When the data is all there and no one wants to acknowledge it.

From Race and Violent Crime by Eugene Volokh.  

No new information, and that is no slight towards Volokh.  The facts laid out in the article have been known for the better part of twenty years and the trends have not changed materially.  Volokh is responding to an argument by a law professor of magnificent ignorance.

An article by a criminal law professor Thursday in the Columbus Dispatch included this assertion:

The reality is that Black-on-Black crime is a myth, and that Black and white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates, but Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.

Yet I think this is not the reality, at least as to violent crimes of the sort that are usually labeled "black-on-black" when committed by black criminals against black victims. (Blacks and whites do seem to commit drug possession and drug distribution crimes at relatively similar rates, but in this post I focus on violent crimes.) As best we can tell,

• blacks appear to commit violent crimes at a substantially higher rate per capita than do whites;
• there seems to be little aggregate disparity between the rate at which blacks commit violent crimes (especially when one focuses on crimes where the victims say they reported the crimes to the police) and the rate at which blacks are arrested for crimes; and
• the black-on-black crime rate is especially high. 

Then he lays out the data from multiple sources demonstrating that not only are the above statements true but the degree to which they are true.

Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were 12.5% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were 60.4%. It thus appears from this data that the black per capita violent crime rate is roughly 2.3 to 2.8 times the rate for the country as a whole, while the white per capita violent crime rate is roughly 0.7 to 0.9 times the rate for the country as a whole.

It also appears that the arrest rates for violent crime are roughly comparable to the rates of offending, especially if one takes into account those offenses reported to the police (which is a choice of the victims, not of police departments). And the great bulk of such violent crime is intraracial.

And it is even more true when you shrink your population set to murder as a subset of violent crime.

The point is that this data is available, longitudinally tracked, has been reasonably well known in research circles for at least a couple of decades and yet almost never manifests in the debates around policing and officer involved shootings.  With these disparities in violent crime commission, of course there are going to be disparities in arrests and police engagement.  

If the root cause is not police behavior, which the disparities in commission supports, then we should reduce our focus on police (while retaining a focus on improving training) and refocus on the root causes, which are the group disparities.  That is where we ought to be making progress and for two decades the chattering classes have steadfastly averted their eyes.