Peter Winkler: Professor Loury, hundreds of thousands of people in American cities have been protesting that police treat black people more harshly than other populations. The reason, they say, is systemic racism. What do you think?
Glenn Loury: This is a representation that has developed a life of its own. The claim is: the police are hunting black people, black people are at risk, there is an epidemic of violence against black people—unarmed, innocent black people.
There is a problem, but I think its scale is exaggerated. There are approximately 330 million people in the United States, and there are many tens of thousands of encounters between citizens and the police every day. We take half a dozen, maybe a dozen, admittedly outrageous, disturbing incidents of police violence, and we form this into a general account of how people are treated. I think that’s dangerous.
Winkler: But wasn’t the incident in Minneapolis extraordinary in its nonchalant brutality?
Loury: I don’t want to understate it: the case is terrible. It is difficult to look at the images. There was nothing good about it; it’s certainly not good policing. But you still don’t know what exactly happened. This requires an in-depth investigation. Even so, people have started to call it a lynching, and to say that it characterizes the nature of racial relationships in America today. This is a kind of collective hysteria.
I am aware that millions of people are horrified by what they see as systemic racism in this case. But I repeat: I am waiting for the investigation to be completed. This applies to all such incidents. That they happen is nothing to dismiss, but I deny that these incidents are representative of the everyday experience of African-Americans.
I am a contrarian, and I have refused to follow the mob opinion that led to the recent turmoil. And I’m also convinced that this is about more than what happened to George Floyd. That event was a catalyst, and I hope we can finally talk about the broader framework and the circumstances in which racial charges are made in the United States.
Winkler: Even a superficial look at the statistics confirms that there are more confrontations, including violent ones, between blacks and the police. Isn’t that evidence of racist prejudice?
Loury: Not necessarily. Every year, more whites than blacks are shot by the police in the U.S. But it is true that the number of blacks killed by police, relative to population, is higher. However, the problem of police violence affects all ethnic groups.
Moreover, the likelihood that an individual will come into conflict with the police depends on the frequency with which that individual behaves in a manner that attracts police attention. Criminal behavior is not equally distributed across all population groups. African-Americans are overrepresented in prison because they commit more acts that can be punished with prison.
Winkler: Can you elaborate?
Loury: Blacks make up an average of around 40 percent of inmates in prisons and jails, but they make up no more than 15 percent of the population. If you look at the statistics, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that this overrepresentation can be explained by racist prejudices of the police or the courts. Rather, the numbers show that this is due to an overrepresentation of blacks who violate the law.
It’s legitimate to ask why black men commit more crimes than whites. But it is a fact that they commit massively more homicides; almost 50 percent of homicides, while representing maybe 6 percent or 7 percent of the U.S. population. Or consider robbery: many more whites are victimized by blacks than vice versa, speaking in absolute numbers, not per capita.
Part of the reason why the police have had so many difficult encounters with black people is because the crime rate in black areas is much higher. For example: If the police want to arrest a driver in a black neighborhood, they must be prepared for the possibility that the driver might have a gun on him. Statistically speaking, this is generally not the case—but experience has shown the likelihood that such a dangerous situation will arise is higher in black areas.
Winkler: But you yourself admit that what happened in Minneapolis was bad police work. Is anger at the police understandable?
Loury: The main threat to the quality of life of people living in black areas is the criminal behavior of their fellow citizens, most of whom happen to be black. Black people in American cities are victims of rape, robbery, and murder to a very significant degree, and the perpetrators are almost always black. The protection of life and property is the most important task of the state, and many African-Americans cannot feel safe in their homes. The police are part of the solution to this problem. Black people need the police more than other people do.
Of course, the police must treat all citizens with respect.
. . .
Loury: We need to focus much more on the means through which people acquire the techniques, skills, and behaviors that make them productive members of society. I call that development. It can be about education but also about behavioral, emotional, psychological, and social development. You learn restraint, patience, postponing reward, and things like that. When I look at statistics and find high rates of school failure, the low percentage of blacks in the professions—lawyer, doctor, engineer, or scientist—when I see the high rate of criminality and violence that is endemic in black communities, I see a failure in development, in people reaching their full human potential.
Please understand, that’s not just a question of mistakes or poor choices by these individuals or their families. It’s also about schools that are far less good in areas where many black people live. It is undoubtedly partly related to discrimination and the legacy of that discrimination. Blacks, for example, started with significantly less wealth.
Still, it’s a common mistake to think that we are still in the middle of the twentieth century and that the decisive obstacle to the successful inclusion of blacks in society is racial prejudice. Many people insist that we debate racism, face the injustices of history, and so on. Instead, they should be looking at our children and asking: Can they do math? Can they read a text and understand it? Can they cooperatively get involved in social groups? And when I see that this is sadly not the case with many black children, I believe I am seeing not simply “racism,” but something that is more specific and that is remediable—the obviously insufficient development of their human potential.
We find that immigrants, wherever they come from, have much better success rates than certain African-Americans. One of the main reasons for this is that these groups arrive here with a different culture; they have different, value-oriented expectations of the behavior of their fellows.
Also see “Brands, shut up: Put an end to corporate Black Lives Matter virtue signaling“