Data suggests Hispanic criminality is similar to that of blacks

Over the years, people like me have disagreed with Ron Unz that the rate of serious crime by Hispanics is not much different than that of whites.

Analysts typically rely on police or imprisonment data to estimate Hispanic/White differences, but Hispanics are significantly less likely than whites to report crimes to the police. Since Latinos are typically victimized by other Latinos (crime is typically intra-ethnic), there is an undercount of crime committed by Hispanics.

Using victim data is a method around this problem.  The National Crime Victimization Survey contacts tens of thousands of people each year to ask them about being victimized.  We can use these statistics as proxies of crime rates for various races/ethnicities. I took the estimates for 2014-2018 and averaged them since there is quite a bit of annual error, especially in a group as small as Asians.  Here are the percentages of people who were victimized by serious crime in the past year:

Percent victimized
Blacks  2.1
Hispanics  2.1
Whites  1.6
Asians  1.0
Other  3.1

See how the rates for Hispanics and blacks are the same. Prevalences for whites and especially Asians are significantly lower.

I doubt serious criminality among Latinos is exactly the same as blacks. While most crimes are intra-racial, some of the victimizations of whites, Latinos, and Asians are by blacks committing robbery or assault.

By the way, I assume that the "Other" category is mostly American Indians. Their very high prevalence is consistent with Cochran and Harpending's hypothesis that racial groups with deep histories of agriculture and powerful states experienced selection for docile and self-disciplined individuals.  Criminological research has found that criminals tend to be impulsive and disagreeable.  As people with shorter histories under agrarian states, Native Americans might have a higher percentage of these types.

Data: I'm skeptical that the Hispanic crime rate is similar to that of whites

I doubt the Hispanic crime rate is similar to that of whites. Let's put aside police statistics and victim surveys because both depend on someone reporting the crime, and immigrants are notorious for failing to report crimes out of fear of authorities.  And arrest data also depend on law enforcement policies.

Criminologists understand that homicide is a good measure of serious violent crime because corpses advertise crimes loudly.

The CDC has a neat website for analyzing mortality data.  I looked at homicide rates for 2017, the most recent year available. Here are the rates per 100,000 in the specific population:

Homicide Rate
Black  23.0
American Indian  9.7
Hispanic  5.3
White  2.8
Asian  1.7

Not surprisingly, blacks are at the top with a rate that is 13 1/2 times the Asian rate.  American Indians are second with a rate that is 5.7 times that of Asians.  This reminds me of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending's hypothesis (if I remember correctly) that Native Americans never got pacified by centuries of the state weeding out the most violent.  Henry and Peter Frost published a paper three years ago that found that the English proclivity to execute criminals with abandon resulted in a country with a homicide rate that is a tiny fraction of what it was a 1,000 years ago.

Criminologists excuse black violence by blaming criminogenic urban environments. If living in a big city is the key to violence, why are rural Indians so murderous? Genes explain better than sociology.

When it comes to homicide, Hispanics resemble their racial reality: they are somewhere between American Indians and whites. Looking at Latin America, I'm pretty sure crime is a more serious problem for Hispanics than it is for whites.

American Indians are Christians (or nothing), not "Native American spiritualists"

The amount of BS from liberals is so overwhelming, it's hard to take.

Whenever the topic is American Indians, "Native American spirituality" is sure to come up. The stereotype is of a people deeply devoted to the spiritual traditions of their forefathers. When I hear this, I say to myself, "I bet not even 10% of Indians say their religion is Native American." Turns out I was right. Using GSS data, here is a graph of over 300 Americans who say they are non-white American Indians (AIs). (I exclude the Elizabeth Warren types.) I split the sample in half (1970-99 and 2000-16) to see if there are any trends.

First of all, most AIs are Christian. There is a trend away from Protestantism and toward Catholicism, Native American, or no religion. But even with the shift, fewer than 10% say their religion is Native--just like I guessed. When it comes to their religious profile, Indians are pretty similar to many other American groups. 

I checked to see if liberalism predicts identifying one's religion as AI (thinking that adopting the old beliefs might be a sign of anti-Americanism) but the two are unrelated. The typical believer of this type is politically moderate. 

Addiction among American Indians

I ran across a new study reviewing the research on race and addiction. The authors find that: 

In these studies, both past year and lifetime rates of alcohol, nicotine, and drug use disorders were consistently higher in Native Americans and lower in Asians,with Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites in between. 

It looks like any theory of American Indians (AIs) that limits itself to alcohol (e.g., the notion that AIs have not been exposed to it long enough to adapt to it) is missing part of the story. Addiction to drugs in general tends to be more common in this population.

Also--the stark differences between Northest Asians and Natives--addiction differences being only one illustrative trait--show how quickly significant genetic change can occur (the differences surely can't be 100% due to environment). It's not like these groups split 100k years ago. 

Race and fatal gun accidents

One way to measure recklessness is by accidental gun accidents. Research shows that these accidents typically involve young males who are playing around with a firearm, often while drinking.

Using CDC Wonder, I calculated rates for fatal gun accidents (FGAs) by race. I also separated Hispanics versus non-Hispanics. Since some groups have higher percentages of older people who are less likely to have an accident, I focus on those in the 15 to 24 age group.

Fatal Gun Accidents Rates

American Indian  0.8
Blacks  0.7
Whites 0.4
Hispanics  0.3
Asian  0.1

The risk for an accident will be greater for groups with higher levels of gun ownership. According to the General Social Surveys (years 2010, 2012, 2014) home gun ownership looks like this: Amerindians, 42%; blacks, 17%; whites, 40%; Hispanics, 19%; Asians, 16%.  If we adjust for exposure by dividing accident rate by the proportion of the group with guns, we get this:


Fatal Gun Accident Index

Blacks  4.2
American Indians  1.9
Hispanics  1.6
Whites  1.0
Asians  0.6

So recklessness among groups is highest for blacks and lowest for Asians.  In fact, the index for blacks is 7 times that of Asians.  I think I hear Phil Rushton's voice from the other side: "See, I told you so."

The high rate among Amerindians is also consistent with Cochran and Harpending's contention that these people have not been selected for tameness like other groups by many centuries of state control.

More on Indians and environmentalism

As a follow-up to the last post, I wanted to see if contemporary American Indians (AIs) are more liberal on the environment than others. The GSS has asked respondents over the years if the federal government should spend more on protecting the environment. Sixty-one percent of AIs said we don't spend enough. Sounds like a lot? It's not: 62 percent of all Americans say we don't spend enough (N = 24,270).

Those numbers are based on data going all the way back to the 70s, however. If we limit it to just the past decade, 63 percent of both AIs and all Americans together feel we don't spend enough.

AIs are not currently liberal on the environment; they haven't been over the past 40 years; and I doubt they ever were. That crying Indian in the anti-littering commercial I saw as a kid is typical liberal anti-white propaganda. (Mexican Americans have a lot of AI ancestry and litter, on average, more than others.)

The myth of the Indian environmentalist

From pages 404-405 of A Patriot's History of the United States:

Even before the introduction of the horse, Indians had hunted bison, though not nearly as effectively. They tracked herds on foot, often setting fire to the grasslands in a massive box, surrounding a herd, except for a small opening through which the panicked animals ran--and were laughtered by the hundreds.

Frequently, though not universally, Indians destroyed entire herds, using fire or running them off cliffs. One Indian spiritual belief held that if a single animal escaped, it would warn all other animals in the region, and other Indian concepts of animals viewed the animal population as essentially infinite, supplied by the gods. Ecohistorians agree that although hunting by the Plains Indians alone did not threaten the bison with extinction, when combined with other natural factors, including fire and predators, Indian hunting may have put the buffalo on the road to extinction, regardless of the subsequent devastating impact of white hunters.

The fatal weakness of the Plains nomads regarding the buffalo was expressed by traveler John McDougall when he wrote of the Blackfeet in 1865, "Without the buffalo they would be helpless, and yet the whole nation did not own one." The crucial point is that the Indians did not herd and breed the very animal they depended on. No system of surplus accumulation existed. Since the entire source of wealth could rot and degrade, none could exist for long. Moreover, the nomadic life made it impossible to haul much baggage and therefore personal property could not be accumulated. This led fur trader Edwind Ding to conclude that this deficiency prevented Plains nomads from storing provisions and made them utterly dependent European trade goods.

A great ecomyth has appeared, however, about the Indians and their relationship with the buffalo, wherein Indians were portrayed as the first true ecologists and environmentalists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Traveler after traveler reported seeing rotting carcasses in the sun, often with only a hump or tongue gone. While the bison was, as Tom McHugh claimed, "a tribal department store" with horns used for arrows, intestines for containers, skins and hides for teepee coverings and shields, and msucle for ropes, it is misleading to suggest that Indians did not wantonly slaughter buffalo at times. Father Pierre De Smet observed that an Assinboin hunt in which two thousand to three thousand Indians surrounded an entire herd of six hundred bison and killed every one. Aside from their own deprivation--which they could only notice when it was too late to prevent--the Indians had no way of estimating or tracking the size and health of the herds, and even if they could, nomadic lifestyle "made it difficult to enforce mandates against waste."

American Indian religion

After rolling my eyes at the Native American invocation given at the memorial service rally in Tucson, I wondered what percent of American Indians even belong to an indigenous religion.

According to the GSS, here is the distribution of religious affiliations for American Indians (sample size = 1,818--I didn't count the white wannabes)

Percent

Protestant  53.3
Catholic 17.8
None 13.2
Other 7.4
Native American 4.1
Christian 3.3
Buddhist 0.8

Wow! A whopping 4 percent of American Indians belong to an indigenous faith.

According to the most recent GSS Survey (2008), 0.7% of Americans are Amerindians. So the Tucson event catered to--what--about three people?  I've got more cousins. Organizers didn't give a damn about the wishes of real, live Indians (or they would have asked a Protestant minister to pray). They really care about their fashionable liberal buddies.

More on Native Alaskan crime: In an earlier post, I provided evidence that Native Alaskans are much more criminal than their white counterparts who, in turn, have crime rates somewhat higher than whites in the lower 48 states. American Indians (AIs), by contrast, are not arrested much more often than whites.

Some readers suggested that native Alaskans are not more criminally prone than AIs; rather, many crimes committed by AIs do not result in an arrest because the law is underenforced on reservations.

The General Social Survey asked thousands of Americans if they have ever been threatened or shot at with a gun. I define as American Indian those people who say their primary ethnicity is Indian and that their race is non-white (in order to eliminate whites who say their main ethnicity is AI). Here the percentages:


Percent having ever been threatened or shot at with a gun

American Indians 18.1
Whites 18.7
Blacks 25.2

I'm assuming that most attacks are intra-racial. (The white offense rate is probably lower since the National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that a substantial share of attacks on whites are perpetrated by blacks. This should not be the case with the more rural and segregated American Indians.) These numbers indicate that gun violence is not higher--or not much higher--among AIs than among whites. This pattern is consistent with arrest statistics.

So native Alaskans still look much more violent than Native Americans.

More on crime among Native Alaskans: In the lower 48 states, American Indians are not known for high rates of crime. The Uniform Crime Report tells us that AIs are slightly more than 1 percent of all arrests for serious crimes, which is close to matching their share of the U.S. population (1.0%). They only seem to have a noticeable problem with family violence and alcohol-related crimes.

Not so with Alaska natives. Using arrest data, I calculated how their rate of serious crime compares with white Alaskans. I've listed the ratios here:


Ratio of Alaskan native crime rates to whites

Murder 4.3
Rape 5.7
Robbery 3.4
Aggravated assault 3.7
Burglary 3.4

These are huge differences--similar in magnitude to black-white differences. It's typical though how crime in Alaska is portrayed as a white problem. Those hell-raising rednecks (which I'm sure are actually lily white up there).

So how do we explain the propensity to act violently, especially in light of the fact that American Indians are similar to whites? Have these descendants of hunters not lost their fierce ways yet? Did the White Man kill off many of the aggressive males down here?

The media didn't mention that the Alaskan barbarians are Indians: CNN continues the media pattern of making Alaska look like a state of Neanderthals with their story of how high the rape rate is in the state and how Wasila did not pay for rape kits while Palin was mayor. I've browsed data on Alaska's rate of alcoholism and murder--they're unexceptional. Just now, I looked at the 2006 rape rate. CNN neglected to mention that 45% of the rapes are committed by American Indians, even though they are only 15% of Alaska's population.

American Indians have poor vocabularies: Let's continue our look at ethnic groups who report multiple races. Among people saying they are American Indian (AI), they answered one of three races: white, black, other. Here are the mean vocabulary scores for these three categories:

Mean vocabulary scores (General Social Survey):

White American Indians 5.52
Black American Indians 4.65
Other American Indians 4.62

As we saw with Hispanics, more white ancestry is associated with higher scores, but having black ancestry does not lower the average. In fact, the average of all blacks is 5.01, so having AI ancestry lowers the scores of blacks. The pure AI average of 4.62 is lower than the non-white Hispanic mean of 5.34. So clearly, AI's do poorly on vocabulary tests. I imagine that some of this is due to low-quality environments--AI's often have worse indicators than blacks.