II. PREVALENT IMPRESSIONS REGARDING NEGRO CRIME
In its inquiry the Commission met the following current beliefs among whites in regard to the Negro criminal:
That the Negro is more prone than the white to commit sex crimes, particularly rape; that he commits a disproportionate number of crimes involving felonious cuttings and slashings; that the recent migrant from the South is more likely to offend than the Negro who has resided longer in the North; and that Negroes willingly tolerate vice and vicious conditions in the midst of their residence districts. These and similar impressions are compared with the facts as found by the Commission.
III. CRIMINAL STATISTICS
In its effort to secure information regarding Negro crime the Commission sought the only available records kept of all crimes—the police records, especially the annual report of the Department of Police. On examination these records were found to be of questionable value for any accurate presentation of Negro crime, or, in fact, of general crime. In 1913 the City Council Committee on Crime made a study of crimes in Chicago and encountered the same difficulty. Says the report of this Committee: "The police and criminal judicial statistics in Chicago are wholly incomplete and are not even assembled or published by any authority." Further commenting on this inadequacy, it says:
Unfortunately, there is in Illinois no central bureau of criminal statistics through which statistics from the police department, the courts, the jails, prisons, and the probation department are collected and correlated. A state bureau of criminal statistics does exist on our statute books, for, by a law approved June 11, 1912, the State Charities Commission was directed to establish such a bureau with the secretary of the Commission as director in charge. This proposed bureau was charged with the duty of collecting and publishing annually the statistics of Illinois relating to crime, and all courts of Illinois, police magistrates, justices of the peace, clerks of all courts of record, sheriffs, keepers of all places of detention for crime or misdemeanors or violations of the criminal statutes are to "furnish said bureau annually such information on request as it may require in compiling such statistics." Up to the present time, however, owing chiefly to the fact that no appropriation has been made to cover the expenses of this work, no steps have been taken by the executive secretary of the Commission towards putting this law into effect. Moreover, there has never been in Chicago any attempt at an annual "stock-taking" in which the statistics furnished by the various departments and agencies dealing with the problem of crime might be brought together and examined with the hope of determining how far the problem is being adequately met.
Because there has been no systematic handling of criminal statistics, no method has been developed for accurately measuring the prevalence of crime. The Crime Commission expressed its difficulty here in this manner:
It is very important to note that the number of arrests is not synonymous with number of crimes, among others reasons because (1) a large number of persons may be arrested for complicity in a single crime; (2) many innocent persons are arrested through misapprehension and later discharged; and (3) the vast majority of arrests are for petty offenses that are not serious enough to be called "crimes" at all. Some consideration should be given to the question of "new crime." When laws are passed creating new offenses, there may be an increase in arrests without any corresponding increase in criminality. As a matter of fact, however, the new offenses are chiefly those involving misdemeanors and violations of ordinances. New felonies are rarely created. In Chicago the police classification does, however, include two new offenses improperly classed as felonies, "contributing to delinquency" and "pandering."
To the difficulties experienced by the City Council Crime Committee in determining the extent of general crime may be added the even greater difficulty of comparing the crime record of Negroes with that of other racial groups. The sources of the police statistics are the bookings by the desk sergeant in the police station. These are taken from arrest slip notations made by police-station desk sergeants, before whom persons arrested are brought. The ability of these desk sergeants correctly to ascertain the prisoner's race or nationality is open to question. Reports from the Immigrants' Protective League show that the foreigners arrested are often given wrong racial designations. On the other hand the classification of Negroes, even of half blood, is never in doubt. This fact should be remembered in interpreting the figures, for the Negro will be debited with all the crimes he commits, while figures for other groups will probably not indicate the full extent of their criminality. Added to this is the disposition, conscious or unconscious, to arrest Negroes more freely than whites, to book them on more serious charges, to convict them more readily, and to give them longer sentences.
This bias does not appear in the bare figures, which thus seem to substantiate the already existing belief that Negroes are more criminal than other racial groups. An example of this is found in the bookings in murder cases. For the six-year period 1914-19 inclusive, 1,121 whites and 193 Negroes were booked for murder, while 501 whites and only twenty-one Negroes were booked for manslaughter. While Negroes were charged with 17.1 per cent of the murders, they were charged with only 4.1 per cent of the cases of manslaughter. This, of course, takes into account bookings before trial. On the other hand, according to the testimony, they are more easily convicted on the charges on which they are booked. This fact introduces another element in the figures, which, although not representing the actual criminality of Negroes, yet gives plausibility to records. These situations presented such obvious dangers that the Commission considered it best to avoid giving currency to figures which carried such clear evidence of their own inaccuracy and misrepresentation. Since it is necessary to employ some of these figures despite their inaccuracies, the effort has been made to use them only where clear comparisons are possible.