From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, the United States suffered a massive crime wave, including perhaps the biggest sustained rise in violent crime in its history, certainly the biggest in the 20th century (Latzer, 2016). Violent crime rates, as measured by FBI reports of offenses known to police, rose from 161 per 100,000 in 1960 to 758 in 1991, a staggering 371% escalation. Murder rates for 1970 to 1995 averaged 8.97 per 100,000, and in fourteen of these years tolled 9 per 100,000 or more (FBI, UCR Data Online). An estimated 540,019 Americans were murdered in this twenty-five year period, more than the number that perished in all U.S. foreign wars from World War II to Afghanistan combined (DeBruyne & Leland, 2015).
The role of African Americans in the post-60s crime boom illustrates one of the problems with failing to examine historical crime. The Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern and west coast cities during and after World War II had a major impact on the post-60s crime situation (Latzer, 2016, pp. 106, 128–41). As Roland Chilton's (1995)
study of urban homicide demonstrated, between 1960 and 1990, murder arrests of African Americans, approximately 12% of the U.S. population, accounted for an astonishing 65 to 78% of all big city homicide arrests in the nation. Furthermore, between 1965 and 1990, arrest rates of blacks for crimes of violence, including but not limited to murder, were five to nine times the white rates (FBI, 1993, p. 173).
The intellectual climate of the 1960s, shared by criminologists and other social scientists, fixated on poverty and related adverse conditions. Little attention was paid to the economic progress of African Americans, which was considerable. Criminologists at the time and ever since have focused on the nexus between crime and socioeconomic adversities, such as poverty, residential segregation, female-headed households, high unemployment rates, and socially-isolated large-scale communities. Analysts commonly explained, and continue to explain, the exceptionally high crime rates of low-income urban African Americans in terms of these conditions (e.g., Lo et al., 2013, Sampson, 1987).
However, a comparison of black conditions and crime rates at the time of the crime rise with conditions and crime rates of earlier periods produces anomalies. In earlier periods the conditions often were worse while the crime rates were lower. And in the late 1960s, when African American conditions had improved markedly, their crime rates began to escalate dramatically. This is especially noticeable when we compare black conditions and crime in 1940, on the eve of the World War II migration, and in 1970, at the start of the crime tsunami.
In 1940 black homicide victimization rates were 54.4 per 100,000, whereas in 1970 they were 78.2 per 100,000, a difference of 44% (Latzer, 2016, p. 29).
Yet by almost every measure African Americans socioeconomic conditions were better in 1970 than in 1940. “Blacks not only shared in the rising prosperity of the war and the immediate postwar years,” wrote historians Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom and Thernstrom (1997), p. 70), “they advanced more rapidly than whites.” Table 1 gives a snapshot of black socioeconomic progress in the three decades ending in 1970.
United States
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Originally Posted by Petalpusher
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