Racial Threat and Social Control: A Test of The Political, Economic, and Threat of Black Crime Hypotheses

Abstract

The oftenobserved association between the sizeof the black population and the amount ofsocial control imposedon blacks has been interpreted as consistent with one of three conceptually distinctperspectives: (1) the political threat hypothesis, (2) the economic threat hypothesis, and (3) the threat ofblackcrime hypothesis. Although these three hypotheses advance differing conceptualizations ofthreat, adjudicating between them has proven difficult. The current study uses county-level data drawn from South Carolina's National Incident-BasedReporting System (NIBRS), race-specific voting data, and demographic data to investigate the validity of each of these racial threat hypotheses. Results from a pooledcross-sectional time-series analysis show that blackon-white crime has a substantivepositive effecton blackarrestlevels. In contrast, no such effect is observed for black-on-black crime. These findings taken together furnish strongsupportfor the threat of blackcrime hypothesis. The curvilinear relationship between the ratio of black-to-whitevotes castin a general election and black arrest levels hypothesized by the political threat hypothesis does not hold for the data analyzed. Additionally, we find no empirical support for the economic threat hypothesis. The implications of these findings arediscussed.Social scientists continue to debate whether the social control of crime is influenced by extralegal factors. Much of this scholarship focuses on the importance of race and social class as determinants of treatment by various social control agents. The major theoretical impetus for these inquiries is the conflict perspective and its ,.. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of

The Conditional Effects of Race and Politics on Social Control

“…Consistent with some other studies showing no direct effect of these variables (e.g. D' Alessio et al 2002;Eitle et al 2002;Ousey and Lee 2008;Parker et al 2005;Shihadeh and Flynn 1996), neither the presence of a Black mayor nor the percentage of the city council that is Black is directly related to Black violent crime arrest rates. However, equations 2-4 suggest conditional effects of all three political variables.…”

“…Jacobs 1979). Still others suggest that absolute minority disadvantage is more important than inequality (Parker et al 2005 Eitle et al 2002;Ousey and Lee 2008;Parker et al 2005;Shihadeh and Flynn 1996). Despite the inclusion of political indicators in some recent racial threat research, I argue these studies have not fully considered the implications of politics for social control.…”

“…Eitle et al (2002) note three distinct forms of racial threat-economic, political, and the threat of Black on white crime.…”

Reassessing Political Explanations for Murders of Police

“…drops so precipitously is not clear as the only difference between the two models is the different specification of the exposure variable, suffice to say the correctly specified model suggests a substantially poorer fit to the data. Eitle et al 2002;Horowitz 1985;Jackson 1989). We expand on this point in the next section, where we extend J&C's analysis and provide a more comprehensive test of political explanations for murders of police.…”

“…Although not included in the original J&C models, we also include a quadratic term for the percent black measure because Eitle et al (2002) and others (Blalock 1967;Horowitz 1985;Jackson 1989) increases in the size of the black population result in greater efforts at control and subordination, but once the size of the black population attains critical mass, blacks should be less subject to the imposition of control due to their increased political or economic power. Under these conditions, one would expect that blacks will be less likely to fatally assault police.…”