According to official statistics in 2000, 26 white people were arrested per 1000 of the population, with 113 per 1000 for ‘blacks’. According to the British Crime Survey the majority of crime is intra-racial, with 88% of white victims stating that white offenders where involved, 3% claiming the offenders were black, 1% Asian and 5% ‘mixed’. In British prisons, the number of African-Caribbean prisoners is proportionately, 8 times higher than would be expected.

Hall et al.’s study of street crime (‘mugging’), known as policing the crisis, shows a particular kind of Marxist approach. According to Hall, the late 1970s were a time of crisis for British capitalism. The country was undergoing industrial arrest, there was a collapse in the economy and the political unrest in Northern Ireland was harsh. When capitalism is in crisis the normal methods of control of the population may be to a unsatisfactory standard, and it’s sometimes necessary to use force. However, using obvious repression needs some form of reason. It was in these circumstances that the media, basing their reports on police briefings, highlighted a huge increase in ‘mugging’. According to Hall, the focus on a relatively small problem, caused by a group who were already viewed negatively, served the purpose of drawing attention away from the crisis and focusing blame on young African-Caribbean males. This ‘moral panic’ then increased numbers of police on the streets, acting in a more repressive manner. Therefore, Hall et al. sees the view that ethnic minority people are muggers as a social construction.

This study provides a sophisticated analysis of the crime of ethnic ‘mugging’ from a new-Marxist perspective. However, Hall et al.’s analysis has been criticised for not making any effort to actually research the motivations and thinking of young African-Caribbean males. What is more, the association between ‘criminality and black youth’, made by the police and the media, has continued for over twenty-five years and so it seems unlikely that this can be explained simply by a ‘crisis of capitalism’. Also, Downes and Rock criticised Hall for contradicting himself. He appeared to claim that African Caribbean street crime wasn’t rising quickly, that it was being amplified by police labelling, and that it was bound to rise as a result of unemployment. According to this negatives , Hall et al. were trying to have their cake and eat it. They changed their view on whether these crimes were rising or not, according to how it fitted their argument. Despite the contradictions in policing the crisis, the general approach adopted by Hall et al. tends to see any over-representation of minority ethnic groups in crime as largely a product of labelling. This clearly has roots in Interactionism, who argue that crime statistics are socially constructed and the product of labelling. These approaches tend to deny that African Caribbeans are more prone to criminality than anybody else.

However, this approach has been heavily criticised by left realist criminologists such as Lea and Young, who argue that the statistics do bear out a higher crime rate for street robberies and associated personal crimes by youths of African-American origin – they believe its not entirely a myth that certain types of crime are common among ethnic minority groups than among whites and as such statistics on the ethnic background of offenders aren’t entirely fabricated. They explain this by suggesting that British society is racist and the young ethnic-minority males are economically and socially marginalised, with lesser chance of success than the majority population. Running alongside this is their sense of relative deprivation. According to Lea and Young, the result is the creation of delinquent subcultures, which can lead to higher levels of personal crime as a way of coping with marginalisation and relative deprivation.

However, a number of writers, such as Mayhew, reject this argument and argue that most crime is performed by young males who come from poorer backgrounds and as such there would be an over-representation of offenders from the ethnic minorities because there are a higher proportion of young males in the ethnic-minority population as a whole. Therefore, any argument that says the relationship between ethnicity and crime is the result of deprivation is basically arguing the relationship between social class and ethnicity.

A third approach overlaps with the Marxist approach. According to this approach, linked with Gordon, policing, media coverage and political debates all centre on the issue of ‘race’ being a problem. Ethnic minorities have been on the receiving end of discrimination since the first migrants arrived, leaving them in a significantly worse socio-economic position than the white majority. In response to this, ‘cultures of resistance’ have emerged, in which crime is a form of ‘organised resistance’ which has its origins in the anti-colonial struggles. When young members of the ethnic minorities commit crimes, therefore, they are doing so as a political act rather than a criminal act.

However, there are a number of criticisms to this approach. Lea and Young have been particularly scathing, pointing out that the majority of crimes are ‘intra-racial’, that is ‘black on black’. This cannot therefore reflect a political struggle against the white majority. Secondly, they accuse writers such as Gordon as ‘romanticising’ crime and criminals, and in doing so ignoring the very real harm that crime does to its victims.

A further group of sociologists see the higher arrest rates as evidence of police racism. The reflection of society approach, often adopted by the police, is that there are some individuals in the police who are racist. According to Lord Scarman, the police reflect the wider society and therefore some racist recruits may join. According to Macpherson, the police are characterised by institutional racism. This has the result that police are more likely to be arrest ethnic minorities and this is why the statistics suggest ethnic minorities are more criminal.

Gilroy provides some evidence to support such views – he points out that the Police Federation magazine claimed that Jamaica had deliberately shipped convicts to Britain during the early period of migration in order to export its crime problem. Also, in a covert observation Holdaway found that police held stereotypical views on the criminality of African Caribbean youths which led them to stop and search these youths to a far greater extent than any other group thus supporting the idea of institutional racism. Indeed, despite the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent concerns about racism in the police, by 2000 black people were still more likely than whites to be stopped and searched. However, these figures should be treated with caution – it may be that there are simply more members of minority ethnic groups to be stopped and searched in the urban areas, where such stops are likely to take place. Nevertheless, Phillips and Bowling argue that the preponderance of African Caribbean suspects among those stopped and searched suggests that this makes “a modest but significant contribution to the over-representation of black people in the arrest population’. The institutional racism can also be found within the courts – Hood’s study of 3300 cases heard in the West Midlands Crown Courts in 1989 suggests that black males have a 17% greater chance of receiving a custodial sentence than whites for the same sentence.

In conclusion, the study of ethnicity is closely tied in to differing perspectives, ranging from the assimilationist views current in the 1960s, through the multicultural perspectives of the 1970s and the anti-racist views of the 1980s, to ideas about new racism in the 1990s. At one end of the argument, ideas are put forward as to why ethnic minorities are more criminal. However, its argued that ethnic minorities aren’t more criminal but are merely displayed as this. Indeed, the relationship between crime rates and ethnicity is extremely complex, due to complicating factors such as the difficulties of identifying ethnic origin and the cultural and social differences between ethnic groups – the lumping together of very different social groups into a single category results in differences of the social reality.