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What this means is that blacks suffer unduly from the rising crime rates, especially in big city ghettos. Murder is now the leading cause of death among black males 24 to 34. (For white males in that age group, it is car and motorcycle accidents.) Black men are eight times as likely to die in a homicide as are white men. Says Lynn Curtis, former director of the Interagency Urban Initiatives Anti-Crime Program: "The typical violent crime involves two young black males who know each other and get into trivial altercations, which lead to serious injury because they both have weapons."
Ironically, there seems to be less alarm about crime in high-risk black neighborhoods than in white areas where crime is lower. Contends Northwestern University Associate Professor Wesley Skogan: "Our studies show an inverse relationship between fear and levels of crime. People who live in the areas of least crime are often the most fearful."
There are few reliable statistics on Hispanics involved in crimes, since states and localities tend to classify them differently. Generally, they commit proportionately more crimes than do whites and fewer than do blacks, and they are victimized in this midrange too. In California, where 16% of the population are Hispanic, they constitute 19% of the prison inmates. Like other ethnic groups, they tend to join neighborhood gangs. In Hartford, Conn., so many newly arrived young teen-agers from Puerto Rico have become victims of gang warfare that some parents have sent them back to the island for their own safety.
Statistics also show that young people commit most of the violent crime in America. Fully 57% of all arrests for such offenses in 1979 were of criminals under the age of 25; one-fifth were under 18. Although the female prison population doubled through the 1970s, women account for relatively few violent crimes: about 11% of all such arrests in 1979.
For all the arguments among law officers and criminologists about what the statistics really mean, there is widespread agreement on one point: a large share of all violent crime is committed by a surprisingly small group of hard-core criminals. One study of repeat offenders in Washington, D.C., showed that 7% of the criminals arrested in a 4½-year period had been apprehended four times-and this 7% accounted for 24% of all the serious crimes considered solved in those years. In one startling example, in suburban Evanston, Ill., the arrest of one burglar cleared up 163 break-ins. Says Evanston Police Chief William McHugh: "Eighteen hundred burglaries doesn't mean we had 1,800 burglars." The fact that the repeaters are released to strike again and again says a lot about the nation's system of criminal justice (see following story).