From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

… But Republicans feel uncomfortable citing official crime statistics by race, so they prefer to blame Democratic mayors of big cities.

Because practically all big cities are Democratic, it’s hard to test statistically how much worse Democratic politicians make black proclivities.

One approach is to look at the level of urbanization, since there is a high correlation between population density and voting Democratic. The CDC reports on six levels of urbanization, ranging from counties that form a “Large Central Metro,” such as Cook County in Illinois, down to purely rural “NonCore (Nonmetro).” (The second level, “Large Fringe Metro,” includes suburban counties around big cities, such as DuPage County west of Cook County, so it interrupts the descent in density.)

The main thing that stands out in this graph is the immense black vs. white gap: In total, across the country, blacks died violently 10.8 times as often as whites last year.

Unsurprisingly, all groups behave least lethally in the suburban counties outside big cities, which traditionally tended to be affluent and run by moderate Republican politicians.

As the Republican theory would imply, blacks are at their worst in Large Central Metros, with homicides rates 56 percent higher than in the most rural counties: 42.4 per 100,000 compared with 27.1.

But the density trend isn’t strongly consistent.

Read the whole thing there.