Word: crimed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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PERHAPS the touchiest and most taboo-ridden major problem facing big-city governments in the U.S. is the high crime rate among Negroes. Probing into the subject, TIME correspondents found city politicians evasive, police officials wary, Negro leaders defensive. But as the facts piled up, it was plain that the curtain of evasion conceals a social illness of disturbing scope. For a report on the problem and its causes, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Negro Crime Rate: A Failure in Integration...
THEY are afraid to say so in public, but many of the North's big-city mayors groan in private that their biggest and most worrisome problem is the crime rate among Negroes...
Negro leaders sometimes argue passionately that arrest statistics wildly distort the comparative incidence of crime among Negroes and whites because cops are more likely to arrest Negroes for petty crimes or on mere suspicion. Protests Executive Editor Charles Wartman of Detroit's Michigan Chronicle, a Negro weekly: "The number of Negroes booked is at least partially indicative of subconscious if not conscious racial persecution on the part of police officers...
...inequality of treatment by the police may actually tend to shrink rather than inflate the statistics of Negro crime. Says Newsman Wartman in the next breath: "When Negroes violate social morals-sex, drinking, gambling-white cops bypass this as 'typically Negro.' " Many Negro leaders protest that the police are far from diligent enough in dealing with crimes committed against Negroes-and Negroes are the victims in the great majority of Negro crimes of violence. Since Negroes, even when they are victims or innocent bystanders, are often wary of calling the police, many offenses of disorder and assault...
Whether the statistics of Negro crime overstate or understate the reality, they are shrouded from public attention by what a Chicago judge last week called a "conspiracy of concealment." In many cities, Negro leaders and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People put pressure on politicians, city officials and newspapers to play down the subject. Fearing loss of Negro votes, few elected officials dare to resist the pressures...