Crime statistics: Government agencies are normally ultra-enthusiastic about breaking out Hispanics as a separate demographic category ... except when it comes to crime statistics. Then, most Hispanics are lumped into "White," which has two effects from a political point of view: It makes it harder for citizens concerned about immigration to call attention to the question of why we are importing a gigantic number of new criminals annually. And it makes the black-white crime ratio look not quite as horrendous by inflating the "white" crime rate with Hispanics (who are imprisoned at 2.9 times the non-Hispanic rate).

This stratagem also makes police work less effective because the official shorthand descriptions of the suspects are misleading. The VDARE.com blog has done us the favor of posting the pictures of the 14 Mexican and Guatemalan farmworkers, no doubt illegal immigrants, who have been arrested in Florida for the kidnapping and gang rape of a woman. All are listed by the sheriff's office as "W/M" -- White Males -- but at most 1 of the 14 might strike the average citizen as what we think of as white. Can you imagine being told to look out for 14 "white males" on the loose and then running into these desperados?

(Also new in VDARE, Nicholas Stix's in-depth report on "Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…Police Corruption."

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More crime-race bilge: USA Today columnist DeWayne Hickam uses genuine numbers to prove that racism is the cause of more blacks than whites being in jail:

Bill Bennett's thesis: Racist? Maybe. Wrong? Absolutely.

Of the men and women behind bars last year, 910,200 were black; 777,500 were white and 395,400 were Hispanic, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics...

The Bureau of Justice Statistics' figures represent only those who were jailed for a crime. But according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, more than twice as many whites as blacks (6.7 million to 2.6 million) were arrested in 2003 for committing a crime. Whites made up 70.6% of all people arrested that year — and 60.5% of those arrested for violent crime. Blacks totaled 27.0% of all arrests and accounted for 37.2% of the people arrested for committing a violent crime.

And 2003 was no fluke.

A check of the arrest statistics gathered by the FBI from 1999 through 2003 shows that substantially, more whites than blacks were arrested in each of those years. Why does the black inmate population in jails and prisons exceed that of whites when so many more whites are arrested?

Maybe Bennett and others who view blacks as a criminal class are blinded by their myopia. Maybe they just never bothered to compare the government's data on who gets arrested in the country with who ends up behind bars.

Uh, DeWayne ...

- Because blacks who get arrested have on average committed worse crimes on average than whites, such as homicide, armed robbery, and aggravated assault, which come with longer prison terms. The "Color of Crime, 2005" (new report largely written by Ian Jobling) reports that:

"This means that when all crime categories are added together, blacks were more than twice as likely to be arrested as [whites & Hispanics lumped together]. Blacks were four times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, and no fewer than eight times more likely to be arrested for robbery."

- Because, on average, individual blacks who get arrested get arrested more often than individual whites who get arrested. When criminal background is controlled for, according to "Color of Crime," convicted blacks are 2% less likely to go to prison and get sentences 6% longer -- only minor differences.

- And because a sizable fraction of the whites who get arrested each year aren't white as the government otherwise uses the term, but are Hispanic. You'll note that if you add together the "white" percentage of arrestees (70.6%) and the black percentage (27.0%), you get 97.6% of all arrestees, leaving only 2.4% left over to account for American Indian, Pacific Islander, and Asian arrestees. Obviously, the Hispanic "ethnic" group has been completely excluded from this arrest breakdown, with most of them being assigned to the "white" race.

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Meanwhile, as the debate surges over whether or not Bill Bennett got the idea that Freakonomist Steven D. Levitt's abortion-cut-crime had an explicitly racial component from Levitt himself or from evil old me, over on Levitt's Freakonomics blog, triviality reigns. The last four postings by Levitt or his co-author Stephen J. Dubner consist of the following burning topics:

Sumo in Vegas
Freakonomics at Columbia University?
Lojack for Bikes?
Oh, Crap! [about dog poop in NYC]

By any chance, do you get the impression that Levitt is trying to dodge the Bill Bennett controversy and hopes it all blows over so he can go on being a highly paid celebrity instead of becoming another sacrificial victim to political correctness?

Levitt's cowardice is all very understandable on a what's-in-it-for-me basis, but how are we ever going to break the reign of political piety over free speech unless one of the media's fair-haired boys like Levitt takes a stand?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer