I believe this change is happening, and probably at the pace shown in the graph, but I just want to point out you have to be especially careful with statistics applied to the hispanic population. There are much greater measurement errors both in the numerators (identifying how many of the incarceration are actually hispanic) and denominators (how many Hispanics are here).
On the numerator, there is a lot of fluidity both in how people self-id and how they are identified by others when it comes to Hispanic identity. People change from one census to another, or are marked one thing by one arresting officer, a different thing by the next one.
On the denominator undocumented / illegal immigrants are a bigger part of the Hispanic population than for other ethnicities, and the undocumented are notoriously difficult to count and track. Add to that there are always Hispanics coming in, legally or otherwise, as well as going out to return to their original country.
So basically the Hispanic rate could be 50% higher or 50% lower...who knows
All good points, but a more interesting question is WHY did this happen? As a Hispanic who grew up in Compton, Ca in the 80's and 90's and still has family living there, I posit a few reasons:
1. Technology. Everyone has a cell phone now and anything done is fundamentally done in the eyes of everyone. This would contribute to an overall reduction in crime, not specifically Hispanic. But its such a callosal point its worth mentioning right at the beginning.
2. If you ask the friends I have living in Compton, they will say it was deportations. Do anything serious - even in California - and you get deported. This is a confounding variable though. It doesn't just reduce one less criminal, it also changes the culture dramatically. Less new people to feed the criminal networks.
3. Immigration restrictions are certainly playing a role. Mexicans crossing over now have to get significantly higher income to cross (coyote fees are like $10k now, years salary in Mexico). Then there is the Venezuela and Colombia affect (Venezuela is crumbling, which causes an exodus of the high income - and low crime - population to flee to USA).
4. All play a factor but my biggest answer is: culture. Women suddenly, around 2000, stopped valuing gang members. Ask any Hispanic who grew up in LA during the 80s and 90s and they will tell you that you almost had to be a gangster to get play in the dating market. It was high premium. Even ugly dudes scored higher if they were from a gang. This all changed in the 2000s and its bound to have downstream consequences. Why this sudden change?
Anyway it's a fascinating puzzle, but one thing I'm fairly certain of is that it wasn't because of any real policy issue. The ground level is much more dynamic than policy experts assume.
On your point 4, I wonder if it's related to the way housing prices soared? Making $ was more valued because no one wants to end up homeless. Being in and out of jail is very rough on your financial situation and most street gang members, even those dealing drugs, are not making major $. The bank teller, or entry level IT worker who lives on his own and might one day afford a house looks a lot better when you see 30 something gangbanger's coming out of prison being forced to live with mom again. Back in the 80s the recent ex-con could still afford his own place.
What's remarkable about these numbers is the lower Hispanic jail incarceration rate occurs despite: a lower median age, lower socioeconomic status, and some degree of discrimination. Which throws in to question how important those factors really are when studying crime and arrests.
Right! I came across this in some previous work I did on life expectancy modeling.
To sum up, Hispanics appear to live much longer than white people in the United States, despite lower socioeconomic status, which is very contrary to the usual trend. Theories explaining this phenomena boil down to "it's because they are healthier in some way" or "the numbers are wrong b/c population and deaths are being miscounted in some way'
I was pretty open to both sides of the debate, and likely there are multiple contributing factors. But covid has really pushed me towards believes "the numbers are wrong". It sure seems that Hispanics in the United States, and in the countries that have recently sent so many immigrants (mexico foremost among them) are experiencing very bad rates of covid deaths, relative to whites. Excess covid deaths seem linked primarily to age and health and given that we know that Hispanics are younger, on average, it seems very likely that health factors like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems are behind most of the difference.
Be careful Matt, your friends at Vox will start attacking you for inferring Hispanics are a model minority. They are now frantically sifting through statistics to push back against this take. Expressing positive feelings about the success of a minority group is such a racists thing to do. No wonder you have to slum it at Substack!
I'm less concerned about prompting that reaction from that crowd than I am about the prospect of seeing some extremely counterproductive articles with titles like "we need to talk about Hispanic privilege." But both are bad.
I've never bought the 'POC' formulation. The Black experience is unique, closer to the Native American experience than to Hispanics, who are more analogous to the Italians or even the Chinese. The political battles going forward will be for the loyalty of Hispanic voters. They are a growing demographic while whites are in slow decline and Blacks are staying roughly steady.
Yup, the ethnic history of the United States can be broken down to 3 groups at the 10,000 feat level.
1. Native Americans: hated and despied by White Majority for land they held. Whites aggressively stole that land and pushed them into the unwanted parts of the country. Now that that mission is completed present anti-Native American racism is at the margins but impact from history still huge. Probably easiest to fix with pure reparations.
2. Whites: Majority and dominant ethnic group. Definition continually expands. Once a new group to the country reaches a certain level of acceptance with whites, intermarriage becomes extremely high. Label may change in 21st century. But based on present trends current whites, Asians and Hispanics will fall into this group.
3. African Americans: brought into the country as slaves. Massive level of racial hatred still felt by non-African Americans for them. Explicit discrimination quite common. Implicit discrimination as well. Discrimination, racial hatred against African Americans, by far, biggest societal problem
For antiblack racism, too, that traces to slavery, it's likely that to the extent there's a resolution it won't be any kind of grand moment, like a reparations bill or mass repentance or anything else like that, but that it will just fade into the past as the population mixes and changes, new immigrants arrive, including from Africa, and the old categories just become archaic.
There's a rear-guard action on both the right and the "antiracist" left to demarcate and preserve existing categories, but time marches on and so long as that's not backed up by law, as it once was, it's unlikely to succeed.
+1 I've noted for at least the last 20 years that "anti-Hispanic" sentiment is virtually always anti-immigrant sentiment when you drill into it, not genuine racism, and I've been fully expecting disparities between Anglos and Hispanics to diminish over time as Hispanic immigrants assimilated and the native-born Hispanic population matured.
In today’s world it’s inconceivable that Italians wouldn’t be considered white. But what was the consensus c. 1890? As far as I know there was a lot of concern about the hordes of Irish and they were very white and already spoke English.
Concerns about Italians and Irish were less about racial categories and more about nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. That's not to say there was on talk about diluting the pure stock of NW European genes and culture, but that talk didn't get as far as making it onto any census forms. It did however lead to immigration form that effectively shut down further immigrations from Southern and Easter Europe for several generations.
A real, real thing that we have probably forgotten in recent generations. This was the intense meaning in Kennedy's presidency for Catholics of a certain generation.
The politically correct position is to contend that Italians of that era weren't considered white, but that's objectively a lie - no state ever had laws banning ethnic Italians from voting, owning property, marrying other white people, etc. in the manner blacks, Native Americans, East Asians were discriminated against.
One tangential but interesting question here is the anomalous class position of cops, in that a cop can make a middle-class income without a college degree, and that's increasingly rare. Cops can make middle-class money without being middle-class people. I haven't seen any studies of the role of cop jobs in intergenerational class mobility, but it would be interesting to know.
Nursing is similar, though it requires a degree the desire can be earned at a community college. It is a typical path for an adult student going back to college, and employment is not too contingent on who you know.
It’s also hard physical labor in a way white-collar middle class jobs aren’t.
Are you including benefits as well as salary? Here in New York, the union contract with the city gives every cop a 35% contribution to their pension every year and I have no idea how much in healthcare benefits. All adds up, and all paid by taxpayers, most of whom making a lot less.
We don't include benefits for any other jobs when comparing. I mean teachers get two months of the year off, plus long spring break and winter break. That generally isn't included in evaluating teacher pay.
Private sector companies don't much emphasize benefits when they talk 'salary' because they're piddling. The average 401(k) match in the private sector is 5%, vs 35% if you're a cop, and I suspect something pretty close to that for teachers.
> From 1997 to 2016, the proportion of police officers who were African-American was stable, whereas the proportion who were Hispanic increased 61%. This helps explain why a June 2021 Gallup poll found that the proportion of Hispanics expressing “a lot” or “a great deal” of trust in police was 49%
Correlations are not causation! Maybe they trust police more for other reasons and thus are more likely to be become a police officer.
This is even more true with Asians probably. Lot of Asians in Queens and other places very pro-cop. Also, why aren’t you using “Latinx” instead of Hispanic? :)
Bingo! It is a "conservative" theme to frame issues -- trade, immigration, tax reform, LGBTQ rights, voter suppression, policing reform, vaccine mandates -- as zero sum identity politics. Liberals need to be sure our reforms are positive sum and then organize and campaign on that basis.
Yep, we need both conservative and liberal impulses. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it's bad. And even if the change is good, too rapid of change can still cause a host of problems.
I agree with that, but do not think "too much" or "too far" is usually the problem. My favorite example: The problem is not too much or too little action on climate change but the wrong kind, investments and regulation, rather than taxation of net CO2 emissions.
Speaking of Hispanic Americans and police, I heard a story of a Hispanic cop from California who decided to retire to the Wyoming/Montana border and start doing airport shuttle rides because he liked driving and talking to people (this is how my family met him).
Anyway, he also had a nice sports car and kept getting pulled over for being a brown man in a nice car—until he went to the local sheriff and introduced himself and his ex-cop background. Then word got around not to hassle the retired cop with a nice car.
This was over a decade ago that B I heard this story, so longer since it happened, but I thought it was an illustration of summer of the trends in this piece.
So do we have an idea *why* this has shifted so much? Did I miss a link in the article?
Living in a heavily hispanic area, my naive guess would be this is simply what assimilation looks like. The majority of Americans are honest and hard-working people, and in my experience this is especially true of immigrants and their children. I would say the general perception in my neighborhood is that Hispanics are the hardest working people here and that they form the backbone of our economy. There can be cultural tension sometimes, but perceptions are strongly positive and overall tension is low.
Is this just me and my local experience, or does this sound like the general trend across most of the country?
The evidence points to something else impacting violent crime rates other than incarceration rates. My favorite theory is lead in gasoline made us violent:
But those mechanisms should suggest a decline in crime and incarceration overall, without suggesting any difference in this change between racial or ethnic groups - unless there's reason to believe that one racial or ethnic group was more affected by one of these things than others.
Without searching and going by distant memory, I believe that building highways that cut through certain minority neighborhoods and, through housing discrimination and economic disparities, having some minorities live near freeways and other busy roads subjected them to higher levels of lead from the exhaust of vehicles using leaded gasoline. I think that the Cross Bronx Expressway was cited as an example with possible repercussions for children growing up inhaling those leaded fumes.
I've heard this most strongly for Black neighborhoods rather than Hispanic ones, but in any case, this effect seems to be occurring at least a decade or two later from the main effect that is claimed to be driven by the end of leaded gasoline.
Highways were built through white neighborhoods as well as black. During much of the leaded gasoline era, inner cities were largely white in population (including the neighborhoods around the Cross Bronx Expressway). You'd expect to see some effect, earlier. Do we?
I believe this change is happening, and probably at the pace shown in the graph, but I just want to point out you have to be especially careful with statistics applied to the hispanic population. There are much greater measurement errors both in the numerators (identifying how many of the incarceration are actually hispanic) and denominators (how many Hispanics are here).
On the numerator, there is a lot of fluidity both in how people self-id and how they are identified by others when it comes to Hispanic identity. People change from one census to another, or are marked one thing by one arresting officer, a different thing by the next one.
On the denominator undocumented / illegal immigrants are a bigger part of the Hispanic population than for other ethnicities, and the undocumented are notoriously difficult to count and track. Add to that there are always Hispanics coming in, legally or otherwise, as well as going out to return to their original country.
So basically the Hispanic rate could be 50% higher or 50% lower...who knows
All good points, but a more interesting question is WHY did this happen? As a Hispanic who grew up in Compton, Ca in the 80's and 90's and still has family living there, I posit a few reasons:
1. Technology. Everyone has a cell phone now and anything done is fundamentally done in the eyes of everyone. This would contribute to an overall reduction in crime, not specifically Hispanic. But its such a callosal point its worth mentioning right at the beginning.
2. If you ask the friends I have living in Compton, they will say it was deportations. Do anything serious - even in California - and you get deported. This is a confounding variable though. It doesn't just reduce one less criminal, it also changes the culture dramatically. Less new people to feed the criminal networks.
3. Immigration restrictions are certainly playing a role. Mexicans crossing over now have to get significantly higher income to cross (coyote fees are like $10k now, years salary in Mexico). Then there is the Venezuela and Colombia affect (Venezuela is crumbling, which causes an exodus of the high income - and low crime - population to flee to USA).
4. All play a factor but my biggest answer is: culture. Women suddenly, around 2000, stopped valuing gang members. Ask any Hispanic who grew up in LA during the 80s and 90s and they will tell you that you almost had to be a gangster to get play in the dating market. It was high premium. Even ugly dudes scored higher if they were from a gang. This all changed in the 2000s and its bound to have downstream consequences. Why this sudden change?
Anyway it's a fascinating puzzle, but one thing I'm fairly certain of is that it wasn't because of any real policy issue. The ground level is much more dynamic than policy experts assume.
That's all really interesting
On your point 4, I wonder if it's related to the way housing prices soared? Making $ was more valued because no one wants to end up homeless. Being in and out of jail is very rough on your financial situation and most street gang members, even those dealing drugs, are not making major $. The bank teller, or entry level IT worker who lives on his own and might one day afford a house looks a lot better when you see 30 something gangbanger's coming out of prison being forced to live with mom again. Back in the 80s the recent ex-con could still afford his own place.
What's remarkable about these numbers is the lower Hispanic jail incarceration rate occurs despite: a lower median age, lower socioeconomic status, and some degree of discrimination. Which throws in to question how important those factors really are when studying crime and arrests.
Right! I came across this in some previous work I did on life expectancy modeling.
To sum up, Hispanics appear to live much longer than white people in the United States, despite lower socioeconomic status, which is very contrary to the usual trend. Theories explaining this phenomena boil down to "it's because they are healthier in some way" or "the numbers are wrong b/c population and deaths are being miscounted in some way'
I was pretty open to both sides of the debate, and likely there are multiple contributing factors. But covid has really pushed me towards believes "the numbers are wrong". It sure seems that Hispanics in the United States, and in the countries that have recently sent so many immigrants (mexico foremost among them) are experiencing very bad rates of covid deaths, relative to whites. Excess covid deaths seem linked primarily to age and health and given that we know that Hispanics are younger, on average, it seems very likely that health factors like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems are behind most of the difference.
The "numbers are wrong" theory also jibes with a better-understood phenomona, the race-crossover in life expectancy: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-69892-2_795-1
Shh, don't let the English departments know about this. Where they are going to get their funding if everyone is turning white??
Be careful Matt, your friends at Vox will start attacking you for inferring Hispanics are a model minority. They are now frantically sifting through statistics to push back against this take. Expressing positive feelings about the success of a minority group is such a racists thing to do. No wonder you have to slum it at Substack!
I'm less concerned about prompting that reaction from that crowd than I am about the prospect of seeing some extremely counterproductive articles with titles like "we need to talk about Hispanic privilege." But both are bad.
I've never bought the 'POC' formulation. The Black experience is unique, closer to the Native American experience than to Hispanics, who are more analogous to the Italians or even the Chinese. The political battles going forward will be for the loyalty of Hispanic voters. They are a growing demographic while whites are in slow decline and Blacks are staying roughly steady.
Yup, the ethnic history of the United States can be broken down to 3 groups at the 10,000 feat level.
1. Native Americans: hated and despied by White Majority for land they held. Whites aggressively stole that land and pushed them into the unwanted parts of the country. Now that that mission is completed present anti-Native American racism is at the margins but impact from history still huge. Probably easiest to fix with pure reparations.
2. Whites: Majority and dominant ethnic group. Definition continually expands. Once a new group to the country reaches a certain level of acceptance with whites, intermarriage becomes extremely high. Label may change in 21st century. But based on present trends current whites, Asians and Hispanics will fall into this group.
3. African Americans: brought into the country as slaves. Massive level of racial hatred still felt by non-African Americans for them. Explicit discrimination quite common. Implicit discrimination as well. Discrimination, racial hatred against African Americans, by far, biggest societal problem
"Massive level of racial hatred still felt by non-African Americans for them."
You're going to need to present some pretty strong evidence for a statement like that.
For antiblack racism, too, that traces to slavery, it's likely that to the extent there's a resolution it won't be any kind of grand moment, like a reparations bill or mass repentance or anything else like that, but that it will just fade into the past as the population mixes and changes, new immigrants arrive, including from Africa, and the old categories just become archaic.
There's a rear-guard action on both the right and the "antiracist" left to demarcate and preserve existing categories, but time marches on and so long as that's not backed up by law, as it once was, it's unlikely to succeed.
+1 I've noted for at least the last 20 years that "anti-Hispanic" sentiment is virtually always anti-immigrant sentiment when you drill into it, not genuine racism, and I've been fully expecting disparities between Anglos and Hispanics to diminish over time as Hispanic immigrants assimilated and the native-born Hispanic population matured.
In today’s world it’s inconceivable that Italians wouldn’t be considered white. But what was the consensus c. 1890? As far as I know there was a lot of concern about the hordes of Irish and they were very white and already spoke English.
Some of the coverage of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial spoke of Italians as being other than white. This was 1921.
Concerns about Italians and Irish were less about racial categories and more about nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. That's not to say there was on talk about diluting the pure stock of NW European genes and culture, but that talk didn't get as far as making it onto any census forms. It did however lead to immigration form that effectively shut down further immigrations from Southern and Easter Europe for several generations.
"Concerns about Italians and Irish were less about racial categories and more about nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. "
I would argue that today's concerns about immigration are likewise not usually racist. But just concerns about too much immigration too fast.
You’re forgetting about the ever present threat posed by popery.
A real, real thing that we have probably forgotten in recent generations. This was the intense meaning in Kennedy's presidency for Catholics of a certain generation.
The politically correct position is to contend that Italians of that era weren't considered white, but that's objectively a lie - no state ever had laws banning ethnic Italians from voting, owning property, marrying other white people, etc. in the manner blacks, Native Americans, East Asians were discriminated against.
By that theory the Jews had nothing to complain about either. I think we can agree that Anti-semitism was still a thing even if not codified into law.
Anti-Semitism was and is a thing. Bigotry and racism aren't synonyms. (All racism is bigotry; not all bigotry is racism.)
The pace of Hispanic assimilation to Anglo norms really is amazing.
Yesterday's "Yglesias" is today's "Humphreys."
One tangential but interesting question here is the anomalous class position of cops, in that a cop can make a middle-class income without a college degree, and that's increasingly rare. Cops can make middle-class money without being middle-class people. I haven't seen any studies of the role of cop jobs in intergenerational class mobility, but it would be interesting to know.
Nursing is similar, though it requires a degree the desire can be earned at a community college. It is a typical path for an adult student going back to college, and employment is not too contingent on who you know.
It’s also hard physical labor in a way white-collar middle class jobs aren’t.
"Middle class" like $200k-$300k p.a. from OT, much higher than this PhD ever earned.
Some of these guys make a killing. And earn a lot, too.
Are you including benefits as well as salary? Here in New York, the union contract with the city gives every cop a 35% contribution to their pension every year and I have no idea how much in healthcare benefits. All adds up, and all paid by taxpayers, most of whom making a lot less.
We don't include benefits for any other jobs when comparing. I mean teachers get two months of the year off, plus long spring break and winter break. That generally isn't included in evaluating teacher pay.
I've been at companies where they present total compensation analysis that covers all the benefits too.
Given that benefits can add up to 20-30k a year (or more). It make sense to include them
Private sector companies don't much emphasize benefits when they talk 'salary' because they're piddling. The average 401(k) match in the private sector is 5%, vs 35% if you're a cop, and I suspect something pretty close to that for teachers.
It bankrupted Detroit.
Was it that or losing 65% of their population?
> From 1997 to 2016, the proportion of police officers who were African-American was stable, whereas the proportion who were Hispanic increased 61%. This helps explain why a June 2021 Gallup poll found that the proportion of Hispanics expressing “a lot” or “a great deal” of trust in police was 49%
Correlations are not causation! Maybe they trust police more for other reasons and thus are more likely to be become a police officer.
(not that this takes away from your overarching point)
This is even more true with Asians probably. Lot of Asians in Queens and other places very pro-cop. Also, why aren’t you using “Latinx” instead of Hispanic? :)
Hey. Who's this new guy? :)
Welcome, Keith. Good article to kick off with — Easy to understand, well argued, fact based and makes an interesting point with many implications.
Are you going to be writing here again?
Thanks, just happy to be here today!
Bingo! It is a "conservative" theme to frame issues -- trade, immigration, tax reform, LGBTQ rights, voter suppression, policing reform, vaccine mandates -- as zero sum identity politics. Liberals need to be sure our reforms are positive sum and then organize and campaign on that basis.
Right, like not caring about inequality, right? Just growth?
Yep, we need both conservative and liberal impulses. Sometimes change is good, sometimes it's bad. And even if the change is good, too rapid of change can still cause a host of problems.
I agree with that, but do not think "too much" or "too far" is usually the problem. My favorite example: The problem is not too much or too little action on climate change but the wrong kind, investments and regulation, rather than taxation of net CO2 emissions.
My ideal for politics is for progressives to put forward some "half-baked" ideas for improving things and conservatives "bake" them. :)
Speaking of Hispanic Americans and police, I heard a story of a Hispanic cop from California who decided to retire to the Wyoming/Montana border and start doing airport shuttle rides because he liked driving and talking to people (this is how my family met him).
Anyway, he also had a nice sports car and kept getting pulled over for being a brown man in a nice car—until he went to the local sheriff and introduced himself and his ex-cop background. Then word got around not to hassle the retired cop with a nice car.
This was over a decade ago that B I heard this story, so longer since it happened, but I thought it was an illustration of summer of the trends in this piece.
how law enforcement ought to work, not
Great article!
So do we have an idea *why* this has shifted so much? Did I miss a link in the article?
Living in a heavily hispanic area, my naive guess would be this is simply what assimilation looks like. The majority of Americans are honest and hard-working people, and in my experience this is especially true of immigrants and their children. I would say the general perception in my neighborhood is that Hispanics are the hardest working people here and that they form the backbone of our economy. There can be cultural tension sometimes, but perceptions are strongly positive and overall tension is low.
Is this just me and my local experience, or does this sound like the general trend across most of the country?
The evidence points to something else impacting violent crime rates other than incarceration rates. My favorite theory is lead in gasoline made us violent:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
Another one with some evidence is the rise in abortion rates. Unwanted children are more likely to cause crime, according to that theory:
https://www.prb.org/resources/new-study-claims-abortion-is-behind-decrease-in-crime/
Is is probably more than one factor though.
But those mechanisms should suggest a decline in crime and incarceration overall, without suggesting any difference in this change between racial or ethnic groups - unless there's reason to believe that one racial or ethnic group was more affected by one of these things than others.
Without searching and going by distant memory, I believe that building highways that cut through certain minority neighborhoods and, through housing discrimination and economic disparities, having some minorities live near freeways and other busy roads subjected them to higher levels of lead from the exhaust of vehicles using leaded gasoline. I think that the Cross Bronx Expressway was cited as an example with possible repercussions for children growing up inhaling those leaded fumes.
I've heard this most strongly for Black neighborhoods rather than Hispanic ones, but in any case, this effect seems to be occurring at least a decade or two later from the main effect that is claimed to be driven by the end of leaded gasoline.
Highways were built through white neighborhoods as well as black. During much of the leaded gasoline era, inner cities were largely white in population (including the neighborhoods around the Cross Bronx Expressway). You'd expect to see some effect, earlier. Do we?