Biden, Claiming ‘Systemic Racism’ in Policing, Defies Science
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‘Absolutely,” President Biden said last year when a reporter asked him if he believes there’s “systemic racism in law enforcement.” That’s hard to square with a presidential memorandum Mr. Biden recently issued, stating: “It is the policy of my Administration to make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.” The claim of “systemic racism in law enforcement” defies the best available science and data.
In a report released days before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics examined whether people of different races were arrested to a degree that was disproportionate to their involvement in crime. The report concluded that there was no statistically significant difference by race between how likely people were to commit serious violent crimes and how likely they were to be arrested. In other words, the data suggested that police officers and sheriff’s deputies focus on criminals’ actions, not their race.
The BJS report did not take cops’ word for who commits crimes. Rather, it relied on victims’ own accounts of who committed crimes against them, as reported through BJS’s National Crime Victimization Survey.
The NCVS, which dates to the Nixon administration, is the nation’s largest crime survey. Its results are based on about 250,000 interviews annually with U.S. residents, who are asked whether they were victims of crime within the past six months. In addition, the NCVS gathers data on who actually commits crimes—according to the victims—thereby providing an independent source of data not reliant upon police records.
The new BJS report took victims’ responses on the 2018 NCVS and compared them with arrest rates by police, supplied by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. It found that for nonfatal violent crimes that victims said were reported to police, whites accounted for 48% of offenders and 46% of arrestees. Blacks accounted for 35% of offenders and 33% of arrestees. Asians accounted for 2% of offenders and 1% of arrestees. None of these differences between the percentage of offenders and the percentage of arrestees of a given race were statistically significant. (The data is limited to nonfatal crimes because murder victims cannot identify their assailants.)
Those statistics exclude Hispanics. The White House Office of Management and Budget classifies Hispanics as an ethnic rather than a racial group. Hispanics made up 13% of offenders and 18% of arrestees, a statistically significant difference. But because about 10% of victims were unable to determine whether their assailants were Hispanic or not, it is likely that victims classified some Hispanic offenders as white, or perhaps black, rather than Hispanic.
When removing simple assault, which generally isn’t prosecuted as a felony, and focusing solely on the more serious nonfatal crimes reported to police (rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault), whites made up 41% of offenders and 39% of arrestees. Blacks made up 43% of offenders and 36% of arrestees. Asians made up 2.5% of offenders and 1.5% of arrestees. Again, none of these differences between offenders and arrestees by race were statistically significant. Hispanics accounted for 12% of offenders and 21% of arrestees, which was statistically significant. But again, “victims not knowing the ethnicity of their assailants, even if they knew their race,” to quote the BJS report, “may have resulted in some underestimates of Hispanic offenders’ involvement in violent crime.”
These statistics don’t indicate that police officers are never racist. Individual officers, like people in any profession, run the gamut from laudable to deplorable. But what they do show is that Mr. Biden’s claim of “systemic racism” in American police forces is contrary to the best data we have on the subject.
It’s good news that police are arresting those who actually commit crimes, and that the data doesn’t support the claim of “systemic racism.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Biden emphasized the need for unity and said that “demonization” has “long torn us apart.” Yet the president’s demonization of America as a land of “systemic racism,” a claim that he roots in the alleged racism of police, contradicts the evidence. It would be more accurate, as well as more unifying, to refer to America as what it has always aspired to be and what the data generally shows it to be—a land of justice.
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