Race and crime reporting posted by Richard Seymour

I haven't written anything for the last few days because, to use a shopworn colloquialism, I have been swamped with work. Writing, mostly - I have a lot of new shit coming your way, so if you have somehow neglected to purchase and peruse Liberal Defence, you're about to get way behind in your reading. Anyway, I wanted to mention something. A while back, when Rod Liddle averred that young African-Carribean men were responsible for the overwhelming majority of violent crime in the capital, he had a host of reactionary defenders. They asserted that the statistics bore out his argument, (they did not), and that he was the real anti-racist because he was dealing with a serious issue without allowing it to be siezed upon by racists (this is easily refuted by having a quick look at the comments underneath the offending post, and subsequent efforts). Liddle was simply recasting an argument that has been a racist commonplace since significant numbers of Commonwealth immigrants arrived in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. (See Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack for a detailed account of this.) The statistics are just so much fungible matter for the prosecution's rigged case.

One of the points I made at the time was that there are complexities in the construction, classification, reporting and prosecution of crimes that are simply ignored in the angry diatribes of the ageing white men who largely populate the commentariat. Official statistics tend to show that non-white people are over-represented in arrests, prosecutions and convictions in a number of crime categories. This is a million miles away from saying that young African-Carribean men are responsible for the "overwhelming majority" of rapes, robberies, gun crimes, etc. And there were some anti-racist bloggers who suggested that lots of defineable groups are over-represented in crime statistics - young people, poorer people, etc. Sociological commentary has tended to attribute the overrepresentation of black people in some crime categories to their overrepresentation among the poorest of the working class, the unemployed, etc.

That is a reasonable approach, in that it refutes the relevance of 'race' or some essentialised 'culture' in such debates. But it does also assume that the statistics are reliable, essentially accurate, and unlikely to be skewed in a way that is 'racially-laden'. And that assumption is not a safe one. The government occasionally gathers information about this sort of subject, though it is only selectively publicised. And the Home Affairs Select Committee did produce a report in May 2007, after a lengthy inquiry, that is worth digesting. This is the report. There is some intricate analysis, as well as a measure of arse-covering advocacy for the police. It is a study of black over-representation in certain crime categories, and while it sought to buttress the then Blair government's narrative concerning a crisis in black communities, its caveats are extremely interesting. Note what it says about the government's own findings with respect to the distribution of criminal behaviour among different ethnic groups:

Evidence from the Home Office's Offending, Crime and Justice survey suggests white young people and those of mixed ethnic origin are more likely to report offending behaviour than young males in other ethnic groups, including black young people.[26] The findings from Home Office self-report surveys have been remarkably similar over time.[27] The most recent sweep of the survey found white males aged from 10-25 were "far more likely" to have committed an offence within the last year than young males in other ethnic groups (28% compared with a range of 12% to 19% for other ethnic groups).[28] The survey found that once young black people committed an offence, they were more likely to come to the attention of the police.

In fact, it should be said that even if they hadn't committed an offense, young black people were more likely to come to the attention of the police. Black people of all ages were three times more likely to be arrested, and six times more likely to be stopped and searched, by police. They are less likely to be given bail, or let off with a caution. And they are more likely to receive the most punitive sentences. There is more, of course, and I am sceptical of the broader thrust and conclusions of the report. But the above raises the question: even if Liddle's claims were close to accurate, even if they weren't manufactured on the basis of a half-remembered Daily Mail article, what would the statistics be evidence of? The Home Office's findings, quoted above, indicate that they would at least partially be evidence of the extent of racist discrimination by the institutions of criminal justice. In other words, the very evidence that the state continues to oppress ethnic minorities, not least young black men, is what would be being used to damn them.

Labels: blair, crime, knife crime, media, metropolitian police, police, racism, tough on crime

Aspects of a racist diatribe posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: bnp scum, crime, knife crime, racism, right-wing

"Failed by the system" posted by Richard Seymour

One of the ways the tabloids exhibit their basic indifference to the real problems around knife crime is in their indifference to its victims. When Leon Francis was stabbed to death at the age of 24, newspapers like The Sun chose to focus on his conviction for armed robbery, and to treat his murder as a matter of gang warfare. What they didn't care to know was that Leon Francis, having emerged from prison, had been trying to change his life around, and was frustrated by those supposedly there to help. Socialist Worker did what the big newspapers ought to have done. They spoke to his mother, Jackie Ranger, and found out about how the system failed him. Read on...

Labels: knife crime, racism, tabloid frenzy

Crime and punishment in the neoliberal twilight posted by Richard Seymour

Last year it was gun crime, this year it is knife crime, and next year it will be blunt object crime. There is hardly a day that passes without a headline about another young man who has been stabbed, usually in south London. And this is not to be dismissed. It is a serious issue. Regardless of the overall statistics, which show violent crime to be quite low compared to, say, the early 1990s, the problem is concentrated in a number of run-down working class areas and the risk is experienced in an elevated way there. And while it is true that people generally overestimate their own chances of being subject to violent crime, an artefact of a politically-driven campaign to frighten and demoralise people, in some areas and for some population groups the risk is very real. Yet, to have the issue serialised as a tabloid shriek-fest is possibly the least appropriate way to address the problem. Joan Smith pointed out the other day that serious and ongoing violent crime against women isn't receiving this treatment (apparently she has forgotten that misogynistic violence is only a media topic if Muslims are involved). Endemic violence against children by authority figures is also generally ignored.

Nonetheless, this being the topic du jour, and quite a serious one, what is the cause of it? One hears from pundits that young black men in particular are prone to violence because they exist in a survivalist subculture that values macho behaviour and endorses violence (blame Fifty Cent again). One also hears that they often come from 'broken homes' (those 'deadbeat dads' and 'absent black fathers') and thus don't form a strong identification with social norms. Various associated explanations - drugs, 'gang culture' etc - are posited with equal gravity. I simply take it as obvious that these kinds of explanations, more often than not, are about scapegoating population groups deemed in the ruling culture to be somehow 'alien' and a problem in and of themselves. Moreover, these explanations are incoherent. There are those who have listened to the So Solid Crew without blasting someone's head off. There are those who have bought and even sold drugs without knifing someone to death. And some people from single parent families are perfectly average human beings who don't carry knives with them. Again, the fact that these explanations neither explain nor cohere is not strictly relevant, since their purpose is to create an overriding impression of menace and disorder. A problem whose boundaries are not defined by race is given a racist twist in such analyses. It is the 'New Barbarism' thesis transplanted into New Cross and Stockwell. Even where it isn't explicitly racist, it is doggedly reactionary, as when commentators recycle Blair's old speeches on 'respect' and its putative breakdown. Can't we just go back to the 1930s, when everyone knew their place and the kids could get a clip round the ear from a disgruntled bobby if they misbehaved?

The scholarly research points to alternative conclusions, with radical policy implications. For example, one recent study by Fajnzylber et al on the causes of violent crime took a trans-national analysis of various trends and found one outstanding factor: income inequality raises violent crime rates dramatically. This is backed up by earlier research. Related factors such as educational inequality, and 'ethnic polarisation' (racism in the society) contribute as well, while the rate of such crimes fluctuates with the economic cycle (much of violent crime being property-related). The dry statistics point to a reality that is palpable for anyone who lives in London, where all of these social ills co-exist, and where inequality of all kinds is glaringly apparent. It is not so surprising that there are a relatively small number of extremely damaged individuals who, as Yuri Prasad argues, "see little value in human life – neither theirs, nor anyone else's".

What about drugs? Andrew Resignato at Florida State University has summed up a wealth of literature on this topic, and concludes that there is in fact scarce data to support the thesis of a positive correlation between drug use and violent crime. On the contrary, there is a much stronger correlation between the enforcement of drug laws and violent crime. Drug users who do have to support the cost of their habit (inflated by dint of its control by criminal cartels) through crime tend to opt for non-violent means. On the other hand, the more investment in policing to control the sumptuary habits of the poor, the more likely there is to be violent crime. This is unsurprising. Create an illicit capitalist economy in the hands of extra-legal cartels embroiled in competition with one another, with that competition delegated down to those lowest in the hierarchy, and you get a great deal of violence in the process. I strongly suspect that states which impose drug laws are well aware of this, and that their function is to facilitate a strongly interventionist police force with ready-made pretexts for detaining and imprisoning people considered dysfunctional to the society's requirements. It keeps 'problem' populations, generally the urban poor, under tight surveillance. It criminalises them before they have necessarily even broken the law.

If talking tough and ratcheting up repression, with heavily policed schools and widely used stop-and-search applied in a racist fashion, worked, then American cities would be the safest in the world. Yet this is exactly what New Labour, and the Tories after them, will continue to do. Can we even take them seriously when they claim to want to deal with the problem? Is it not obvious that the periodic episodes of hysteria on what are chronic problems are opportunistic attempts to expand the state's repressive capacities? Isn't this just what we have seen in other fields, such as 'anti-terror' legislation, whose dystopian precepts were being driven through parliament by New Labour well before 9/11 or 7/7? We now have a criminal justice system with an extraordinary scope for control, with such disgraceful policies as curfews and ASBOs, in which non-criminal behaviour becomes the subject of sanction. Given that crime rates are not soaring, given that the risks that people face of encountering violence have not substantially altered, the most likely explanation is that as the neoliberal era enters its most decadent phase, states are attempting to manage the adverse social by-products of the descent with an iron fist.

And next year, when they've got round to blunt object crime, the newspapers and politicians will pretend that it's all new again, that we've never been here before, and that whatever repression is in place isn't enough.

Labels: 'war on drugs', crime, inequality, knife crime, neoliberalism, racism

The wrong sort of person posted by Richard Seymour

A liberal conspirator interrogates the police on Boris Johnson's new metal scanners...

Labels: boris johnson, knife crime, metropolitian police, racism