"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steven D. Levitt's opening statement to Steve Sailer in 1999 "Slate" debate

Below is the first of four parts of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

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AUG. 23 1999 5:32 PM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

Part 1 of 4 of a debate between Steven D. Levitt and Steve Sailer

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)

By Steven D. Levitt

In recent weeks there has been a lot of media coverage of a paper John Donohue and I recently wrote connecting the legalization of abortion in the 1970s to reduced crime in the 1990s. (A preliminary version of the paper is posted here.) The purpose of the study is to better understand the reasons for the sharp decline in crime during this decade, which, prior to our research, had largely eluded explanation. While there are many other theories as to why crime declined (more prisoners, better policing, the strong economy, the decline of crack, etc.), most experts agree that none of these very convincingly explains the 30 percent to 40 percent fall in crime since 1991.

The theoretical justification for our argument rests on two simple assumptions: 1) Legalized abortion leads to fewer "unwanted" babies being born, and 2) unwanted babies are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect and are therefore at an increased risk for criminal involvement later in life. The first assumption, that abortion reduces the number of unwanted children, is true virtually by definition. The second assumption, that unwanted children are at increased risk for criminal involvement, is supported by three decades of academic research. If one accepts these two assumptions, then a direct mechanism by which the legalization of abortion can reduce crime has been established. At that point, the question merely becomes: Is the magnitude of the impact large or small? 

Our preliminary research suggests that the effect of abortion legalization is large. According to our estimates, as much as one-half of the remarkable decline in crime in the 1990s may be attributable to the legalization of abortion. We base our conclusions on four separate data analyses. 

First, we demonstrate that crime rates began to fall 18 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion across the nation, just the point at which babies born under legalized abortion would be reaching the peak adolescent crime years. In my opinion, this is the weakest of our four data analyses. In a simple time series, many factors are negatively correlated with crime. Furthermore, the world is a complicated place and it would be simplistic to believe that legalized abortion could overpower all other social determinants of crime. 

Second, we show that the five states that legalized abortion in 1970--three years before Roe vs. Wade--saw crime begin to decrease roughly three years earlier than the rest of the nation. This is a bit more convincing to me but still far from conclusive. 

Third, we demonstrate that states with high abortion rates in the mid-1970s have had much greater crime decreases in the 1990s than states that had low abortion rates in the 1970s. This relationship holds true even when we take into account changes in the size of prison populations, number of police, poverty rates, measures of the economy, changes in welfare generosity, and other changes in fertility. This is the evidence that really starts to be convincing, in my opinion. 

Fourth, we show that the abortion-related drop in crime is occurring only for those who today are under the age of 25. This is exactly the age group we would expect to be affected by the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. That is where our paper stops. Our paper is a descriptive exercise attempting to explain why crime fell. While our paper highlights one benefit of allowing women to determine whether or not to bring pregnancies to term, we make no attempt to systematically analyze the many possible costs and benefits of legalized abortion. Consequently, we can make no judgment as to whether legalized abortion is good or bad. In no way does our paper endorse abortion as a form of birth control. In no way does our paper suggest that the government should restrict any woman's right to bear children. Although these are the most interesting issues for the media to discuss, our paper actually has very little to say on such topics. 

I think the crux of the misinterpretation of our study is that critics of our work fail to see the distinction between identifying a relationship between social phenomena and endorsing such a relationship. When a scientist presents evidence that global warming is occurring, it does not mean that he or she favors global warming, but merely that the scientist believes such a phenomenon exists. That is precisely our position with respect to the link between abortion and crime: We are not arguing that such a relationship is good or bad, merely that it appears to exist. 

As an aside, it has been both fascinating and disturbing to me how the media have insisted on reporting this as a study about race, when race really is not an integral part of the story. The link between abortion and unwantedness, and also between unwantedness and later criminality, have been shown most clearly in Scandinavian data. Abortion rates among African-Americans are higher, but overall, far more abortions are done by whites. None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable. 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I am interested in your views on the paper and its analysis, but also on the broader topic of the coverage of scientific research in the popular press, particularly when it relates to sensitive subjects like abortion, crime, or race. Do you think any good comes from a public discussion of academic studies such as this one? What, if anything, could be done to make such public debates more productive?

To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.
   
Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
   

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steve Sailer's first response to Steven D. Levitt in 1999 "Slate" debate

Below is the second of four parts of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

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AUG. 24 1999 3:30 AM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

Part 2 of a 4-part debate between Steven D. Levitt and Steve Sailer

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)

By Steve Sailer

Your open-minded search for the truth, no matter how disturbing it may turn out to be, epitomizes the scientific ideal. Your study of abortion and crime is exactly what the social sciences need more of: courageous, hard-headed inquiries into the big topics that everybody else is afraid to touch. Even more impressive is your behavior since the controversy started. (Some background for readers: On Aug. 15, I circulated a critique of Steven Levitt and John Donohue's theory that legalized abortion reduced crime to the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group. A member passed it on to Steven, and despite his being deluged with media requests, he wrote to thank me for my criticisms. We then started up an e-mail exchange; this Slate "Dialogue" is its public continuation.)

With luck, I'll have room in my next message to respond to your important questions about how to make public and academic discourse less moralistic and more realistic. (Short answer: Junk political correctness.) Today I'll stick to the empirical issues. The problem with your abortion/reduced-crime theory is not that it encourages abortion or eugenic reasoning or whatever, but that it's largely untrue. Your biggest methodological mistake was to focus on the crime rates only in 1985 and 1997. Thus, you missed the 800-pound gorilla of crime trends: the rise and fall of the crack epidemic during the intervening years. 

Here's the acid test. Your logic implies that the babies who managed to get born in the '70s should have grown up to be especially law-abiding teens in the early '90s. Did they?

Not exactly. In reality, they went on the worst youth murder spree in American history. According to FBI statistics, the murder rate for 1993's crop of 14- to 17-year-olds (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975 to 1979) was a horrifying 3.6 times that of the kids who were 14 to 17 years old in 1984 (who were born in the pre-legalization years of 1966 to 1970). (Click here to see the graph.) In dramatic contrast, over the same time span the murder rate for those 25 and over (all born before legalization) dropped 6 percent.

Your model would also predict that the recent decline in crime should have shown up first among the youngest, but the opposite was true. The murder rate for 35- to 49-year-olds has been falling since the early '80s, and for 25- to 34-year-olds since 1991, but the two most homicidal years for 14- to 17-year-olds were 1993 and 1994.

The dubiousness of your theory becomes even more obvious when we break down this post-Roe vs. Wade generation by race.

Now, you say that your theory isn't "about race," but simply about the greater likelihood that "unwanted" babies will grow up to be bad guys. That correlation sounds plausible. Still any realistic theory about abortion and crime must deal with the massive correlation between violence and race. As you note, African-Americans have three times the abortion rate of whites. You don't mention, however, that, as Janet Reno's Justice Department flatly states that "blacks are 8 times more likely than whites to commit homicide." Therefore, blacks commit more murders than whites in total as well as per capita.

So, let's look at just black males born in 1975 to 1979. Since their mothers were having abortions at three times the white rate, that should have driven down their youth murder rate. Instead, from 1984 to 1993 the black male youth homicide rate grew an apocalyptic 5.1 times. (Click here to see graph.) This black juvenile rate also grew relative to the white juvenile murder rate, from five times worse in 1984 to 11 times worse in 1993.

Why, then, is this generation born in 1975 to 1979 now committing relatively fewer crimes as it ages? It makes no sense to give the credit to abortion, which so catastrophically failed to keep them on the straight and narrow when they were juveniles. Instead, the most obvious explanation is the ups and downs of the crack business, which first drove violent crime up in the late '80s and early '90s, then drove it down in the mid and late '90s. That's why the crime rate has fallen fastest exactly where it had previously grown fastest as a result of crack--in the biggest cities (e.g., New York) and among young black males. This generation born right after legalization is better behaved today in part because so many of its bad apples are now confined to prisons, wheelchairs, and coffins. For example, over the last two decades the U.S. has doubled the number of black males in prison, to nearly 1 million.

More encouragingly, the biggest decline in murder from 1993 to 1997 was among the newest generation of black males aged 14 to 17. These kids born mostly in the early '80s survived abortion levels similar to those faced by the crime-ridden 1975-to-1979 generation. Yet, their murder rate in 1997 was less than half that of the 14- to 17-year-olds of 1993. Seeing their big brothers gunned down in drive-by shootings and their big sisters becoming crack whores may have scared them straight.

Admittedly, it's still theoretically possible that without abortion the black youth murder rate would have, say, sextupled instead of merely quintupling. Still, there's a more interesting question: Why did the places with the highest abortion rates in the '70s (e.g., NYC and Washington D.C.) tend to suffer the worst crack-driven crime waves in the early '90s?

To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
  

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steven D. Levitt's response to Steve Sailer in 1999 "Slate" debate

Below is the third of four parts of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

DIALOGUES

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AUG. 24 1999 9:30 PM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

Part 3 of 4 of a debate between Steven D. Levitt and Steve Sailer

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)

By Steven D. Levitt

It is so refreshing to have someone challenge our study based on the facts instead of the knee-jerk reactions I have been hearing and reading about in the press the last few weeks.

The set of facts that you offer is indeed challenging to our theory: The late '80s and early '90s were periods of high inner-city youth homicide, fueled by the crack epidemic, declining juvenile punishment, and the increased availability of handguns to kids. I would never deny that legalized abortion is only one factor among many that affect crime rates. According to our estimates, abortion has had the effect of suppressing crime by about 1 percent per year over the last decade. Compared with the gyrations in the crime rate caused by other factors, this is pretty small stuff. But since the impact of abortion builds year after year as more cohorts of potential criminals are covered by legalized abortion (unlike factors such as crack, which tend to rise and fade), eventually the impact of abortion begins to overwhelm the noise in the data.

Because the time-series data are so volatile, I have always been more convinced by the cross-state changes in crime that we uncover (see my previous e-mail). In particular, we find that by 1997, crime among those under age 25 had fallen much more sharply in high-abortion states than low-abortion states. The same was not true for crime among those 25 and over. I do not have the data at my fingertips to see what was happening across states to 17-year-olds in the early '90s. This is clearly data I should gather and analyze.

Your hypothesis that crack, not abortion, is the story, provides a testable alternative to our explanation of the facts. You argue:

1. The arrival of crack led to large increases in crime rates between 1985 and the early '90s, particularly for inner-city African-American youths.
2. The fall of the crack epidemic left many of the bad apples of this cohort dead, imprisoned, or scared straight. Consequently, not only did crime fall back to its original pre-crack level, but actually dropped even further in a "overshoot" effect.
3. States that had high abortion rates in the '70s were hit harder by the crack epidemic, thus any link between falling crime in the '90s and abortion rates in the '70s is spurious.

If either assumption 1 or 2 is true, then the crack epidemic can explain some of the rise and fall in crime in the '80s and '90s. In order for your crack hypothesis to undermine the "abortion reduces crime" theory, however, all three assumptions must hold true.

So, let's look at the assumptions one by one and see how they fare.

1. Did the arrival of crack lead to rising youth crime? Yes. No argument from me here.
2. Did the decline in crack lead to a "boomerang" effect in which crime actually fell by more than it had risen with the arrival of crack? Unfortunately for your story, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly rejects this claim. Using specifications similar to those in our paper, we find that the states with the biggest increases in murder over the rising crack years (1985-91) did see murder rates fall faster between 1991 and 1997. But for every 10 percent that murder rose between 1985 and 1991, it fell by only 2.6 percent between 1991 and 1997. For your story to explain the decline in crime that we attribute to legalized abortion, this estimate would have to be about five times bigger. Moreover, for violent crime and property crime, increases in these crimes over the period 1985-91 are actually associated with increases in the period 1991-97 as well. In other words, for crimes other than murder, the impact of crack is not even in the right direction for your story.
3. Were high-abortion-rate states in the '70s hit harder by the crack epidemic in the '90s? Given the preceding paragraph, this is a moot point, because all three assumptions must be true to undermine the abortion story, but let's look anyway. A reasonable proxy for how hard the crack epidemic hit a state is the rise in crime in that state over the period 1985-91. Your theory requires a large positive correlation between abortion rates in a state in the '70s and the rise in crime in that state between 1985 and 1991. In fact the actual correlations, depending on the crime category, range between -.32 and +.09 Thus, the claim that high-abortion states are the same states that were hit hardest by crack is not true empirically. While some states with high abortion rates did have a lot of crack (e.g., New York and D.C.), Vermont, Kansas, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Washington were among the 10 states with the highest abortion rates in the '70s. These were not exactly the epicenters of the crack epidemic.

So, what is the final tally? Two of the key assumptions underlying your alternative hypothesis appear to be false: The retreat of crack has not led to an "overshoot" in crime, causing it to be lower than 1985, and even if it had, the states with high abortion rates in the '70s do not appear to be affected particularly strongly by the crack epidemic. Moreover, when we re-run our analysis controlling for both changes in crime rates from 1985 to 1991 and the level of crime in 1991, the abortion variable comes in just as strongly as in our original analysis.

Crack clearly has affected crime over the last decade, but it cannot explain away our results with respect to legalized abortion.

The best test of any theory is its predictive value. The abortion theory predicts that crime will continue to fall slowly for the next 10 to 15 years. Also, the declines in crime should continue to be greater in high-abortion states than in low-abortion states. What do you predict based on your crack theory? If you are willing to wait 10 years, perhaps we can resolve this debate.

To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
   

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steve Sailer's 2nd response to Steven D. Levitt in 1999 Slate debate

Below is the fourth and final part of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

DIALOGUES

E-MAIL DEBATES OF NEWSWORTHY TOPICS.

AUG. 25 1999 3:30 AM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

Part 4 of 4 of a debate between Steven D. Levitt and Steve Sailer

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)

By Steve Sailer

I suspect that both the readers who have stuck it out with us this far and the professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago who heard you present your theory must be thinking roughly along these lines: "Well, I'm not sure I followed all the statistical details, but Professor Levitt's basic point is pure common sense. As long as abortion rids us of more fetuses likely to become gang members, it simply must reduce crime." That would explain why those high-powered academics forgot to point out to you that, contra your theory, when the first generation to "benefit" from being culled by legal abortion reached ages 14 to 17, they went on a homicidal rampage. (Click here to see FBI graph. [Update 2014: see graph here.)

Therefore, rather than mud wrestle in the numbers here, I'll privately send you my technical suggestions. In this essay, I'll step back and explain why this straightforward insight might not actually work in practice.

The widespread assumption that your theory must be correct reveals just how many people deep down believe, whether they admit it publicly or not, that "certain people" are just permanently more incorrigible than others. As a contender for the World's Least Politically Correct Human, I'm sympathetic. It's ironic, but because I've been arguing for years that genetic diversity affects society, I was one of the few to notice in this particular case that crime has risen and fallen not because we are aborting the poor and black and unwanted, but because of that staple of genteel liberal commentary, Cultural Forces (e.g., crack).

Your "differential fertility" logic has a fascinating history. That the poor outbreed the rich was noted at least as long ago as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. A long line of both conservative and progressive nail-biters have worried that a bourgeoisie that's self-disciplined and responsible enough to use abstinence or contraception will someday be demographically swamped by a working class too sexually indulgent and disorganized to prevent pregnancies. The "eugenicists" feared the spread of the lower orders' inadequate genes, while the "euculturalists" dreaded their cruder culture. And agnostics on the subject realized that while disentangling nature and nurture was extremely difficult (only with the advent of twin and adoption studies have we made much progress), the precise mechanism mattered surprisingly little. Whether from genes or upbringing or both, people who are too irresponsible or incompetent to prevent most unwanted pregnancies tend to have fairly irresponsible or incompetent children. Thus, many unreligious right-wingers and WASP progressives (e.g., Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood) supported abortion as the antidote to the bad demographic effects of contraception. Abortion would allow the working class to tidy up its mistakes.

This logic implies that legalized abortion should reduce illegitimacy. And since illegitimacy is closely linked to crime, therefore abortion must reduce crime. Right? Yet, abortion and illegitimacy both soared during the '70s, and then the youth violent-crime rate also soared when the kids born during that decade hit their teens. How come?

In theory, legal abortion reduces murder by being, in effect, "prenatal capital punishment." But, first, it's not very efficient. Like Herod, we have to eradicate many to get the one we want. While genes and upbringing do affect criminality, there's so much randomness that predicting the destiny of individual fetuses is hard.

Second, what if besides a contraceptive-using bourgeoisie and an abortion-using working class, there also exists an underclass to whom, in the words of Homer Simpson, "Life is just a bunch of things that happen"? What if in the '70s members of the underclass didn't effectively use either contraception or abortion, but, being too destitute or distracted or drunk or drugged, they just tended to let s*** happen all the way to the maternity ward? And what if the legalization of abortion gave them an excuse to be even less careful about avoiding pregnancy? In fact, in your paper you cite evidence that 60 percent to 75 percent of all fetuses aborted in the '70s would never have been conceived without legal abortion. If that's what happened across all classes, the increase in careless pregnancies specifically among the underclass might have been so big that it negated the eugenic or euculturalist effects of abortion.

Thus, legalizing abortion would have thinned the ranks of the respectable black working class but not the black underclass. Its cultural influence would therefore have mounted. Just compare the working-class black music of the '60s (e.g., Motown) with the underclass gangsta rap of the late '80s, which spread the lethal bust-a-cap code of the East Coast and West Coast crack dealers across America.

Third, legalizing abortion finished off the traditional shotgun wedding. Earlier, the pill had shifted responsibility for not getting pregnant to the woman. Then, legal abortion relieved the impregnating boyfriend of the moral duty of making an honest woman out of her. This would drive up the illegitimacy rate.

Finally, even more speculatively, but also more frighteningly, the revolution in social attitudes that excused terminating the unborn may also have helped persuade violent youths that they could be excused for terminating the born.

To conclude, you ask for my prediction on crime trends. Because you failed to use data that focused precisely enough on particular generations (e.g., the highly violent group born after Roe vs. Wade in 1975-1979), your model has consistently failed to even predict the past. For example, in utter contrast to your logic, the murder rate for 14- to 17-year-olds even in the low crime year of 1997 was 94 percent higher than it was for 14- to 17-year-olds in 1984. Yet, over the same span, the murder rate for 25- to 34-year-olds (born pre-legalization) has dropped 27 percent. (Click here to see FBI table.

Thus my faith in your theory's ability to forecast the future is limited. Last week, in the Human Biodiversity discussion group, the polymath Gregory Cochran (who was the co-subject of the February 1999 Atlantic cover story on his new Darwinian theory of disease) responded to your prediction that crime will fall slowly for another 10 to 15 years, assuming all else is equal: "A counter-prediction: that all else will not be equal. Social changes are more important to crime trends than abortion, they're still ongoing, and they're likely to dominate." At some point in the future when black teens no longer remember much about the previous generation's self-inflicted crack wound, somebody will invent a new drug. Then we'll be back on another drug-epidemic-driven crime roller coaster.

To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.
   
Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
    

Daily Mail has Tavon White's picture

Tavon, Tavon likes his money
He makes a lot they say

The World's Most Interesting Newspaper, the Daily Mail, comes through again, posting a picture of Tavon White. 

As I mentioned yesterday, Tavon is the head of the Black Guerilla Family prison gang inside a Baltimore jail, where he fathered five babies by four lady prison guards.

I'm not sure why the Washington Post and other American outlets hadn't posted Tavon's picture. Perhaps they were trying to battle racial stereotypes. After all, without pictorial evidence, how could anyone have guessed that Tavon White is black? Or maybe they couldn't find a picture of Tavon at age 12 like they found of Trayvon?

Crime-fighting billionaire advises rest of us

From the Associated Press:

Mayor: Fight Crime by Being More Like NYC 

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says places that want to reduce gun violence might want to emulate the Big Apple.

How movies and videogames are more accurate about recent history than the newspapers

There has been a lot of talk in the news media about how Christopher Dorner's rampage is more or less payback for the bad old days of racism in the LAPD, as exemplified by Dorner's complaints about Rodney King and the Rampart Scandal. 

Rafael Perez

The Rampart Scandal was a huge whoop-tee-doo in the late 1990s that's a good example of how even Hollywood can be less prone to throwing all the facts into the Narrative Blender than the news media. The Los Angeles Times was much celebrated for epic reporting on racism in the Rampart Division, but mostly they just covered up that the four central very bad cops in Rampart were all diversity hires. Indeed, the Big Bad Four had intriguing connections of some sort to the legendary murders going on among famous gangsta rappers.

You might think that exploring the ties between rogue cops and some of the most notorious murders of the 1990s (Biggie and Tupac) would be a good way to sell newspapers, but selling newspapers has long been a lower priority than Shaping the Narrative.

The key figure in Rampart was Puerto Rico-born Rafael Perez, who got himself a short sentence by spilling (or concocting) the beans on dozens of other cops for minor stuff. This suited the LAT's agenda, even though it turned out in court to not amount to a hill of beans.

Oddly, enough, screenwriters saw through the L.A. Times' bias and did a better job of conveying the essence of the story in movies like Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won an Oscar as a bad cop. From my 2001 review of Training Day:

Further, how common are "gangsta cops" in reality? I called one of the LAPD's most prominent critics, "police misconduct" lawyer Winston Kevin McKesson, a protégé of superstar attorney Johnnie Cochran. He remarked that the plot "seems a bit over the top." McKesson said he's sued many cops for excessive force, but of those he's sued, none were "a complete crook." 

McKesson, though, has defended one cop who might indeed fit that description: Rafael Perez. When his theft of a million dollars worth of cocaine from the police evidence locker was finally uncovered, Perez, to win a reduced sentence, incriminated 70 fellow officers in his elite anti-gang unit. Yet, Perez ended up admitting that a large fraction of the worst abuses at Rampart - such as an attempted murder - were his own work, making him look less like a whistleblower and more like Rampart's criminal kingpin. 

Even though Ayer wrote the first draft of his script before the Rampart scandal broke, McKesson noted that there are now "striking similarities" between the character portrayed by Washington and his client Perez. For example, both are black and bilingual, even though McKesson estimates that only three or four out of about 1,000 black LAPD officers can speak Spanish.

Frank Tenpenny

Similarly, the Best Picture winner Crash was an oblique reference to Perez's running amok when assigned to Rampart's C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang program and instead using his badge to become a gangster. Thus, the scene where a white cop shoots a black undercover cop dead and the politicians offer Don Cheadle a promotion, but then Cheadle opens the trunk of the dead cop's car and finds $300,000 in cash -- that happened. (It may be connected, somehow or other, to the deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie. Screenwriters have been fascinated and frightened by this murky chain of events for 15 years.)

Finally, the lead villain in the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Frank Tenpenny, is modeled on this line of cultural inheritance.

So, why can't journalists fictionalize no more than screenwriters?

Dorner = Rambo's "First Blood?"

I've only seen bits and pieces of the 1982 Sylvester Stallone movie "First Blood," in which troubled but heroic Medal of Honor winner John Rambo outsmarts corrupt cops tracking him in the cold mountains, but I'll bet Christopher Dorner has watched the whole thing.

He probably didn't watch The King of Comedy all the way through, however.

As a big movie fan, Dorner has probably moved beyond DVDs to downloading and streaming. But just in case he hasn't, I'd advise the cops to find his DVD player, push the Eject button, and see what he watched right before setting off. It might give them some clues.

Where are the Hispanic flash mob videos?

For a number of years, I've been predicting that, all else being equal, crime should decline as ubiquitous information technology powers us into the This-Will-Go-on-Your-Permanent-Record era. And, indeed, crime rates appear to have fallen during the recession (demonstrating once again that very little crime in modern America is driven by Les Miserables-style stealing-a-loaf-of-bread-to-feed-your-familyism.)

On the other hand, the spread of technology has encouraged some people to draw the opposite conclusions: e.g., that Twitter is great for organizing a flash mob of convenience store looters and that the resulting high def surveillance video will look good on World Star Hip Hop. 

In recent years, we've seen a surfeit of video of Blacks Behaving Badly, validating the crime statistics at the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The new availability of these countless videos has caused much unease in the Mainstream Media, and was likely an underlying factor behind the prestige press's kamikaze hyping of the Trayvon Trayvesty.

On the other hand, where are the Latino-American flash mob videos? Is there a Spanish-language equivalent of World Star Hip Hop that nobody I know knows about? 

I have several vague hunches. One is simply a bell curve explanation: people who want see their crimes displayed online come from the far edges of various bell curves and the black curves are more skewed in those directions. 

Another is that the vast growth in criminality in Mexico keeps the scariest Mexicans employed in Mexico and even sucks in some of the worst Mexican-Americans. When my dad and I would travel in Mexico in the 1960s-1980s, it was pretty safe. By the 1990s, there were guys standing around with AK-47s everywhere. And they were supposed to be the good guys.

Another possibility is that the traditional Los Angeles-style gang life is passe, that it cuts too much into video game-playing time. 

Another idea I don't hear much of is that the 1996 GOP reform that cut down on welfare for immigrants has attracted a better class of immigrants.

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

A New La Griffe essay!

For the first time since 2008, La Griffe du Lion has posted a new essay. It's called Crime and the Hispanic Effect. He builds a regression model for predicting crime rates in cities and finds its largely driven by the percent black. Percent Hispanic doesn't much matter, one way or another.

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

Colorado, Christopher Nolan, and "Following"

From my new essay in Taki's Magazine:

Are criminals in real life ever even one-tenth as fascinating as they are in Christopher Nolan movies? Can you think of a real criminal as intriguing as the late Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight or Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb in Inception? Or is “master criminal” just a fantasy where filmmakers such as Nolan project their own considerable talents onto a class of dismal individuals? 

Whenever some creep shoots a lot of people, as at The Dark Knight Rises midnight showing in Colorado, journalists are expected to generate instant analyses of The Meaning of It All.  

Yet if we have to concoct far-reaching theories based on a sample size of one, I’d much rather ponder somebody accomplished and interesting, such as Nolan. The director’s first movie, Following, a miniature masterpiece from 1998, demonstrates that Nolan has been fretting for his whole career about this question of whether he’s glamorizing lowlifes by portraying them as creative leaders of men, as auteurs modeled on himself.

Read the whole thing there.

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

George Zimmerman, Wrecker

From the Chicago Tribune:

New records released by prosecutors in the George Zimmerman murder case show federal civil rights investigators interviewed dozens of his friends, neighbors and coworkers, but found no one who said Zimmerman was a racist.

And if they had?

This whole brouhaha is basically the equivalent of a 1930s Stalinist show trial of "wreckers." The Five Year Plan not going as planned? Find some engineers to be blamed for throwing wrenches in their turbines out of spite. Blacks still shooting each other in large numbers? Find a Great White Defendant to play the symbolic role of Racist Wrecker. Of course, the whole thing rapidly turned into a fiasco with the GWD turning out to look like a cross between Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez, and the victim of profiling turning out to have a history of burglary.

FBI agents interviewed an array of people involved in Zimmerman's life, including several coworkers. None said they had ever known him to show racial bias. One who saw him the day after the shooting said Zimmerman was "beat up physically and emotionally." 

Agents also interviewed Chris Serino, the Sanford police department's lead investigator in the case. He told agents he believed Zimmerman had pursued Trayvon Martin "based on his attire," and not "skin color." Zimmerman, he said, has a "little hero complex" but is not a racist. ...

 Zimmerman's ex-fiancee', who filed a domestic violence injunction against him in 2005, also had kind things to say about his behavior around blacks, the FBI reported.

He socialized and played basketball with white, black and Hispanic men and "never exhibited any biases or prejudices against anyone and did not use racial epithets of any kind", an agent quoted her as saying. 

The woman told the FBI Zimmerman "began to exhibit overly protective and territorial behavior" after their engagement. Once they moved in together, the relationship "deteriorated," she told agents. She also talked about incidents of violence between them, culminating when they filed domestic-violence injunctions against each other in 2005. 

Zimmerman "often talked about wanting to be a police officer," the ex-fiancée said.

George Zimmerman is the pardo Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

To step back: I've got to figure that, in contrast, the next time the gay lobby decides to go all in on some killing of a gay, they'll make sure to get their ducks in a row better than the black lobby did on Trayvon. And if the story still turns out to be a fiasco, the gays will be able to use their media power to massage The Narrative. Blacks still have a ton of symbolic clout, but they don't have a lot of competent people in positions of power to suavely manage the storyline, so things tend to unravel on them like this. No wonder nice white people are slowly switching from blacks to gays as their Most Favored Oppressed Minority. We live in an era that values skillful marketing above just about anything else, and blacks, while they have moments of genius, generally don't execute as well as gays.

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

More SoCal deep pockets

From the L.A. Daily News:

LONG BEACH — A former high school football star whose rape conviction was thrown out this week plans to sue the state, but will not sue the woman who recanted the rape and kidnapping charge she made a decade ago. 

An attorney for Brian Banks, 26, said in news reports that his client will seek $100 from the state for every day he was wrongfully incarcerated.

Only $100 per day? This poor bastard has to be the only honest man in Southern California. (See next posting for comparison).

Banks walked free on Thursday in a dramatic, 30-second hearing in Long Beach Superior Court during which Judge Mark Kim vacated his conviction. Banks spent five years and two months in prison after pleading no contest to forcible rape in 2003. 

His accuser, Wanetta Gibson, was a high school sophomore when she accused Banks, then 17, of raping her in 2002 on the campus of Poly High School. 

She received a $1.5 million payment from a civil suit brought by her mother against the Long Beach Unified School District for failing to provide a safe environment. 

School district officials wouldn't comment this week on whether they would seek repayment of the settlement.

I'm sure Wanetta and her mom socked the $1.5 million away in T-bills for a rainy day, so there shouldn't be any trouble recovering the fraudulently obtained funds.

Prosecutors have said they have no plans to charge Gibson, now 24, with making false accusations, saying it would be a tough case to prove. She could not be reached for comment. 

Banks' attorney with the California Innocence Project, Justin Brooks, could not be reached for comment Saturday. 

Brooks told the Los Angeles Times that Banks is entitled to $100 a day for every day he was falsely imprisoned under State Law 4900. 

If successful, the lawsuit against the state of California would net Banks about $188,500. 

Banks, a football standout at Poly, had been heavily recruited by colleges, and had a verbal offer for a scholarship at the University of Southern California. 

He told police he had a consensual sexual encounter with Gibson, a classmate — but always maintained that he did not rape her. He pleaded no contest to forcible rape charges to avoid a possible 41-year-to-life sentence in prison if convicted on all the charges, he said. 

After accepting a plea deal, he served more than five years in prison, and was required to register for life as a sex offender. 

Gibson recanted her story a little more than a year ago after "friending" Banks on Facebook and asked to meet with him. 

"I got on my knees and prayed," Banks said this week after his court hearing. "I asked God to help me play my cards right." 

Gibson refused to tell prosecutors the truth, for fear of having to repay the settlement. But attorneys with the California Innocence Project were eventually able to record her recanting the accusation. [He wore a wire when talking to Wanetta.] 

On Thursday, prosecutors conceded the matter, and the judge immediately vacated Banks' conviction. His record is now wiped clean. 

Banks is training six days a week at a gym in Long Beach, and hopes to revive his chance for a football career.

Long Beach Poly sends about one player per year to the NFL (as many as any high school in the country), so his hopes for a pro career hadn't been just the usual teenage pipedream.

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

Euphemisms don't translate well

The parents of two USC students from China who were murdered sitting in their BMW have sued:

Their parents filed a lawsuit recently accusing the university of misrepresenting safety at the campus, where nearly one-fifth of the 38,000 students are from overseas, including 2,500 from China. ...

In the lawsuit, the victims’ parents said the university made false claims about safety in a section of its online application. 

The 15-page lawsuit accuses the institution of hiding behind the word “urban” and not saying the campus is in a high-crime area. It also notes that Chinese students in particular would interpret “urban” to mean the university is in a safe area.

Which colleges are urban and in low crime areas? Kids these days like urban, with good public transportation (in part because drunk driving is punished much more harshly than a generation ago). NYU in Greenwich Village. Harvard, I imagine. Georgetown? Some of the lesser Chicago colleges in the Loop. Depaul is in the heart of Chicago's North Side yuppieville. The U. of Washington in Seattle? But it doesn't seem like that long of a list, unfortunately. Rice and UCLA, where I went, are nicely located in pleasant inner suburbs, but the areas don't really have the pre-Modernist big city feel that the new generation wants. Westwood was the place to go in 1982, but it's sedate today.

The reason why urban and low crime don't go together for most colleges is something like this: the most prestigious colleges are old, rich, and have fancy campuses. But they all had to have their own cohesive, master-planned campuses, unlike European colleges, which tend to be scattered sites within a city. So, prestigious old American colleges are seldom located right downtown in the well-policed skyscraper districts, they are typically a few miles away, where they could obtain a big chunk of acreage a century or so ago for their campus. But the neighborhood is now a moldering inner city. USC is three miles south of downtown L.A. and the U. of Chicago is five miles south of the Loop.

NYU, the exception to this rule, gave up its West Bronx campus in 1973 for a hodgepodge of buildings around Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan, which almost wrecked the college at first, but now is a boon when crime is down 75% in New York.

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

"Creepy:" Was Martin-Zimmerman fistfight a gay bashing?

From the New York Times:

Martin Spoke of ‘Crazy and Creepy’ Man Following Him, Friend Says 

By Serge F. Kovaleski 

... In the sworn interview recorded on April 2, which runs more than 22 minutes, the unidentified 16-year-old said Mr. Martin described a man who was “crazy and creepy” and on the phone, watching him from a vehicle before he started to follow him on foot.

Keep in mind that the cops didn't get to talk to this unidentified girl until almost two weeks after attorney Benjamin Crump coached her through a talk with ABC News, and that there is no recording of this phone call (unless Echelon has it, of course). 

But, this new report, especially the word "creepy" (which might be, for all we know, attorney Crump's suggested replacement for Martin's even more explicit term for sexual deviance), fits in with my surmise back in March that Trayvon Martin might well have thought that George Zimmerman was following him for homosexual purposes. As I blogged then:

It's hardly implausible that Trayvon Martin might have worried that this strange man was following him in the dark for homoerotic purposes, and he might have mentioned that concern to his girlfriend over the phone.  

Of course, if he did, he probably wouldn't have used the term "homoerotic purposes."  

What if Trayvon used the (heavens) "3-letter F-word" to describe Zimmerman? What if he said to her, "I'm going to punch that f__ because I hate f___?"

Chaos in the courtroom!

The media originally pumped up this story under the mindset that, of course, a black child would be terrified of roving white racists like George Zimmerman. I mean, aren't we always looking for an example of an evil white male attacking unprovoked a 17-year-old black male for white racist reasons? Pulitzer! Movie adaptation! I'm sure Trayvon was just as Pulitzer-crazed as we are, so that must be what he was thinking, too, right?

But, what if it wasn't about race? It always made far more sense that if Trayvon was acting perfectly innocent and feeling perfectly innocent (i.e., not casing houses to break into and not looking to score drugs), then the youth was most likely experiencing fear and loathing of a man he suspected to be gay.

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

Zimmerman was right about Martin: "He's on drugs"

From ABC News:

Trayvon Martin Had Drugs in System, Autopsy Found 

By MATT GUTMAN (@mattgutmanABC) , SENI TIENABESO (@senijr_abc) and COLLEEN CURRY 

May 17, 2012 

Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, had the drug THC in his system the night of this death, according to new information obtained by ABC News.

THC = weed.

This is of major importance not because marijuana makes people more aggressive (it doesn't), but because it undermines the indictment's claim that Zimmerman racially profiled Martin, which appears to be the prosecution's main hope in swaying the jury: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what reason could Zimmerman possibly have had for being suspicious of a black male other than his blackness? 

Well, Zimmerman explained his reasons in his 911 call:

We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy. It’s Retreat View Circle. The best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about. [Emphasis mine]

How much worse can this get for The Narrative?

By the way, Matt Gutman of ABC has been doing a lot better work ever since Gucci Little Piggy called him out for playing Peter Fallow (the poisonous English reporter who shills for attorney Al Vogel in Bonfire of the Vanities) to attorney Benjamin Crump.

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

My Zimmerman question to the NYT answered

From the New York Times:

Police Missteps in Trayvon Martin Case: Readers’ Questions Answered 

By SERGE F. KOVALESKI 

Thank you all for submitting such thoughtful questions and insights into the article ["Trayvon Martin Case Shadowed by a Series of Missteps"] about how the Sanford Police Department handled the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, on the night of Feb. 26. ....

Q. Has any solid evidence emerged after all these months of media frenzy that the story George Zimmerman told the police wasn’t true?
– Steve Sailor * 

A. Some Sanford officers were skeptical about certain details of Mr. Zimmerman’s account. For instance, he told the police that Mr. Martin had punched him numerous times, but they questioned whether his injuries were consistent with the number of blows he claimed to have received. They also suspected that some of the threatening and dramatic language that Mr. Zimmerman said Mr. Martin used during the struggle — like “You are going to die tonight” — sounded made up.

And there you have it ...

-------------------------------

* By the way, The New York Times' misspelling of my name is no big deal, but it reminds me of why I've chosen to use a variety of handles that are easier for other people to spell than "Steven Sailer." In elementary school, I noticed that people tended to spell my name "Stephen Sailer" or "Steven Sailor" or "Stephen Saylor," or other variants. And who can blame them? It's naturally confusing.

So, to simplify things for everybody, I decided to use Steve to eliminate the Steven/Stephen problem. Online, I emphasize Steve over Sailer because the former is almost impossible to misspell. I picked iSteve.com because somebody beat me to Steve.com. I use SteveSlr as an email address to get rid of those hard to remember vowels in my last name.

I'd recommend to parents that when choosing a baby name, they consider the inconvenience an unconventionally spelled name can impose on their child, and even the inconvenience their child's altered spelling can cause other children with the conventional spelling.

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

Trayvon's knuckles were injured

From the Los Angeles Times:

An autopsy of Trayvon Martin, the black unarmed teenager who was fatally shot by a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer, shows that his body had injuries to the knuckles, while a medical report on the shooter, George Zimmerman, shows that he suffered a broken nose, two black eyes, and cuts on the back of his head, according to a Florida TV news channel and ABC News. 

What these details, like many others leaked in recent days, will ultimately mean for Zimmerman's high-profile second-degree murder case is unclear, though they could presumably be used by his defense team to bolster his argument that Martin attacked him and beat him up before he was forced to shoot the teenager in self-defense. 

What they do not seem to clarify is how the altercation between the two men started on the night of Feb. 26 at the gated subdivision in Sanford, Fla., where Zimmerman had been watching the teenager and reporting him to police as suspicious. 

Zimmerman, according to the Orlando Sentinel, has told police that Martin approached him from behind that night, punched him in the nose, and began beating him up. Martin's attorneys have played audio of a phone call to ABC News in which Martin, talking to his girlfriend, reportedly told her he was worried about a man following him, and asked the man why he was doing so.

No, no, no. Nobody has played audio of Martin talking to his girlfriend, unless they are at some secure National Security Administration site. As Gucci Little Piggy explained on March 29, when the March 20th ABC story refers to the "existence" of that phone call, "existence" is meant in roughly the sense of "the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire:" it once existed. The phone call that ABC listened to was between the girl, coached by attorney Crump, talking to the parents about what was supposedly discussed on that last phone call. The girl had not gone to the police and all her contacts with the press have been filtered by Crump. 

This might seem like a minor point, but it's evidence of how reluctant the national press is to get the facts straight in this local police blotter item that they chose to make a national whoop-tee-doo, and which has been slowly blowing up in their faces ever since.

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