September 13, 2005

Color Of Crime, Sound Of (Big Media) Silence

By Jared Taylor

[Recently by Jared Taylor: Further Down The Road (Paved With Good Intentions)]

Today, September 14, the New Century Foundation releases The Color of Crime, our relentlessly factual study of race, crime, and the criminal justice system.

For anyone who ever wondered just how much more likely blacks or Hispanics are than whites to commit various crimes, the answers are here. 

It takes hard work to pry the facts out of the reluctant grip of federal crime databases. But the results are eye-opening:

There is plenty more—but just as interesting will be how the Mainstream Media will treat these facts.

Back in 1999, we released an earlier, less detailed version of this report. [PDF] Even before publication, the Associated Press, Time, CBS Evening News, National Public Radio, Knight-Ridder, and the Washington Times wanted copies. A dozen other media organizations, including the Washington Post, attended the press conference with which we launched the report. At the same time, we arranged to have copies delivered to more than 450 news organizations with offices in the Washington, DC area.

The result: complete silence—with one exception. The Washington Times ran a substantial story on the report, in which it interviewed several prominent criminologists who confirmed the accuracy of our numbers but said they were too inflammatory to be discussed publicly. [VDARE.COM note: One other exception: Dr. Walter Williams, in his Creator's Syndicate column.]

Maybe no other editors thought people are interested in race and crime.

Or maybe they were afraid people are too interested.

Some years back, a group called Violence Free Duluth in Duluth, Minnesota, studied a year's worth of the city's gun crimes. They looked into type of gun used, whether liquor or drugs were involved, the relationship between shooter and victim; age, race, and sex of criminal, etc.

But when they released their report they left one thing out: race of perp.  

Frank Jewell, head of the organization, explained that "we didn't include it because it might be misinterpreted."

Duluth's deputy police chief Robert Grytdahl added that race might distract whites from the real problem: "It's a comfortable place for white people to park the [gun crime] problem. It would be a huge distraction, and we wanted to focus on firearms." [Duluth Gun, Crime Study Withholds Race Data, [Pay Archive] By Larry Oakes, Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 30, 1999.]

Mr. Jewell and Mr. Grytdahl are saying, almost in so many words, that the people of Duluth can't be trusted with the truth.

Duluth is about 90 percent white. What if it turned out most of the gun crime was committed by the other 10 percent?

Someone might think Duluth has, not a gun problem, but a minority problem.

When an organization deliberately suppresses its findings like this, it is not doing research: it is putting out propaganda.

It is impossible to know whether the national media suppressed the findings in our earlier report or just didn't think they were newsworthy. But if they thought no one was interested in race and crime they were wrong. Radio talk show hosts greeted the report with shouts of joy.

Over the years, I have spoken on hundreds of radio programs. But no other subject has ever caught the attention of hosts and listeners the way this one did.

Over and over, I was asked to stay on the program longer than scheduled because listeners could not get enough. Producers called up a week later and had me back again because listeners demanded it. Some producers even called because they had heard me on a rival station and wanted a piece of the ratings bonanza.

Most whites lose the power of speech when the subject is race, but they can tuck right into a purely factual discussion of crime rates. Everybody—and I mean everybody—knows blacks commit crime way out of proportion to their numbers. People want to know just how way out the proportions are. 

Needless to say, some listeners didn't want to hear that blacks are in jail for robbery at 15 times the white rate. A surprising number of black callers claimed our "racist" white government cooks the statistics. Most white callers said one of two things: either that I was "racist" or that I was brave. (Somehow, no one ever thought I was a brave racist.)

It is a sorry day in America when you are either brave or racist if you dig up and publicize crime data the Department of Justice has been collecting for decades.

The main point of the "racism" accusation was that, even if the numbers were true, publicizing them only encourages other "racists" and feeds stereotypes. This is the Frank Jewell argument: White people can't be trusted with the facts.

Of course, the Internet makes it hard to keep facts under the rug. People know the big media are full of pablum; that's why they come to sites like VDARE.COM and my own American Renaissance.

In fact, more and more people are laughing outright at mainstream prudery. When I talked about crime on the radio, talk-show hosts were exultant: "You didn't read about this in the Baltimore Sun did you? That's right, folks, this is where you get the real news."

This time around, it would be pleasant if AP or the LA Times wrote about The Color of Crime.

But we're not counting on it.

The internet and talk radio will get the word out—and big media will sink just a little further in the minds of people who are tired of being told they can't be trusted with the truth.

Jared Taylor (email him) is editor of American Renaissance and the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. (For Peter Brimelow’s review, click here.) He is sorry his organization is too poor to give away free copies of The Color of Crime, and urges you to buy it here—$8.95 each, ten copies for $60.