Lumps, with your post in mind you can equal up the problems between white and black youths very adequately.
The truth is we have a major problem with the youth element in the London boroughs, if that be knife crimes, drugs, robberies etc.
If you care to study these figures the main problem is black youths, now I'm not trying to be racist and please do not think I'm another Ironside.
If you believe the news broadcasts, the paper reports ... proportionally who is the major problem at the moment? They are obviously not the only element but they far outway any other.
Actually when you get behind the newspaper headlines and look at the real stats, crime isn't doing the mad mushrooming out of control that the media would have us all believe.
Look at the 12 month rolling stats here.
http://www.met.police.uk/crimestatistics/docs/hist_perf.pdfDoesn't really fit with the moral panic that's currently ongoing does it. Murder down, robbery down, gun crime down, Most Serious Violence and Assault with Injury down. What it tells us is all these stabbings that were being terrified by at the moment, were almost certainly happening last year and the year before to an even greater extent, but each one wasn't headline national news like they've been this year.
As for your comments about the racial profiling of certain categories of crime they're true enough. Street robbery has a higher proportion of black kids arrested, charged and convicted than amongst the general population, but in burglary it's lower than in the general population. Both are quite nasty property crimes and when you put them together the racial profile of the offenders is pretty much the same as the general pop?
What does that tell us? Well fuck all really. It's clearly more than a statistical anomaly, more of a clutural trend, but there are still black burglars and there are still white muggers, so it's not like you can generalise in investigating those crimes.
Overall there is a higher proportion of non -white people in prision than in the general population, about 10% compared to about 2-2.5%, but when you look at the stats at every stage of the policing and judicial system that's not suprising. Non-whites are 5 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, they're 4 times more likely to be arrested, more likely to receive a custodial sentence, get noticeably longer sentences than white people.
If you police a community more closely, are more inclined to imprison them, and almost always lock them up for longer, you're going to find there are more of them inside.
Let's face it the 19th century there were very few black people living in London but there was still plenty of street crime. Take the black faces away tomorrow and I can't imagine the streets would suddenly be wonderfully safe.
