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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community - 2. Crime
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974 An American Dilemma
One of the most noticeable features of the Negro offenses is the small number of
vicious or serious crimes in the period studied—that is, most of the cases studied were
misdemeanors rather than felonies. There were, it is true, a rather considerable
number of assault cases but a large proportion of these were in connection with
drunkenness. . . . The comparatively large numbers in for possession and selling liquor
and for fraud , . . are partly explained by the fact that quite a number of the
former merely had in their possession a little liquor which they had not yet drunk,
and that most of the fraud cases were instances of jumping small board bills.
There was very little difference noted between the percentages of various crimes
of the two races. In general, the crimes which one committed, most frequently, the
other also tended to commit frequently.
If any one feature . . . may be thought of as characterizing most of the Negro’s
crimes, it is not their viciousness or even their immense numbers, but merely their
petty qualities. , . .
The relatively small proportion of violent crimes committed by Negroes, and the
large proportion of cases of drunkenness, petty larceny, vagrancy, and other lesser
offenses, further enhances the conclusion that there is no innate racial criminal
tendcncy.^^
The study for the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem, made
by E. Franklin Frazier, showed that in the first six months of 1935, 6,540
Negro men and 1,338 Negro women were arrested in Harlem.^^ Of the
male arrests, 31.9 per cent were for policy gambling and 30.9 per cent
were for disorderly conduct. Only 7 per cent were for burglary, robbery,
grand larceny, assault and robbery, and pickpocketry combined 5 5.0 per
cent were for felonious assault j
and only 0.5 were for homicide. About 80
per cent of the Negro women arrested were charged with immoral sex
behavior. Another study showed that 54 per cent of the arrests of all
women for prostitution in New York City were of Negro women, and
that the rate for Negro women was 10 times that for white women.^®
Theft, burglary, and other property offenses are committed mainly
against whites j
assault, murder, and other crimes against persons are
committed mainly against other Negroes. ^‘Premeditated crimes or those
requiring education and cunning do not seem to be so prominent among
colored offenders as do those crimes likely to involve some emotional flare-
up, or some immediate desire or economic necessity.”^®
Explanations of Negro crime have usually started out from the statistical
finding that Negroes commit more crimes than do whites. If this is done,
the first group of “causes” of Negro crime to be considered are the
discriminations in justice which we summarized at the beginning of this
section. Because the criminal statistics reflect police and court practices as
much as they do crime, it is impossible to prove whether or not the Negro
crime rate would be higher than the white crime rate if there were no
discrimination. In the same way, the general characteristics of the Negro
population—poverty, ignorance of the law, lack of influential connections,
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