NCJ Number: 221480
Title: Race and Violent Offender Propensity: Does the Intraracial Nature of Violent Crime Persist on the Local Level?
Journal: Justice Research and Policy Volume:9 Issue:2 Dated:2007 Pages:53-86
Author(s): Sarah Becker
Date Published: 2007
Page Count: 34
Publisher: http://www.jrsa.org
Type: Report (Study/Research)
Format: Article
Language: English
Country: United States of America
Annotation: This study examined whether the propensity of violent offenders to select victims intraracially held up if expected values were calculated locally.
Abstract: The findings indicate that though causes behind the predominantly intraracial nature of violent crime remain open to and worthy of investigation, the proposition that Black offenders’ racial animosity for White people is what drives high levels of interracial offending can be dismissed. Events of criminal violence motivated by racial hatred do occur. However, aggregated, national, city-level, and neighborhood-level patterns demonstrate that Black or White, Latino, Asian, or Native-American assault offenders do not exhibit a general propensity to select victims interracially; rather that violent offenders do tend to select victims intraracially at the local level, but that the intraracial character of violent offending varies by crime, offender race, and locale. For most cities in the analysis, assault is predominantly intraracial across offense/offender categories. For a few cities, however, criminal assault is less intraracial than expected with White offenders victimizing interracially more than random selection would predict. The past research which relied on national-level data to calculate expected value of interracial offending implicitly assumed that people had access to each other across the Nation. Not only do Black offenders not have a propensity to select White victims for crimes of violence, but if they demonstrate a propensity, it is to select victims within race. That the pattern persists even when local-level segregation is taken into account makes it apparent that factors beyond residential segregation operate to produce predominantly intraracial assault offending. White and minority populations are not just segregated residentially, but are also segregated into different occupations, jobs, and career trajectories as well as different tracks in the educational system. Data for the study were collected from the National Institute Based Incident Reporting System (NIBRS). Tables, references
Main Term(s): Black/White Crime Comparisons; Crime causes theory; Crime Rate; Intra-racial crime
Index Term(s): Crime analysis; Crime data files; Crime Statistics; Minority crime causes; Race-crime relationships
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