Despite a few highly publicized cases, Los Angeles is not "on the brink" of a major interracial crime wave, three University of California, Irvine scholars have concluded after examining assault, robbery and homicide data in the city's southern police precincts.
The researchers said that, although some crimes involving blacks and Latinos have been "sensationalized," the overall crime statistics suggest that offenders preying on people of their own group is a much bigger problem and should remain the focus of police attention.
"It sort of goes against the more spectacular stories that have been dramatized in the media," one of the researchers, UC Irvine assistant professor John R. Hipp, said of the findings.
"It's far more common to see [violence] going on within groups. We don't see any real trend here."
The study by Hipp and fellow UC Irvine criminologists George E. Tita and Lindsay N. Boggess compared aggravated assault, robbery and homicide cases between 2000 and 2006 in the four precincts of the Los Angeles Police Department's South Bureau against 2000 U.S. Census data.
It found that black offenders were nearly eight times more likely to kill another black person than to kill a Latino, and Latino offenders were nearly twice as likely to kill another Latino.
The robbery and assault picture was similar, the study found: Black offenders were six times more likely to assault those of their own race than to attack Latinos. Black offenders were about equally likely to rob from each group.
Latino offenders were almost twice as likely to assault fellow Latinos -- and almost three times more likely to rob them -- than to assault or rob blacks.
The report was presented to LAPD officials and a draft is being prepared for publication.
For their calculations, the researchers assessed the opportunity for blacks and Latinos to commit crimes against each other based on population size and the degree to which the two groups are intermixed.
They then looked at whether the actual crimes exceeded or fell short of predictions based on these calculations.
They did find what Hipp called "a blip" in one area: African American offenders showed an increased tendency to kill Latinos in 2005, while Latino offenders showed an increased tendency to kill blacks in 2006.
But the total numbers of killings involved were relatively small.
And because there were no similar trends in assaults or robberies, researchers were not sure what, if anything, the blips mean.
