That narrative is however incongruent with the facts, as African Americans have a higher violent crime rate than both whites and Asians across socioeconomic lines:
While crime rates do fall with socioeconomic status, African American have higher rates of murder than both Caucasians and Asians across socioeconomic status.. African Americans with an average household income of over $85,000 have higher crime rates that the lowest socioeconomics strata of Asians, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice.
The biggest correlation of how much violent crime is in a city is the percentage of population that is black, much more than the percentage that is in poverty. In fact crime rates in the US have a incredible 0.8 correlation to the percentage of population that is black in that city., and this is way higher than any socioeconomic factor, such as poverty, levels of unemployment and education achievement (all which are around 0.3-0.4)
Other groups with an even lower socioeconomic status (such as immigrant groups from Asia) don't have anywhere near the crime rates of blacks in America.
Blacks are only 2.7x more likely to be in poverty than whites, yet as we saw they are 7x more likely to murder than whites.
There are almost twice as many white people in poverty as there are black people, and it if it was true that (irrespective of race) poverty caused violence than whites would be commiting twice as much violence as African Americans. But they don't. African Americans still commit more violent crime in absolute number, despite having much fewer poor people.
Appalachia is almost entirely white and the poorest region in the country. We see horrible rates of poverty, yet the crime that plagues African American communities simply isn't found. The 10 U.S. counties with the lowest annual median household incomes are in Appalachia.
‘Yet, The violent crime rate for Appalachia in 2010 was lower than the national violent crime rate average by 56.76%’
