by J. Pharoah Doss

Decade after decade progressives and conservatives argued over whether systemic factors or cultural dysfunctions were more detrimental to Black communities. The problem with this debate was that the two sides always talked past each other.

Four years ago, Bad Faith podcast host Briahna Joy Gray, who was also the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, debated Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury about whether racial disparities are caused by culture.

According to Loury, there was a great deal of overlap between systemic factors and cultural dysfunction.  Gray maintained that it was a mistake for conservatives to put resolving cultural issues ahead of eliminating systemic factors. According to Gray, trying to overcome racial disparities by first changing the culture of any group is a “fool’s errand.”

The “clearance rate crisis” can help us determine if Gray was right.

The Murder Channel’s senior writer and investigative journalist Larry Katz wrote an article titled “The Clearance Rate Crisis: Why Half of All Murders Go Unsolved” in March.

The national homicide clearance rate, which calculates the proportion of solved cases, has been declining for decades, according to Katz. Authorities cleared more than 90 percent of homicides in the 1960s. The national average currently stands at about 50 percent.

Black homicide rates are six times higher than White rates (20.6 per 100,000), Black offending rates are seven times higher than White rates (26.5 per 100,000), and 94 percent of Black victims are killed by Black offenders, according to the most recent comprehensive data compiled by theglobalstatistics.com. Black men between the ages of 18 and 24 are the group most at risk.

Katz stated, “Here is the most uncomfortable fact in homicide clearance research: cases involving Black victims are cleared at significantly lower rates than cases involving White victims. Multiple analyses have found that cities across the US clear homicides involving White victims at roughly twice the rate as those involving Black victims.”

Katz concluded that the racial disparity reflects broader patterns of resource allocation, geography, and investigative priority. In other words, these racial disparities are the result of systemic failure.

Let’s examine Katz’s explanations for the decline in clearance rates in more detail.

The witness problem.  Many homicides occur in communities with historically adversarial relationships with police. Fear of retaliation and distrust of law enforcement reduces witness cooperation. Most homicide cases go cold without witnesses.

Resources and staffing.  Homicide units in major cities are chronically understaffed. Detectives carry caseloads that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. When a new killing happens, an older case gets deprioritized.

The shift in homicide geography.  Decades ago, homicides were more often crimes of passion—domestic disputes, bar fights—where the perpetrator was known to the victim and often obvious to investigators. Today, more homicides are stranger-to-stranger events tied to drug markets or interpersonal conflicts, which are structurally harder to solve.

Within these reasons there is what Professor Loury described as cultural overlap. 

Black progressives don’t acknowledge the overlap because they see culture as the “complex whole” of knowledge, belief, art, morals, and customs that distinguish a group of people, and they feel obligated to protect their Black cultural heritage from stereotypes and degradation.  

Black conservatives, on the other hand, are not referring to the “complex whole” of “Black culture” but counterproductive subcultures that individuals embrace.

The core issue, which Katz failed to address, is “gang culture,” particularly in relation to “drug markets” and “witness intimidation.” 

The predominance of “gang culture” creates a “culture of silence” in which potential witnesses will not cooperate with the police, but this problem is exacerbated when Black residents do not trust law enforcement due to the “culture of corruption” inside police departments.

It’s not just Black conservatives who focus on subcultures.

Ten years ago, prominent Black progressive author Ta-Nehisi Coates had a conversation with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a pragmatic and moderate Democrat. Their discussion centered around these disturbing statistics: Between 1980 and 2015, over 630,000 Americans have been killed; that’s close to the same number of Americans killed in both World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.  Half of the 630,000 were Black Americans, who are only 13 percent of the population.  In New Orleans, there were between 150 and 200 murders per year, which was eight times the national average. 95 percent of victims were Black Americans, aged 16-25, and 88 percent knew each other.

As New Orleans’ mayor, Landrieu was already aware of all the systemic factors that disproportionately impacted the city’s low-income districts, but he stressed that the “culture of violence” that afflicts these regions needed to be addressed.

It’s crucial to remember that Landrieu did not claim that “Black culture” is violent.

He described the “culture of violence” as a “pattern of behavior that developed over time that has produced a certain result, over and over again, becoming a normative action for some people.” 

Coates disagreed with Landrieu’s wording. He defended “Black culture” by praising it as a “culture of self-preservation.”  Then he said no one should be shocked by the murder rate given the poor condition of these Black neighborhoods.  When the moderator of the discussion asked Coates if he assumed this “culture of violence” existed among certain members of Black communities, how does society break the cycle? 

Coates replied that the solution was simple: It requires the destruction of White supremacy in this country.

Coates prioritized the impractical while Landrieu focused on the practical, and if prioritizing the practical is a “fool’s errand,” then Black neighborhoods need more fools than progressives.