Race/Ethnicity and Measures of Violence at the Macro Level

• Date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Noah Painter-Davis,Casey T. Harris
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368718802349
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Race/Ethnicity and Measures

of Violence at the Macro

Level: Is Disadvantage

Invariant Across Race-/

Ethnicity-Specific Arrest,

Victimization, and Offending?

Noah Painter-Davis

1

and Casey T. Harris

2

Abstract

An abundance of scholarship has examined the racial invariance thesis positing that the

causes of violence, especially markers of disadvantage, are similar across racial/ethnic

groups. More recently, research has adopted “yardsticks” to provide more meaningful

assessments of the thesis, including incorporating Latinos into analyses and using

statistical tests to compare disadvantages’ effects across groups. Less attention,

however, has been given to the measure of violence the thesis applies to. Although

intended to explain offending, criminologists commonly substitute measures of race-/

ethnic-specific arrest and victimization. Using 2010–2014 National Incident-Based

Reporting System data for 453 census places, we examine whether the relationship

between structural disadvantage and race-/ethnic-specific violence varies across

measures of offending, arrest, and victimization. Consistent with “lenient inter-

pretations” of the thesis, we find that disadvantage is generally associated with higher

rates of violence among Whites, Blacks, and Latinos, regardless of the measure of

violence. However, at odds with “strict interpretations” of the thesis, there are sig-

nificant differences in the magnitude of disadvantages’ effects across groups and these

differences are conditioned somewhat by the measure of violence examined. Impli-

cations of these findings and directions for future research are considered.

1

Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

Corresponding Author:

Noah Painter-Davis, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,

NM 87131, USA.

Email: npf26@unm.edu

Race and Justice

ªThe Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368718802349

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2021, Vol. 11(4) 407–\ 433

Keywords

crime, race/ethnicity, theory, racial invariance thesis, National Incident–Based

Reporting System

In his seminal work, the Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson (1987) argued that racial

inequalities in violence are rooted in the divergent structural circumstances of the

communities of Whites and Blacks. The argument that race differences in crime and

violence are the product of differential exposure of Blacks to criminogenic structural

conditions has come to form the core of the “racial invariance hypothesis” (Sampson

& Wilson, 1995). In short, this thesis predicts that macrostructural characteristics,

particularly markers of structural disadvantage, are associated with crime and vio-

lence in similar ways across racial/ethnic groups (Ousey, 1999). Although much

scholarship finds that disadvantage elevates violence among all racial/ethnic groups,

some caution “the assumption of racial similarity in the fundamental causes of vio-

lence or crime is far from settled” (Steffensmeier, Ulmer, Feldmeyer, & Harris, 2010,

p. 1134; also see Ousey, 1999).

More recently, Steffensmeier, Ulmer, Feldmeyer, and Harris (2010, p. 1160)

argued that ambiguity in the scope and conceptual conditions used to evaluate the

racial invariance thesis have left it a “moving target” making “definitive empirical

conclusions about the viability of the hypothesis difficult.” Since its publication, a

number of scholars have adopted their suggested “yardsticks,” including incorpor-

ating Latinos into comparisons, examining multiple types of violence (e.g., homi-

cide, index violence, robbery), and using statistical tests to compare disadvantages’

effects across groups (Bethelot, Brown, Thomas, & Burgason, 2016; Hernandez,

Velez, & Lyons, 2018; Painter-Davis & Harris, 2016; Wright, Turanovic, &

Rodriguez, 2016).

Despite these advances, there remains ambiguity regarding the appropriate

measure of violence for which tests of the racial invariance thesis should be applied.

On the one hand, some scholars have argued that the invariance thesis was originally

intended to explain patterns of offending (Messner, Beaulieu, Isles, & Mitchell,

2014). Yet estimating race-specific and ethnic-specific offending rates presents a

“vexing methodological challenge” because such data are uncommon and often

limited to specific types of crime and/or to particular locales (Messner et al., 2014, p.

2; also see Sampson, 1987). For example, self-report and victimization surveys that

include markers of offending often omit themoreseriouscrimessomeargueare

most applicable to the thesis (e.g., homicide and robbery) and/or are often una-

vailable for a wide range of macrosocial units. On the other hand, sources of official

crime data that resolve some of these issues, such as the Uniform Crime Report’s

(UCR) Supplemental Homicide Reports, only code the offender’s race for homicide

and inconsistently code ethnicity. In turn, comparisons are often limited to the

Black–White divide, failing to include Latinos, now the largest minority group in the

United States (Pew Research Center, 2011).

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Race and Justice 11(4)