Blacks are also just as likely to be victims of property crime as they were the previous year, although Hispanics as well as whites have experienced a significant drop in that crime. It is dangerous to read too much into a trend of just two years, but it may mean that certain reforms that have helped reduce crime over the past few years, such as welfare reform, have now reached their limit in the black and Hispanic communities while still continuing to have an effect in the white community. But crime continues to fall significantly in urban areas, so the issue is probably more complicated than that. In any event, it would probably pay to take another look at policies supposedly directed at protecting minorities from violent crime, as they currently seem to have stopped working. The figures also draw attention to one remarkable fact.
Marriage has a strong protective effect.
Married people suffer 14 victimizations per 1,000 population. An argument could be made that violence mainly affects the young, who are unlikely to be married. The difference is even more striking when it comes to rapes and sexual assaults. Another interesting nugget of information mined from the data is that, in the year of the Million Mom March, guns do not seem to be as big an issue in crime as they are made out. Even the figures for robbery, where the classic image is of a stick-up at gunpoint, show that a gun is used less than a quarter of the time.