Name:   copperline - Subject:   Copperline Date:   4/21/2016 12:45:57 PM

My sense is that if you looked at crime rates by neighborhood without respect to race, you would find crime rates go up where poverty and population density are highest, and not due to racial makeup.    Crime rates in Alburqueque are highest in poor Hispanic neighborhoods, not predominently Black ones.   Crime rates in the DC area are in low income areas, not affluent ones whether their racial make-up is white, hispanic, black or asian.  

There really isn't any causal relationship between race and crime, and you can't understand what causes high crime areas unless you look at the influence of poverty.   The focus that we habitually place on race as a cause of crime is habit we inherited from our forbearers, it's a prime example of institutional racism in all of us.

Your points about the criminal justice system are worth talking about in another thread... it's going to be complicated.   However, I'd say that the fact that Alabama's prison system is at 200% occupancy, and that the sheer size of the US prison population is larger than the prison population in any other country in the world is pretty troubling.... and tells us that we need to do things very differently.