The Ugly Origins of Black Crime Statistics

Ever wonder why police departments use (flawed) stats to defend their actions?

Welcome to Skipped History, a web series by Ben Tumin looking at events, moments, and people conveniently skipped in U.S. history. Want to receive these videos in your inbox three times a month? Click the button below:

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Good morning! Today’s story is about the person who first made the statistical argument that Black people are more likely to be criminals. Click on the video below to watch.

This story comes from Professor Khalil Muhammad’s book, The Condemnation of Blackness. You can learn more about his book here.

I’d also recommend checking out an episode of NPR’s Throughline from June 4th, 2020, where Professor Muhammad talks about the history of policing in the north and the south. The podcast is filled with illuminating tidbits about how and why police forces came into being. As he says, “There's no way to separate the goodness of policing from the messiness of the context in which it's born.” Word.

You’ll find the full text of this week’s Skipped History episode below. See you next Thursday!

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Hello, I’m Ben Tumin and welcome to Skipped History.

Today’s story is about the person who first made the flawed statistical argument that Black people are more likely to be criminals, an argument that police departments still use today. I read about it in The Condemnation of Blackness by Professor Mohammad.

Dr. Mohammad discusses how people today are trained, both in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, to see Black people as criminals.

But those ideas didn’t just suddenly appear out of the racist void—that distinction belongs to Stephen Miller, who even in high school had a certain je ne rai-cist about him.

Rather, after the Civil War, white southerners really wanted to maintain a racial hierarchy, so they came up with ways to justify why slavery had occurred and why Black people still “needed” to be controlled. That’s where Frederick Hoffman, a statistician for Prudential insurance, came into play.

Born in Germany, Fred arrived in the U.S. in 1884. He bounced around for a few years before ending up in Atlanta, where in 1891, he married Ella George Hay. Ella, or should I say, Cruella, was the daughter of a Confederate soldier and granddaughter of a plantation slave owner, so bigotry was a proud family tradition that she gladly passed on to Fred.

On top of this nurturing environment at home, Fred later studied at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. There, Fred combined his budding passion for racism with his budding talent in statistics.

Around the same time, new nondiscrimination laws, like an act in Massachusetts “to prevent discrimination by life insurance companies against persons of color,” were forcing insurance companies to offer Black people the same benefits for the same premiums that were guaranteed to white people.

Prudential Insurance, one of the leading sellers of life insurance at the time, wasn’t so keen on the new legislation, because it meant they’d have to place the same value on Black lives as on white lives, and that might offend some of their customers including, sources tell me, Garrett from the Bachelor.

So, Prudential hired Fred to prove that discriminating against Black people was statistically justifiable. Fred came through, and then some.

In 1896, he published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, the first book-length study to include a nationwide analysis of Black crime statistics.

Citing things like arrest stats of different nationalities among Norwegians, Swedes, and Russians, and comparing them to arrest rates of Black people, Fred pointed out that foreigners made up 32% of the population and 30% of total arrests, so about even, y’know, what you’d expect, but Black people made up 1% of the population and almost 10% of arrests.

To which you and I might say, ya doi, you’re comparing arrest rates of people who’d been enslaved and still faced systemic discrimination with the whitest people in the world. But Fred said the stats show the exceptional “criminality of the negro” and that, “The downward tendencies of the colored race, therefore, can only be arrested by radical and far-reaching changes in their moral nature.”

In other words, using analysis on par with the time I wrote a paper saying all endangered whales should move to Des Moines, or when Ted Cruz… analyzes anything at all,  Fred drew the sweeping racist generalization that Black people were more likely to be criminals because of who they were; because of their inherent “moral nature.”

And as it turns out, telling a corporation and white supremacists what they want to hear is a winning strategy in America. Fred’s innovative tactic of blaming crime on race was replicated by intellectuals who spread the idea to both the general public and legislators looking to justify the Jim Crow laws that were then taking shape.

And though Fred has disappeared from most history books, we still see his argument in use today. For instance, do you remember stop and frisk in New York, in which 90% of the people stopped were people of color? Well, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly pulled a Fred and defended the policy by saying, "The statistics reinforce what crime numbers have shown for decades: that… assailants were disproportionally black and Hispanic."

In his book, Dr. Mohammad also cites the example of the Ferguson Police Department, which after facing accusations of systemic racism in the wake of killing 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2015, also pulled a Fred and defended its actions by saying the “harsh and disparate results” were not “problems with police or court practices, but instead reflect a pervasive lack of ‘personal responsibility’ among ‘certain segments’ of the community.”

Put another way, “certain segments’” of the community had problems with their inherent moral traits.

And we still feel Fred’s legacy in other ways, too. Twenty years after the publication of Race Traits, Fred would leverage his growing reputation to torpedo the U.S.’s first and maybe best attempt at adopting universal healthcare. Tune in next time to learn about that bit of skipped history.