The connection between Latino immigration and criminal behavior is much overstated....if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities—Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso—to the those of the five whitest—Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates—10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles—50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole—has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent.
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4 hours ago
I haven't read the article yet, but doesn't it seem like a methodological issue to evaluate crime so generally? For example, crime in the "whitest" cities aren't all committed by whites; nor is all crime in cities with large hispanic communities all committed by Hispanics.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they have a way for trying to isolate all that or something, but it seems to me more reasonable just to analyze the crime rates based on the ethnicity of the people actually committing each crime, regardless of the overall ethnic makeup of the metro-area. (Not to mention that ignoring the other races in this sort of study seems kind of absurd...)
Anyway, it seems like there would be more fruitful ways of analyzing the propensity of communities to participate in criminal activity....but that's just me and maybe I'm missing something.