For decades, criminologists have pushed the debunked theory that poverty causes crime. The contents of a recent Brookings Institution report suggest that old habits die hard.
The report’s authors sought to answer a question: Why did homicides increase in 2020 and 2021 and fall in 2023 and 2024? The pandemic-era murder spike, they argued, “was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas.” While parts of this claim were coherent—unemployment and school closures left young males idle and free to act violently—why would the homicide increases have been tied to low-income areas? The authors argue that it was because people who grow up in poor neighborhoods “have fewer opportunities, weaker professional networks, and earn less income than those in other areas.”
Being poor, however, doesn’t make one a murderer. Indeed, the Brookings report fails to address the fact that some impoverished groups—recent Asian immigrants to New York City and millions of Latino migrants, for example—have far lower violent-crime rates than other low-income groups. In 2020, the national black poverty rate was just 1.18 times that of Hispanics, yet blacks’ homicide-victimization rate was 32 per 100,000 people, a number 4.8 times the rate for Hispanics (6.6 per 100,000). A Columbia University report on New York City painted a similar picture. Twenty-three percent of the city’s Asian population lived below the poverty line in 2020, compared with 19 percent of black New Yorkers. But while the Asian arrest rates per 100,000 for murder and robbery in New York City were 1.2 and 20.8, respectively, the murder and robbery arrest rates among black New Yorkers (10.5 and 223.7 per 100,000) were more than ten times higher.
Differences in criminal offending among social groups with similar poverty levels are nothing new. I found similar gaps across the twentieth century, and other countries have witnessed comparable phenomena. The most plausible explanation is cultural differences: groups’ varying habits and behaviors over time. A subculture of violence has existed among African Americans for over a century; the same problem appeared among whites in the antebellum South. Culture isn’t written in stone, however, and can change over time for various reasons. When those changes are positive in nature, criminal behavior tends to recede and social mobility to increase—middle-class whites and blacks commit relatively little violent crime, for example.
The Brookings report ignores these racial and cultural dynamics. It makes another major error, too: claiming that the police pullback in 2020 and 2021 “is less supported by evidence than some initially thought.” In fact, considerable evidence shows that police departments changed their crime-fighting policies during the pandemic to protect their officers from Covid and diverted cops to riot duty in response to the often-violent George Floyd protests. In New York City, Dae-Young Kim’s empirical analysis of NYPD data found that police stops fell 30 percent from 2019 to 2020. His work shows that this decline was associated with increased gun, non-domestic, and gang homicides; gang killings, specifically, increased 176 percent.
The authors of the Brookings report rely on discredited tropes about poverty and crime and present a misleading portrait of pandemic-era policing data. Their readers should demand a more honest grappling with the facts.
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