Most Thieves Are White

Most Thieves Are White

Cross posted at Daily Kos. Please recommend this diary.

Posted on July 12, 2013


George Zimmerman called police 47 times between 2004 and 2012. Fifteen of those calls were for “suspicious activity.” Seven of those calls involved “suspicious” individuals. One of those individuals was white. Six were black.

In one of those calls, Zimmerman made his famous statement about “break-ins” which had occurred in the development. I will go out on a limb and speculate that he believed the thieves were “probably black.”

He would be wrong.

Here’s how I know. The State of Florida Department of Corrections has a website. On that website you can do huge searches by category of crime and race. You can also look by incarceration status — probation/parole, released from incarceration, and presently incarcerated. I looked at the raw numbers of everyone under the offense category “theft” for white, black, and hispanic offenders.

White thieves outnumber black thieves in the DOC database by 50%.





Interestingly, it seems the State of Florida hands out stiffer sentences to black thieves. This leads to the perverse result that more known thieves who are white are out on the street in even greater numbers.






This data destroys the most powerful motivator for white bigotry, namely fear of “black crime.” There is simply more “white crime.”

As for why Zimmerman was frustrated in his efforts to find the thieves in his gated community, we now have a really simple explanation.

He was looking for the wrong people.