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In the '90s there was research building on older research showing no reasonable correlation between race and crime, or poverty and crime. The correlations were there, but they were tough to pin down, squishy.
But nonetheless African-Americans were over-represented as both crime victims and perpetrators; this says little about any individual person, of course. Eliminate drug convictions, and you still got a correlation between race and crime. They've all but stopped reporting racial demographics of perpetrators; but most crime is still intra-race, and blacks are still disproportionately victims of violent crime, even with hate crimes dropped out, so you can draw your own conclusions. *This* can be spun in a racist way, and has been far too frequently, as a quick Google search will indicate.
But they finally considered other factors in combination. Race dropped out as a primary factor in the crime rate. Poverty, education, single-parent families, unemployment, segregation--they did a better job at reducing them to independent variables, of course.
But it remained true that blacks disproportionately lived in communities plagued by the factors predisposing people to crime. Some non-black communities had all the factors, and the high crime rates. But the disproportionality involving blacks remained. Since these communities were overrepresented on the crime blotters, anything that reduced the rate of growth of these communities (compared to others) reduced the crime rate, both for the racial/ethnic group, and overall. Moreover, by reducing the number of kids in single-parent families, abortion moderated the poverty rate slightly, ameliorating a predisposing factor: this is a likely implication pulled from the data. It was also noted that attempts to dispose of any given factor in isolation had failed, and the conclusion was that the bundle of factors had to be addressed at once--long term, since they were intergenerational. Clinton proposed and implemented some policies based on this, but they weren't very popular, widespread, or long-lived. Far, far too wonkish.
Underlying Bennett's statement is the progressive take on how to eliminate the legacy of racism, one completely consonant with this research: reduce black poverty, black drop-out rates, black unemployment, segregation, absentee fathers, and make abortion available. In tandem.
That wasn't Bennett's point--his point was that extrapolating anything that ameloriated a bad condition to include the entire population is a silly idea, usually partial solutions are incapable of being applied across the board (hence abortion in pockets of 'dense' poverty). But it's the underpinnings of his point, and why his statement isn't inaccurate. But it's a byproduct of other research.
I don't know if the higher violent crime rate for blacks continues. But I'd suspect that it continues, although to a lesser extent; that as in the mid/early '90s, it is still confined to certain neighborhoods, and that a disproportionate number of those neighborhoods are going to be majority black. If true, this bears serious discussion.
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