Culture — Not Race — Determines Many Crime Stats

If you know Los Angeles neighborhoods, USC is in the "hood" and UCLA is not:
there have been 117 homicides within two miles of the USC campus but only seven near UCLA.

PJ Media » Culture — Not Race — Determines Many Crime Stats

Gentle readers, we are about to sail into dangerous waters, on the rocky shoals of which John Derbyshire recently ran aground and got himself sacked from National Review. So we must do our best to steer carefully through the many hazards lest we come to a similar fate. Yes, I say “we” because while I, in opining as I am about to on race and crime, may risk losing commercial opportunities as a writer, you the reader face risks as well. If you travel in those circles in which discussions of race are limited to extolling the many glories of “diversity,” and if after reading what follows below you are found by your peers to be insufficiently condemnatory of me and what I’ve written, you are in jeopardy of being ostracized to a life of social exile among the wretched and unenlightened.

You’ve been warned, so here we go.

I’ve been with the Los Angeles Police Department for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years. (I keep the details of my tenure and assignment vague so as to foil the efforts of those seeking to unmask me, the number of whom may soon increase.) I’ve spent the better part of my career working in neighborhoods in South and South Central Los Angeles, i.e. those most bedeviled by violent crime. I have also spent time working in some of L.A.’s most affluent neighborhoods, so I feel qualified to comment on the differences I’ve observed over the course of a long career combating crime and villainy in America’s second-largest city.

For the record, I concur with Mark Steyn, who in his discussion of the Taki’s Magazine piece that got John Derbyshire expelled fromNational Review, pointed to culture rather than racial determinism as explaining socioeconomic differences between groups of people. “Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?” Steyn asks. “Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.”

A similar comparison – with similarly stark results – can be made in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times maintains a database of statistical information on cities and neighborhoods across L.A. County. The communities of View Park-Windsor Hills andBaldwin Hills-Crenshaw are adjacent to one another in an area four to five miles northeast of Los Angeles International Airport. The concentration of black residents in View Park-Windsor Hills, at 86.5 percent, is the highest of any area measured in the L.A. Timesdatabase. The Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw neighborhood, just to the north, is home to the county’s fifth-highest concentration of blacks, at 71.3 percent.

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