Gaps between perceived and actual crime rates, by immigrant group in the Netherlands. Dutch people underestimate the crime rate of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean while overestimating the crime rate of lighter-skinned immigrants, including Roma, Turks, and Chinese. The latter don’t benefit from the messaging of modern culture.
The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions [...] and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives the unfavorable crime news an undue weight. Sometimes the white press "creates" a Negro crime wave where none actually exists. (Myrdal 1944, pp. 655-656)
Gunnar Myrdal wrote An American Dilemma during the early
years of the civil rights movement. He won over many young educated people,
particularly when he argued that prejudice was making Black American
criminality seem worse than it really was:
The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro's lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. (Myrdal 1944, p. 968)
The theme of the "framed
Black man" would be central to a work of fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird. Since its publication in 1960 it has never
been out of print. In 2006, it was the book most often mentioned when British
librarians were asked: "Which book should every adult read before they
die?" (Pauli 2006). Thus, for at least six decades, there has been a
social norm of downplaying Black crime.
This norm has spread not only
within the United States but also to all countries where English is widely
used, particularly among the university-educated. In fact, it has spread to
countries that never had black slavery or Jim Crow, or even a substantial
African minority until recent times.
Perceptions and realities of crime in the Netherlands
One such country is the
Netherlands. In a recent survey, 615 Dutch adults were given the following
instructions:
There are many different immigrant groups in the Netherlands. For each of the groups, adjust the slider to your estimation of the crime rate relative to Dutch natives. This means you should adjust the slider to two (2) if you think the crime rate of this group is twice that of natives. (Kirkegaard and Gerritsen 2021, p. 4)
The actual crime rate of each
immigrant group is known from public data published by the government. It was
thus possible to measure how much the survey respondents overestimated or
underestimated the criminality of each immigrant group. The respondents were
chosen by two polling firms. A little over two-thirds of them came from a firm
that tended to select younger and more university-educated people.
The findings are shown in the above
graph. On the y-axis, the crime rate is overestimated at values higher than
zero and underestimated at values lower than zero. The x-axis shows the
percentage of Muslims in the immigrants' home country.
Kirkegaard and Gerritsen
(2021, pp. 12-17) argue that the results show a pro-Muslim bias: the
respondents tended to underestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants. But the
bias was not favorable toward all Muslims. In fact, the crime rate was
overestimated for immigrants from Indonesia, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
and more or less correctly estimated for those from Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. In
addition, the respondents showed much larger gaps between perception and
reality when estimating the crime rates of different non-Muslim groups.
For source countries less than
25% Muslim, the crime rate was greatly underestimated (by a factor of 1 or
more) for people from Congo, Angola, Cape Verde, the Netherlands Antilles, and
the Dominican Republic. Conversely, it was greatly overestimated for people
from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Mexico.
Do you see a pattern? The
respondents were underestimating the crime rate of immigrants from sub-Saharan
Africa and the Caribbean. Their pro-Black bias was much stronger than their
supposed pro-Muslim bias. In fact, it was so strong that it affected their
perceptions of different Muslim groups. The respondents perceived North
Africans and Somalis as being better than they really are, while perceiving Turks
as being worse than they really are.
It looks like people in the
Netherlands, and probably throughout the West, are being conditioned to view
the Black African phenotype positively and the White European phenotype
negatively. This bias caused the respondents to overestimate the arrest rate
not only of European immigrants but also of any group that deviates too far
from the Black African phenotype, including Chinese, Mexicans and, apparently,
Roma.(1)
What about the respondents who
voted for Nationalist parties? You know, the “far right.” Although Nationalist
voters were more inclined to overestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants,
they were just as inclined to underestimate the crime rate of sub-Saharan
African and Caribbean immigrants. The pro-Black bias seems very pervasive.
Note
1. Roma in Western Europe
identify themselves to the authorities by their country of origin, not by their
ethnicity. The Dutch respondents greatly overestimated the crime rate of
immigrants from Romania, and the recent wave of Romanian migrants is widely
perceived to be mostly Roma:
In these figures, the number relating to the Roma is indeterminate since the ethnicity of asylum seekers is not recorded. Nonetheless, the assumption is that the majority of these applications were made by Roma. Certainly, the press is of this view. Articles discussing Czech or Romanian asylum seekers refer frequently to the Roma. As a result, it is easy for the ordinary member of the public to assume that such groups of applicants are of Roma extraction (Stevens 2003, p. 440)
References
Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A.
Gerritsen. (2021). A study of stereotype accuracy in the Netherlands: immigrant
crime, occupational sex distribution, and provincial income inequality. OpenPsych, June 14 https://openpsych.net/paper/60/
https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.06.14
Myrdal, G. (1944). An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.
Pauli, M. (2006). Harper Lee
tops librarians' must-read list. The
Guardian, March 2
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/02/news.michellepauli
Stevens, D.E. (2003). The
Migration of the Romanian Roma to the UK: A Contextual Study. European Journal of Migration and Law
5(4): 439-461.
https://doi.org/10.1163/157181603322849343
