Searching for the Roots of Violent Crime

with Rav Arora

The problem with violent crime in black communities—besides the violence itself—is that we don’t yet know exactly what causes it. There have been many, many attempted interventions, from aggressive policing and sentencing policies to programs of cognitive behavioral therapy for potential repeat offenders, and everything in between. But without a clear and compelling definition of the root causes, all attempted solutions, no matter how well-meaning or ingeniously designed, are educated guesses at best.

Perhaps it’s poverty and unemployment. That’s surely a factor. But there are many poor communities (including poor black communities) with high unemployment where violent crime isn’t an overwhelming problem. Perhaps it’s “culture.” That’s almost certainly a factor, too. But what are the origins of these harmful cultural practices? And how do we explain why they only lead a small minority of the people in those communities to act violently?

In this excerpt with the young journalist Rav Arora (who has a Substack of his own), we discuss the daunting problem of identifying and misidentifying the causes of high violent crime rates in some black communities. We agree that poverty and unemployment alone aren’t sufficient explanations for the problem. So where do we go from there? Rav and I get into it below.

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GLENN LOURY: I'll step out of the devil's advocate role for a moment, just to clarify. I mean, I think that the criminal offending behavior of a minority—and this must be emphasized—of a minority of the residents of communities of high crime districts where homicides are happening, in St. Louis or in Baltimore and Philadelphia and Chicago, where the carjackings and other felony property crimes are taking place—the disproportionate rate of offending of a relatively small number of social misfits making life miserable for everybody else who has to live there is the core issue.

And this is something that people just don't want to face, because it is daunting. It is not at all clear what to do. You know, programs. We should have more programs. People can't demonstrate any reliable interventions that are having a significant effect on this behavior. They say it's due to poverty. Not all poor communities exhibit behavior to the same extent. You say culture can't be talked about, and it's obvious that any common-sense meaning of the word “culture” is implicated to some degree in these patterns of behavior that we're seeing in these communities.

I mean, don't take me for a fool. I can see how people are living. I can see the out-of-wedlock birth rate and the father absence. I can see the gang activity. I can see the violence. What does it take to actually shoot somebody to death, as an act? You think anybody can do that? Anybody can just take a gun and shoot somebody? There are inhibitions. There are psychological and emotional blocks that keep us ...

RAV ARORA: And ethical blocks.

Indeed. Internalized ethical commitments of what kind of person am I and how shall I live in the world? What do I think of myself? How can I be accountable to the people who I love, to whom I look for affirmation and for their respect, if I behave in this way or that? To dismiss that, to say that that's not at all relevant, to say that everything is driven by unemployment rates is offensive to common sense, and I think also inconsistent with a serious engagement with the evidence.

So I'm with you. I don't know, maybe there's not even a “but” here. Can you talk to us a little bit, because you've actually been looking at the numbers, and some of it is reflected in your recent piece in City Journal, about exactly what has happened in terms of criminal offending in American cities over the last couple of years?

Yeah. I also want to address some of the cultural arguments that you just laid out. I think one point to make here, the connection between poverty and the violence is less obvious and clear and significant than one might think. That is one thing that I've learned over the past couple of years in reading and researching this issue. And this is a taboo realm of research, by the way, as many academics have attested to.

But you can control for economic status, as some studies have done. And you look at, for example, low-income Asian communities, very low-income Asian communities where there's lots of unemployment, many issues, like lots of immigrants coming in who barely speak the language and aren't able to access various resources. You compare low-income Asian communities with higher-income black communities, and the crime rates are far higher in the black community as compared to the low income Asian communities.

Now, why is that? Obviously this need not have to be said, but because there are some crazy lunatic progressives who might think that I'm insinuating this, [it has] nothing to do with genetics or any biological predisposition. That is not in my mind at all. Again, doesn't need to be said, but I'm just saying it.

But obviously, if economics doesn't explain it, if you have higher-income black communities having higher rates of crime relative to Asian communities, then you've isolated the role of economic status, but you still have a higher rate of crime. So what is the driving factor, then? Is it fatherlessness? Is it culture? All those things matter. So I just don't find the economic arguments to be convincing.

I mean, there's also one study that Barry Latzer, if you're familiar, the American criminologist. Are you familiar? He's a conservative criminologist. So he's written about this at great length, about how in the 1990s and ‘80s, you had certain black immigrant groups, black immigrants coming in from Haiti, who were also dealing with economic issues on top of language and cultural issues and also had similar, if not higher, rates of poverty relative to American-born black communities. But yet their crime rates were significantly lower. We're speaking of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

So in that case, you have isolated race, you've made that constant. You have two black populations, and yet one has significantly higher crime rates. So you've eliminated race and economic status. You're left with either, you know, society is somehow distinguishing between immigrant black individuals and non-immigrant black individuals, which is not plausible, or there are differences between populations, irrespective of race and economic class that have to do with culture, have to do with family dynamics and fatherlessness, which is something that you've talked about at great length, high rates of fatherlessness that contribute to inner-city dysfunction and crime. And so I just wanted to get that out.

I want to go back. I want to go back. You say you disavow that you're making any assumption about genetic differences between Asian and African-descended populations in calling attention to the fact that a lower-economic-strata Asian population had lower crime rates than a higher-economic-strata African American population. That happened.

You're not saying it's genetics. It's culture. And here's what I want to say. Might it not be easier to take if there were a genetic element? Here's what I mean. I'm not saying there is. I don't know. I don't know how you know that there's not. Certainly populations that descend over many generations from relatively different primordial stock could have evolved some differences in, I dunno, the glandular system and how people deal with aggression or impulse control or whatever.

I'm not saying it's true. I don't believe that it's true. I'm just saying it could be true. Because we're talking about relatively small numbers of people here. The people who are engaging in these violent criminal activities are a minority of the population. They're outliers. And the way people react to stress, I mean interaction between genetic and environmental factors that could conceivably be implicated. A lot of different areas of human behavior have very sharply unequal representation of people from different primordial populations. Look in the professional sports, for example, where you see a vast over-representation of African Americans, et cetera. I won't belabor the point.

What I meant, though, was that might it not be easier to take in the sense that, you know, well, okay, there's an app for that. I mean, if indeed it's a question of how much adrenaline is coming out in the response to certain environmental stimuli, and I find that that is partly under genetic control in the differences between these populations … I'm not saying it's true. I don't know that it's true. I'm just saying something like that could be true.

A, maybe it's treatable, and B, it really does take the moral judgment onus off of the population that's on the short end of the comparison, because people can't really control it. So this is a meta-comment. I'm not actually making a claim about genetics. I'm talking about whether we should be willing to even consider that possibility in the range of explanations and about the ethics of doing so. And I'm trying to say that I think the ethics are ambiguous of doing so. It's not necessarily a racist act or anti-black to begin to entertain that kind of a possibility, again, A, because it might point toward interventions that could be helpful in diminishing disparity.

But also because what's the alternative? See, the alternative is look how they raise their child. Look at the way they are. Look at what they believe. Have you listened to the rap music? Do you see the raunchiness of their culture? Do you see how they are? And that's very, very condemnatory. It's not genetic, it's cultural. But if there were a vigorous argument of that sort to be made, it seems to me that it could be equally diminishing of the status and the reputation of a population. What do you think about that?

No, I don't think we should totally ignore the possibility of these genetic differences. I just come at it from a perspective of ignorance and lack of knowledge. I just haven't spent a lot of time looking at this. Every time I do ...

I don't mean to put you on the spot. Excuse me, Rav.

No, no, no. I totally get it. But every time I do look at this issue, which I have in the past, I come away thinking that even if I were to formulate an opinion on it, it just wouldn't be worth, either way, to make that opinion because we've seen ... The classic example is Sam Harris and Charles Murray, their infamous podcast talking about racial differences, and Sam being attacked by Vox Media, Ezra Klein, and the mainstream media because of even just airing that conversation. So this is not my area of research.