:

• Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges: “My heart is heavy at the tragic death of Philando Castile, known to so many as a kind, caring man whom children loved.”
• Senator Al Franken: “I am horrified that we are forced to confront yet another death of a young African-American man at the hands of law enforcement.”
• Congressman Keith Ellison, whose district includes a big chunk of Minneapolis: ““We live in a world where certain Americans live in fear that their name will become a hashtag. It is not enough to say ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It’s time to make the system mean it.”
• Governor Mark Dayton : “Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white? I don’t think it would have.” After a jury found Officer Yanez innocent, the governor proposed spending $12 million on “police training” in a program named for Castile.

Two years ago, the same governor said: “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago . . . . If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state . . . . Our economy cannot expand based on white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens.” (He was right about one thing; Minnesota doesn’t look like it used to, as I documented here.)

Governor Dayton’s comments were in response to growing tension between Somalis and whites over Somali sympathy and material aid for ISIS, Somali violent crime such as the mass stabbing in a mall last year, and Somali welfare use. Shops now even put up signs saying they accept welfare — not just in Spanish but in Somali, too:

In Minneapolis there is now an official “Somali-American Day” to honor these people.

Public schools in Minnesota have been under orders to suspend and discipline black students less, to make discipline rates the same for all races. The results have been horrific. Minnesota politicians are such grovelers it’s not impossible to imagine them trying the same thing with arrests.

I wish my state had been settled by Hungarians rather than by Scandinavians . . . .