The Myth of Racial Fingerprints on Crime

A troubling story has been unfolding this month in Mexico. We first learned two weeks ago of mass graves across the border from El Paso, Texas. Victims of violent drug cartels were reported buried on ranches outside Juarez. As many as 300 bodies, early reports said.

Less than a dozen corpses have been unearthed so far, and reporters have down-scaled their calculations of the carnage. Yet the impact of this horrifying story should not be underestimated. We’ll know the final body count long before we fathom the damage done to the way Mexico and its citizens are perceived in the United States.

This disturbing crime scene feeds the worst fears of some Americans: Evil lurks on our southern border and threatens to creep across if we don’t stop it.

Crime stories are the stuff of anti-immigrant hysteria in California. So it was no surprise to find accounts of the Juarez killings all over the paranoid Web site of Voice of Citizens Together, a San Fernando Valley group that warns of a takeover by Mexican immigrants and subsequent collapse of American society.

The group devotes a full page to what it calls the “The Killing Fields of Mexico.” But aside from massacres, the site carries a running log of crimes committed right here in the United States by people with Spanish surnames--wife-stabbers, drunk drivers, embezzlers and fugitives making runs for the border.

The message is unstated but unmistakable: Latino culture breeds criminals.

The discredited idea that some ethnic groups are more crime-prone than others is not new, and not exclusive to extremists. Even students at our top colleges argue that minorities commit more crime in California.

At UC Irvine, Prof. Paul Jesilow has heard such racial myths put forth like dogma in his criminology classes. Some pupils point to the high proportion of minority inmates in California prisons as evidence of a link between crime and race.

But the link is an illusion, say Jesilow and other experts. People ignore the underlying causes of crime--poverty, culture clashes, crowded cities. They overlook the fact that we rarely find street gangs among the Latino middle class.

“Not only is there not a gene for criminality, but it is a dangerous way to think,” Jesilow told me last week. “It is the same type of thinking that produced an Adolf Hitler and leads to ethnic cleansing.”

Another myth: Rich and poor are equal before the law. Not so, states Jesilow, coauthor of “Myths That Cause Crime,” a 1992 book published by Seven Locks Press in Santa Ana.

“In truth, the wealthy have the capacity to protect themselves against prosecution, and the invisibility of their crimes prevents detection,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, if arrested, the poor are less likely to get out of jail before trial, more likely to be convicted and more likely to be imprisoned if convicted.”

In a recent update of a landmark 1968 study, the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation warned that crime in the United States has been exacerbated during the last three decades by a “vast and shameful inequality in income, wealth and opportunity.” The hate groups apparently missed that news item, which appeared a week after the Juarez graves came to light.

Many readers have pointedly challenged me to face up to the fact that crime is a minority problem, pure and simple. Some even remind me that the Aztecs conducted human sacrifices, as if to suggest I’ve inherited the genes of savagery.

One reader from Cerritos noted the notorious gang shooting of a little white girl when her parents made the wrong turn in a Mexican neighborhood of L.A. The 1995 atrocity, he claimed, would never have happened in a white part of town.

“No, Mexicans and blacks do that,” the man declared in tortured, trembling handwriting, “So tell the truth. L.A. is only 18% white. It’s dangerous due to two majorities, your people and black ones. Write about that, you bogus racist.”

Other readers clip crime stories with names of Latino perpetrators underlined. I get the point. But nobody sends me stories when the criminals are white.

You never hear anybody argue that white men should be feared because Jeffrey Dahmer cannibalized his victims or because John Wayne Gacy buried boys in his basement. Those crimes are always viewed as the acts of deranged individuals, not signs of a sick culture.

And nobody ever urges me to grapple with this seeming racial anomaly: Why have all the recent school shootings been committed by white students? Have white kids all gone wacko?

No, race has nothing to do with man’s proclivity to violence. Sadly, you see, that trait is all too human.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com