In recent decades, the issue of crime has been subject to much distortion and misrepresentation by the left. Most notably, the left has long characterized America as a profoundly and irremediably racist country where racially motivated crimes against nonwhite minorities are rampant, and where the criminal-justice system—from the police to the courtroom to the jailhouse—is rife with bias against those same minorities. As a result of the constant recitation of such notions by left-leaning media outlets and pundits, a great deal of mythology has gradually evolved into so-called “conventional wisdom.” This section of Discover The Networks is devoted to providing the facts about crime and the justice system, and puncturing the myths that have done so much to harm race relations and civilian-police relations in the United States.

The RESOURCES column located on the right side of this page contains links to articles, essays, books, and videos that explore the following topics:

• crime and arrest statistics, with information about the age, sex, and race of victims and perpetrators; 
• the facts about interracial crime, increasingly a taboo subject;
• the facts about so-called "hate crimes," which have been statistically monitored by the FBI since 1990;
• the notion that poverty is a root cause of criminality, and that by reducing poverty rates, we can cause crime rates to fall as well;
• the close causal relationship between high illegitimate-birth rates and criminality;
• how the breakdown of the black family in the U.S. has led to high rates of crime among African Americans;
• black fear of black, as opposed to white, violent crime;
• the notion that the American criminal-justice system is institutionally racist;
• statistics on the use of force by police, particularly as it regards the respective racial backgrounds of officers and criminal suspects;
• statistics relating to, and rationales for, stop-and-frisk practices by the police;
• the "broken windows" theory of law-enforcement, which maintains that the strict enforcement of laws against relatively minor infractions also diminishes the occurrence of more serious crimes;
• the high rates of crime against blacks and Hispanics in areas controlled by the Left;
• statistics pertaining to the death penalty, most notably the claim that capital punishment is meted out in a racially discriminatory manner;
• the charge that the traditionally harsher criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession, as opposed to powder cocaine possession, are rooted in racism; and
• the realities of, and rationales underlying, the practice of racial and ethnic profiling.