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The hubbub over whether the late
Michael Jackson's personal physician will turn himself
into the Los Angeles Police Department on a charge of
involuntary manslaughter is reminiscent of all those
celebrated L.A. homicides of fact (for example, the O.J.
Simpson and
Phil Spector cases) and fiction (
Chinatown
and
The Big Sleep).
Yet the typical Los Angeles County
homicide isn't much at all like the glamorous murder
mysteries seen on screen.
Few killings take
place in the
Hollywood Hills or at the beach. Instead, homicides are
concentrated in the
vast urban plain south of Wilshire Boulevard.
An impressive journalistic endeavor by the
Los Angeles Times
to maintain a database of all 2,600+ homicide victims in
L.A. County since the beginning of 2007—the
Los Angeles Homicide Report—allows the public (me)
to study in detail who exactly is killing and getting
killed.
And
that's worth knowing because:
The good news: homicides in L.A. County
have been
declining. The bad news: the racial disparities in
homicide victimization rates remain very large, partly due
to gang wars.
The Census Bureau reported that in
2006-2008 the population of L.A. County was 47 percent
Hispanic, 29 percent non-Hispanic white, 13 percent Asian,
and 9 percent black.
About two-fifths of the population of L.A.
County lives in L.A. City, while almost six million people
live in
unincorporated areas or independent municipalities,
ranging from Malibu in the West, to Compton and Long Beach
in the south, to Pomona in the east, to exurban Lancaster
and Palmdale in the
High Desert of the north.
Racial differences in crime rates are one
of those facts that everybody is acutely aware of when
looking for a place to live, but that you aren't supposed to
discuss in print. To its great credit, the
Homicide Report violates the
media taboo on
reporting ethnicity of victims and suspects. As its
Frequently Asked Questions
list states:
"… newspapers and other media outlets
stopped mentioning suspects' or victims' race or ethnicity
because of public criticism. Newspapers came to embrace the
idea that such information is
irrelevant to the reporting of crimes and may unfairly
stigmatize racial groups.
"The
Homicide Report departs from this rule in the interest
of presenting the most complete and accurate demographic
picture of who is dying in homicides in Los Angeles County."
Homicides provide the most reliable of crime statistics
because attention
must be paid to a dead body. Although reporting on lesser
crimes has improved due to the
revolution in data-driven police department management
introduced by William Bratton during his terms as chief
of police in Boston, New York City, and L.A., they are still
open to inconsistency and manipulation. (For a recent
discussion, see
New York Times article:
Retired Officials Question Integrity of Crime Reports)[By
William K. Rashbaum,
February 6, 2010].
Unfortunately, we can be more certain about the identities
of the victims than of their killers. The
Homicide Report
includes information on the
ethnicities of suspects, but it's not complete or fully
reliable.
The sizable age differences between populations—the median
white victim in L.A. County was 40, Asian 37, black 26, and
Latino 24—complicates the job of making apples-to-apples
comparisons. Are apparent differences in crime rates merely
the result of boys being boys? Or are there in fact large
ethnic differences in crime proclivity among males of the
same age?
And there are always questions about how to classify
individuals of mixed heritage. For example, perhaps the most
brutal leader of any L.A. street gang in recent years
was
Timothy McGhee, boss of the
Toonerville Mexican gang, now on death row for three of
the dozen or more murders attributed to him.
McGhee,
whose charismatic hold on his underlings was compared to
Charles Manson's, has the eagle and snake from the Mexican
flag tattooed on the back of his head (the most painful
spot). He is
said to have killed one young man just because he felt
there wasn't room in his Atwater Village neighborhood for
two people with the same nickname: "Guero" for
"fair-skinned."
Generally,
government agencies try to maximize the number of Latinos—except
when it comes to crime statistics. The federal
Bureau of Justice Statistics, for instance, doesn't even
report "Hispanic" as a category. (Wonder why?)
One way of getting around these various methodological
problems in thinking about racial differences in crime: look
closely at homicide victimization rates of 15-29 year-old
males. This approach can seem unkind because it assumes
there is some correlation between the odds of getting killed
and the odds of causing trouble. But among young men,
unfortunately, that assumption has some validity.
Over
the last two weeks, I've read the
LA Times'
write-ups on hundreds of young male victims, and tracked
down additional details on many of them elsewhere on the
Internet, such as from their
MySpace pages.
It's depressing work, but it puts human faces on the
statistics.
Many of
the victims were wholly innocent, such as the Long Beach
engineer who chased teenaged thieves stealing his iPod
into an alley, where they shot him down. Some, such as black
high school football star
Jamiel Shaw Jr., were apparently murdered at random due
to their race as part of the low-intensity
ethnic cleansing struggle in
South Central L.A.
On the other hand, more than a few of the 1,257 male
15-29-year-old homicide victims appear to have been
knuckleheads shot down by cops during crimes or by rival
gangs as payback, or who lost their lives in fights they
started.
Most
killings in L.A. County involve acquaintances rather than
strangers. Perhaps due to the spread of pervasive video
surveillance in stores,
robbery killings are now down to a small fraction of the
total number of victims, and a very small sliver of young
male victims.
This means that victimization rates of young men can give us
some clue about crime rates.
Among 15-29 year-old males killed since the beginning of
2007, I count:
-
Hispanics: 794 victims out of 611,789 young men in the
2006-2008 Census
estimates
-
Blacks: 380 victims out of 96,676 young men
-
Non-Hispanic Caucasians: 47 out of 247,173
-
Asians: 28 out of 129,716
-
Pacific Islanders: 8 out of 3,510
-
American Indians: 0 out of 6,088
-
Total L.A. County: 15-29 year old males: 1,257 out of
1,108,268
A few
technical notes: I'm counting 22
Spanish-surnamed victims as Hispanic even though the
county coroner listed them as white, plus four others where
there is evidence that they identified ethnically as Latino.
Not
surprisingly to anybody who follows the local police
blotter, 14 of the 47 Caucasian victims were of West Asian
descent, and nine of those 14 Armenians. Only 1.7 percent of
the population of Los Angeles County is
Armenian, but some of them are a bit
lively, rather like
Sicilians
in a
Scorsese movie: enterprising and affluent, but with an
Old World
code of honor. Suspects in killings of Armenians are
often described as vanishing into the night in
BMWs or
Lexuses. Judging by the Old Country first names of the
Armenian victims, most were immigrants or the children of
immigrants rather than from the
pre-1924 wave of Armenian immigrants.
Using
the Census Bureau's
estimates of the numbers of 15-29-year-old males in L.A.
County in 2006-2008, we can calculate—relative to
non-Hispanic whites—the homicide victimization rates among
young men:
-
Whites: 1.0 times the white rate (by Census definition)
-
Asians: 1.1x the white rate
-
Latinos: 6.8x
-
Pacific Islanders: 12.0x
-
African-American: 20.7x
-
Total L.A. County: 6.0x
These are also large racial gaps in homicide victimization.
The
disparities in homicide offence rates in L.A. County might
well be even
worse. Of the 33 European whites who died, 5 are
reported to have been killed by cops, 9 by Latinos, 5.5 by
other whites, 2.5 by blacks, and 2 by Asians. (Fractions
represent multiple suspects of different races). Still, in
nine of the 33 cases there is no identified suspect, so it's
difficult to generalize confidently from the
Homicide Report
about offending rates.
Nationally, the ethnic gaps in crime probably aren't as huge
as they are in L.A. County. The
Color of Crime 2005 [
PDF]
report from
American Renaissance
looked at national incarceration figures and
came
up with (for all ages):
"In
total, blacks had the highest incarceration rate at 7.2
times the [nonHispanic] white rate, followed by Hispanics,
at 2.9 times the white rate. [American] Indians and Pacific
Islanders were imprisoned at about twice the white rate, and
Asians at only 22 percent of the white rate."
Why are the racial disparities so bad in Southern
California?
-
First, L.A. County has particularly law-abiding young
white men.
The
high cost of living, the
poor
public schools, and the low wages have driven out much
of the
white working class. The per capita income of white
households in L.A. County is more than twice that of
Hispanic households.
-
Second, L.A. County has a notorious
street gang culture that is endemic among the lower
ranks of all ethnic groups in Los Angeles, except
European-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and
American
Indians.
For
example, one industrious researcher claims there are 137
Asian street
gangs in L.A. County. The
Homicide Report
map shows the largest concentration of gang-related Asian
deaths (typically Southeast Asians) on the East Side of
Long Beach, just north of where the highest density of
Samoans and other
Pacific Islanders were killed.
The
density of diversity in L.A. County provides a critical mass
that allows the bad apples to find each other. In most of
the U.S., for instance,
Armenians are well-behaved. In Southern California,
however, there are 170,000
Armenians, enough to furnish an Armenian street gang,
Armenian Power, as well as
transnational mafias with roots in the old Soviet Union.
In
contrast, a review of the
Homicide Report
suggests that there are virtually no white youth gangs
seriously active in Los Angeles County, even though the
county extends well up into
biker
and
meth lab territory in the High Desert.
I could
only find reports of one white
victim of a gang slaying who had white prison gang
tattoos. And even he was strenuously defended in the
Homicide Report's
comments against posthumous imputations of racism by a
black friend, who pointed out in his defense that he had
half-Latino and half-black children. Indeed, victims listed
as white in the Homicide Report appear to be more likely to
be involved with
Latino gangs than with white gangs.
Will L.A.'s street gang culture take root in more recently
diversifying regions of the country as American-born sons of
immigrants grow up on the mean streets?
That's hard to say. It's possible that street gangs will
become passé as young males spend less time out on the
streets
engaging in Grand Theft Auto and more time indoors
playing Grand Theft
Auto.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to bet the country on
that without being allowed to talk it over in public first.
Moreover, in assessing the recent drop in homicides in LA
County, it should be noted that parents took huge financial
risks to get their sons farther away from the killing fields
of South Central—risks that we're all paying off.
The rational urge to move contributed to a centrifugal
movement outward into the Southern California exurbs (which
then spilled over into Nevada and Arizona) that was central
to the Housing Bubble of the last decade. By
2006, a large majority of
mortgage dollars in the Southern California exurbs were
going to
minorities.
White
flight was
not just for whites anymore.
Murder,
however, is for
whites, and for anyone else who gets in the way of
minorities that are clearly systematically prone to
criminality.
One of the many advantages of an immigration moratorium is
that fewer Americans will have to face the risk that has
become a fact of life in my hometown.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA'S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA'S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE"
, is
available
here.]
.
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