Blacks, Crime, and Poverty

Do blacks commit more crime because of poverty? No.

Blacks are only 2.7 times as likely to be in poverty. If you were to create some sort of crime/poverty index, in which crime rates are adjusted for poverty, they would still be way more likely to commit crime.

http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparebar.jsp?ind=14&cat=1

There are almost twice the number of white people below the poverty line as black people in the US. Using the numbers found on Wikipedia, there are about 9.6 million black Americans below the poverty line and 19.2 million white Americans below the poverty line. So, if "irrespective of race, [poor areas] have an increase in violence" then whites would be committing violence at a race twice that of blacks.

Poverty rates are insufficient to explain the differences in crime rate. There are more whites than blacks at every level of income (in absolute numbers), there are twice as many whites in poverty as blacks and yet blacks commit more murders than whites (in absolute numbers).

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_03.html

http://i.imgur.com/gAmHXQw.jpg

So we can say with relative certainty that when it comes to crimes like rape and murder which are not committed for economic gain that poverty is not a sufficient explanation.

The link between the two isn't even that particularly strong.

http://i.imgur.com/p3dysgD.jpg

For the years 2006-2011, the Census-ACS provides estimates of the Mean Income, Median Income, and Poverty Rates for each urban center, and we can easily perform the same calculations we did in the racial case. The correlations between the Mean Income and Median Income levels and the various crime categories generally fall in the range of -0.40 to -0.60, being moderately rather than strongly negative. Even the correlation between Poverty Rate and crime—supported by the obvious truism that most street criminals are poor—is hardly enormous, falling between 0.50 and 0.70, and usually well below our racial figures.

http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

This is why when we look at places like Kentucky, home to a population that has the second highest white poverty rate in the nation (yet a violent crime rate that is 40 percent lower than the national average)

http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/13-states-with-the-highest-white-excluding-hispanics-and-latinos-poverty-495/

We see horrible rates of poverty, yet the crime that plagues Detroit, Norfolk, Richmond, Birmingham, St. Louis, Atlanta, Memphis isn't found.

The 10 U.S. counties with the lowest annual median household incomes are:

1.Owsley County, Ky. – $21,177

2.Zavala County, Texas – $21,843

3.Clay County, Ky. – $22,255

4.Knox County, Ky. -$22,493

5.Wilcox County, Ala. – $22,611

6.Quitman County, Miss. – $22,625

7.Sumter County, Ala. – $22,857

8.McCreary County, Ky. – $23,163

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/america-s-10-poorest-counties-are-gulf-coast-states-kentucky-and-indian-reservations

**‘Yet, The violent crime rate for Appalachia in 2010 was lower than the national violent crime rate average by 56.76%’**