German Lopez wrote:
Where Latzer gets into trouble is that he’s broadly calling something "culture" that really may be thousands of causes of crime, some of which we may not know about or can’t measure in hard numbers.
Consider one of these possible factors: Black communities may be more violent and crime-ridden in response to a criminal justice system that has both under- and overpoliced them. In the fantastic Ghettoside, journalist Jill Leovy draws on the stories of police officers and black residents in violence-torn parts of Los Angeles to weave a nuanced story of how the justice system deals with crime depending on the community involved.
Leovy writes that police often harass black people for petty crimes — such as drugs, jaywalking, traffic rules, and loitering. But when black people most need police to prevent and solve violent crimes, they are not present. Investigations have found, for instance, that homicides involving black victims are much less likely to be solved than those with white victims. It’s a two-sided coin of systemic racism.
"Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder," Leovy writes. "It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate."
The result: Only 30 percent of black people reported "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the police during a 2014-'15 period, versus 57 percent of white people, according to Gallup.
The criminal justice system has abandoned the most significant needs of black people, while fostering resentment and distrust with excessive policing of small crimes. In the face of this, black communities have turned to their own means — including violence — to solve conflicts that would normally be solved in courts.
(As Latzer notes, "Murder and its junior partner, assault, are in the main precipitated by anger, sexual jealousy, perceived insults and threats, long-standing personal quarrels, and similar issues, frequently facilitated by alcohol or some other disinhibiting substance.")
After all, preventing interpersonal conflicts is the main reason for the criminal justice system’s existence. Leovy writes:
Leovy wrote:In the dim early stirring of civilization, many scholars believe, law itself was developed as a response to legal "self-help": people's desire to settle their own scores. Rough justice slowly gave way to organized state monopolies on violence. The low homicide rate of some modern democracies are, perhaps, an aberration in human history.
Indeed, Latzer acknowledges this. In The Code of the Streets, Elijah Anderson analyzed the reality that many black people in violent neighborhoods live under and the grim rules ("the code") they’ve adopted that essentially allow violence to solve disputes the law can’t be trusted to take care of. Citing Anderson’s work, Latzer writes:
Latzer wrote:The code also was a product of the perception that law enforcement can’t or won’t control violent crime. "Feeling they cannot depend on the police and other civil authorities to protect them from danger," residents adhere to "a set of informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior, particularly violence. The rules prescribe both proper comportment and the proper way to respond if challenged."
But how do you prove anything like this empirically? How do you measure the actual, full impact of systemic racism or distrust in law enforcement? Mathematical models are very advanced nowadays, but they can’t explain everything. We still don’t even fully know why crime rose and fell during the period Latzer looks at — something Latzer acknowledges. So how can we be expected to measure something as abstract as the effects of distrust or a systemic force that has existed since America was founded?
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." 
