Part Three of Three is out, showing how Murray’s “two truths” are indisputably a cause of some disparities:

Even if (like Ezra Klein or Theodore R. Johnson), you might consider the higher black crime rate to be an “effect” of racism, it is still a “cause” of the disparity in police shootings of black suspects.

The same is true for many first-order effects of the increased rate of crime among blacks, and many of those effects have an adverse effect on the black community. To take the starkest and most obvious example, an increased rate of murder by blacks tends to lead to more black murder victims. Rich Lowry recently had an excellent piece in National Review titled Where’s the Equity for Black Murder Victims?

. . . .

If we choose to respond to crime with “decarceration,” many of the people who will pay the price of such policies are the black people who will become victims. This is not a mystery to black people, by the way. An August 2020 poll shows that 81 percent of black Americans want the same level of police or more in their communities. The people behind the “defund the police” movement are wild-eyed activists, many of them white progressives, who largely won’t be the ones paying a major price for a decreased police presence in their community.

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