Rupert Murdoch is a Lying Liar

Oh?

The Huffington Post reports that The Murder Rate for Hispanics is Twice that for Whites. HuffPo is talking about victimization rates–that is, the number of Hispanics murdered, not murdering. But murder is largely a within-group phenomenon–that is, people tend to target their own–so most of those dead Hispanics were probably killed by other Hispanics.

The Color of Crime reports incarceration rates that match HuffPo’s victimization rates: 

(And, in general, the Color of Crime report demonstrates that incarceration rates reflect actual offending rates.)

Note that the Color of Crime graph is not an absolute rate, but a multiple–a multiple of 1 means that the crime rate is equal to the white crime rate; a multiple of 2 means it is twice the white crime rate; a multiple of 0.5 means the rate is half that of whites. Asians tend to offend at statistically insignificant rates. Pacific Islanders apparently really like stealing cars (maybe it’s just easier to find stolen cars on a small island in the middle of the ocean than on a big continent.) High manslaughter among the Indians is probably a result of drunk driving. And Hispanics commit all crimes at a rate of slightly less than 2.5 times that of whites.

“Ah, but “Hispanics” and “Hispanic immigrants” are not the same group,” I hear you saying. That is irrelevant; the children of immigrants only get here via their parents immigrating, and it appears that the children of immigrants actually have much higher crime rates than their parents. No one is comforted that their attacker’s parents were immigrants, rather than immigrants themselves. Either way, immigration is at play.

Other people estimate other crime rates:

Source: La Griffe du Lion, Crime and the Hispanic Effect. In this case, the match between the HuffPo data and the Color of Crime data makes me trust it better than La Griffe du Lion’s, even though I normally find La Griffe pretty credible.

Why such debate over crime rates? Because the FBI hasn’t historically counted “Hispanics” in its crime stats (though I hear they are going to start.) “Hispanic” isn’t a race, it’s just a word that means that you or your ancestors spoke Spanish. Hispanics therefore can be–and are–members of any race.

Now, there is quite obviously something major going on in our data: the black crime rate. Yes, the Hispanic crime rate is lower than the black crime rate.

Let’s play with some numbers. Let’s suppose we’ve got 320 million Americans. We’ll estimate the black crime rate at 20 out of 1000, the white at 5/1000, and the Hispanic at 10/1ooo.

If our population is 10% black + 90% white = 2 black crimes / 1000 + 4.5 white crimes / 1000 = 2,080,000 total crimes. (This reflects the demographics of 1920.)

If our population is 10% black + 65% white + 25% Hispanic = 2 black crimes / 1000 + 3.25 white crimes / 1000 + 2.5 Hispanic crimes / 1000 = 2,160,000 total crimes. (This is closer to our modern demographics.)

That is, 80,000 extra crimes per year.

(Obviously I am simplifying by leaving out small groups like Indians and Asians, [who don’t particularly commit much crime, anyway.])

Why yes, Barbie, math is hard. But this is 5th grade math. Murdoch really ought to have mastered it already.

But what about El Paso? According to Wikipedia list of cities by crime rate, Plano, TX, has 1/3 the violent crime rate of El Paso. Its murder rate is less than 12% of El Paso’s. If you’ve ever been to Plano, the reasons are obvious: It’s full of Asians and middle class whites, and Asians don’t commit much crime. Lincoln, Nebraska is also safer than El Paso, and Portland, Oregon has a lower murder rate.

El Paso’s relatively low crime rate is because violent crime in the US is largely driven by black crime rates, and there aren’t a lot of blacks in El Paso. If you happen to replace a black community with an Hispanic one, you will get a lower crime rate. But unlike whites, blacks as a percent of the US haven’t really been dropping, so this would only be a local effect.

Also, I do wonder whether El Paso’s not-legally-in-the-country sub-population is very likely to call the police when crimes against them occur.

At any rate, let’s have a look at Mexico’s murder rate:

Murder rate per 100k people in 2012: lightest blue = 0-1; darkest blue > 20

Mexico is one of the top scorers, at 21.5. The US rate is 4.7.

Now, immigration is not random, so a country’s emigrants aren’t necessarily going to reflect the country’s overall crime rates. But since criminality does have a fairly large genetic component, the Mexican (and other Latin American countries’) crime rates are high enough to give pause.

What about the claim that all immigrants have a lower crime rate than Americans?

That depends, I suppose, on how we define “all immigrants.” Are we speaking globally of the aggregate of all immigrants headed anywhere? I have no idea if anyone has even collected such data. According to the Wikipedia page on Immigration and Crime,

“The Handbook of Crime Correlates (2009), a review of studies of correlates with crime, states that most studies on immigrants have found higher rates of crime. However, this varies greatly depending on the country of origin, with immigrants from some regions having lower crime rates than the indigenous population. In the US, studies have found lower crime rates among immigrants than among non-immigrants. Other studies suggest that immigration generally does not lead to an increase in crime, and may in some instances, suppress such trends^. Other statistics, such as those from Europe, show higher crime rates among immigrant populations.”

In other words, trying to aggregate all immigrants is dumb, because different immigrant groups (and their children) commit crime at different rates. Japanese immigrants in LA have a different crime rate than Somalis in Minneapolis (and not because of any inherent differences between LA and Minneapolis.) Indonesian immigrants have low crime rates; Moroccans have higher rates.

Here are some more quotes from the Wikipedia page on immigration and crime:

“the relative proportion … of crimes by non-Japanese is substantially higher than those by Japanese … per capita Africans are responsible for 3.5 times as much crime as Japanese natives.

“According to the figures from Danmarks Statistik, crime rate among refugees and their descendants is 73% higher than for the male population average, even when taking into account their socioeconomic background. A report from Teori- og Metodecentret from 2006 found that seven out of ten young people placed on the secured youth institutions in Denmark are immigrants (with 40 percent of them being refugees).

“According to official statistics, 21.0% of rapes have been committed by foreigners in Finland. Foreigners comprise 2.2% of the population.

“A 2006 study found that the share of immigrants has a positive and significant impact on the crime rate …

“In Berlin, young male immigrants are three times more likely to commit violent crimes than their German peers.

“Official statistics show that immigrants are responsible for about half of the criminal activity in Greece. The Greek police have admitted that armed gangs entering the country from neighbouring Albania or Bulgaria could have been attracted by reports that many people have been withdrawing cash from banks and stashing it in their homes.

” More than half of Moroccan-Dutch youths aged 18 to 24 years in Rotterdam have been in trouble with the police for the suspicion of a crime. Young Antillean and Surinamese Rotterdammers are strongly overrepresented in crime statistics. Of them, 40 percent have been suspected. Of indigenous young people aged from 18 to 24, 18% percent already came in contact with criminal law. … of 447 criminal files, 63% teenagers convicted of serious crime are children of parents born outside the Netherlands. … The proportion of these persons in the suspect population is therefore almost twice as high as the share of immigrants among the Dutch population. The highest suspect rates per capita are found among first (4.9) and second generation (7.1) male migrants from a non‐western background. Rates for so‐called ‘western migrants’ are very close to those of the native Dutch.

“The report shows that, of 131 individuals charged with the 152 [Norwegian] rapes in which the perpetrator could be identified, 45.8% were of African, Middle Eastern or Asian origin while 54.2% were of Norwegian, other European or American origin.

“In Switzerland, 69.7% of prison population had no Swiss citizenship, compared to 22.1% of total resident population (as of 2008).

“[In Sweden,] immigrants were found to be four times more likely to be investigated for lethal violence and robbery than ethnic Swedes. In addition, immigrants were three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault, and five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes. Overall, North Africa and Western Asia were strongly overrepresented in the crime statistics.”

Okay, so clearly some immigrants, in some places, commit crime. But what about immigrants in the US?

“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001, 4% of Hispanic males in their twenties and thirties were in prison or jail, compared to 1.8% of non-Hispanic white males.”

Occidental Dissent has done everyone a favor and disaggregated the Arizona Crime data by race, producing these colorful pie charts:

The crime rate among Asian immigrants, by contrast, is of course very low–down around 30% (or less) of the white rate. It makes a big difference where your immigrants come from.

Now, there is more to life than crime rates. But I reserve the right to decide which kind of risks and how much of them I am willing to take, based on actual, honest data, not based on mass media billionaire owners lying to me.

Why is Murdoch lying?

Perhaps he’s just really dumb. Or maybe he lives in a really rich area where crime (and unemployment) just aren’t things people worry about. Maybe he’s just trying to signal liberal tribal identity. Or maybe–like many people in the business of employing other people–he stands to personally benefit from the importation of millions of low-wage migrants.

 

While we’re at it:

No, no. That’s Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a libertarian. Rand Paul is a regular ol’ conservative. I know they’re easy to confuse since their names sound similar, but if I can keep them straight, then so can you.

BTW, Murdoch isn’t a Jew.