Some Fallacies On the Subject of Crime — Part 1

A recidivist El Inglés returns to the subject of crime with the first of a series of essays about the fallacies commonly held by Western government law enforcement officials.


I have written before on the subject of crime, in parts 1, 2, and 3 of “On the Failure of Law Enforcement”. Here, I must return to the subject because of the woeful lack of comprehension of what crime is, what can be done about it and what cannot, and the significance of crime for communities suffering its ill-effects. The problems that Muslims pose for Europe are many and varied, but crime is one of the most severe. This will be the first in a (hopefully) ongoing series of short essays exploring some of the most common fallacies on the subject.

Some Fallacies On the Subject of Crime:
The Tiny Minority Fallacy

by El Inglés

The Enemy Within?

In February 2010, Albert van den Bosch, the mayor of Zaltbommel, a municipality in the Netherlands, referred to Moroccan youth therein as the ‘enemy within’. Presumably inspired by the stone-cold courage and verbal brilliance of the man they call Geert Wilders, he asked why the Netherlands committed forces to Afghanistan when the threat was on the home front? Needless to say, this is fairly strong stuff, and was heartwarming in the extreme for this observer.

Unfortunately for us, the mayor then managed to blunt the impact of his otherwise forceful comments. He informed us, with woeful predictability, that the vast majority of the Moroccans were law-abiding, and that the problem lay in a group of just 50 youths. Twenty of the group were apparently hard-core criminals, with the other thirty just ‘copying’ them. This tiny minority of the population was a great problem, but the good mayor was keen to impress upon us that, overwhelmingly, the Moroccans themselves were not causing problems. After all, were the great majority not law-abiding?

I do not doubt that the mayor of Zaltbommel means well. Furthermore, he has already shown more courage, and a greater appreciation of the dire straits his locality finds itself in, than most would be able to in similar circumstances. However, he is still stumbling around in the dark in one important regard, which I shall explain here.

The Tiny Minority Fallacy

There is a particular stupefaction that runs so deep, is so comforting, and is so intuitively appealing, that it contaminates even otherwise fine minds on the subject of crime. This stupefaction is now so common, and has become such a mindlessly-repeated mantra, that it deserves a name of its own. I propose to call it the Tiny Minority Fallacy. More than perhaps any other idea, The Tiny Minority Fallacy enables people to turn a blind eye to hideous damage being inflicted upon themselves and their countries. It must be exposed and overturned for that reason.

Put simply, the Tiny Minority Fallacy asserts the following:
- - - - - - - - -

1.		That a given problem caused by a given ethnic/religious group in a given society is only committed by a ‘tiny minority’ of that group.
2.		The problem, though unpleasant, is therefore essentially manageable, at least in principle.
3.		It is unfair to blame the problematic group as a whole, as the vast majority of the members of that group are not engaging in the unfortunate behaviour in question.
4.		Whether one blames the group as a whole or not, it is unfair to take any type of action against it as a whole, as such collective action/punishment will affect many innocent people.

The Tiny Minority Fallacy is a peculiar mix of toxic politically correct nonsense and genuinely mistaken analysis. There is nothing I can do about the first of these two problems, but I am confident that I can clear up the second. We will continue to take the Dutch town of Zaltbommel as our analytic focus, as it and its mayor’s implicit statement of the Tiny Minority Fallacy make it perfect for the purposes of exposition.

In Zaltbommel

I do not have a demographic breakdown of the Moroccan population of Zaltbommel to hand, but some reasonable assumptions will enable us to get the ball rolling here. It is 1,000-strong. Let us therefore assume that it has 500 males and 500 females. It will have a younger age pyramid by some margin than the Dutch themselves, with a relatively low median age. We will assume for the sake of argument that 50% of the population is 30 or above (i.e. that the median age is 30), that 30% of the population is in the age range 0-14, and that the remaining 20% of the population is in the age range 15-29.

When we talk about the crime of Muslim populations and the threat this crime poses to European countries, we are not talking about people driving 38mph in a 30mph zone. Nor are we talking about those who urinate in public or litter. Anti-social and unpleasant though all these things may be (whether their perpetrators are Moroccan, Dutch, or anything else), they do not represent threats to the fabric of European society, either at current or conceivable future levels. No, the crime that we are most concerned about in this regard consists of a mix of violent crime (e.g. assault), property crime (e.g. car theft), financial crime (e.g. credit card fraud) and sexual crime (e.g. rape). It is a general truth of human affairs that this sort of crime is overwhelmingly perpetrated by young males. I will assume here that the enemies within referred to by the mayor are all in the 15-29 age category. The article about Zaltbommel mentions ‘teenage criminals’, but I find it difficult to believe that those in their 20s are not contributing to the problem. Either way, this assumption will certainly not be hopelessly inaccurate, and should therefore serve us reasonably well in the following analysis.

Let us consider what significance, if any, the mayor of Zaltbommel’s personal assertion of the Tiny Minority Fallacy has. In our model, those Moroccans who are not ‘enemies within’ (though they may still be criminal to some extent) in Zaltbommel consist of: a) the 500 females there, old and young; b) the 150 males under the age of 14, and; c) the 250 males of ages 30+. This leaves a group of 100 males, between the ages of 15 and 29, half of whom (our original 50) are criminal enough to be referred to by their own mayor as the enemy within.

I do not know what the Moroccan population of the Netherlands was like in the 1980s, and I do not know what it will be like in the 2040s. This caveat notwithstanding, we can say the following: if the Moroccan population of Zaltbommel retains its characteristics in the regards we are interested in the long term, one half of all males will go through an extended phase of vicious, violent, tribal delinquency and criminality, severe enough for their own mayor to identify them as enemies of the Netherlands. Given that every male under the age of 15 (barring untimely death) will pass through this 15-29 category, and that all those who make it through it alive will end up in the older age categories, fully 50% of the male Moroccan population is either being funnelled through this group, will soon be funnelled through it, or has already been funnelled through it.

Let us now consider the significance of this. We have three ‘life stages’ for male Moroccans: early (0-14 years), middle (15-29 years), and late (30+ years). What can be said about these three stages?

Early

a)		Half of all male Moroccans are being socialized, intentionally or otherwise, in such a fashion as to turn them into ‘enemies within’, i.e. not just criminals, but serious, dedicated, vicious recidivists.
b)		At least half of all male Moroccans (the enemies-within-to-be and perhaps others too) are being imbued, in whatever fashion, with a complete contempt for the Dutch, their laws, and their country.
c)		At least half of all male Moroccans are being imbued with such contempt for mainstream society and what it values that we can safely assume they obtain virtually no meaningful educational or professional qualifications of use in a modern economy.

Middle

a)		Half of all Moroccan males are now ‘enemies within’.
b)		Half of all Moroccan males are entrenching ever deeper, on a daily basis, the contempt for Dutch society already inculcated in them.
c)		Some substantial fraction of these will go to prison for a time, disrupting, perhaps permanently, the meagre educational or professional achievements they may have been obtaining, and rendering them not only skill-free, but deeply unattractive to serious employers when they get out of prison.

Late

a)		Half of all Moroccan males are now ex-’enemies within’, with all that implies, i.e. criminal records, unemployability, lack of any useful skills or education.
b)		These ex-’enemies within’ will now be having families and imbuing, to some extent, their children with their values, thereby completing the cycle.

In this preliminary analysis, half of all Moroccan males are being funnelled through this ‘system’. This is what it means for a ‘tiny minority’ of Moroccans to be enemies within — that the Moroccan community of Zaltbommel is so violent, so tribal, so unproductive, so uncivilized, and so completely incapable of making any meaningful contribution to the Netherlands that its males would, collectively, destroy every good thing within it if it were within their power to do so. Is this a state of affairs that can be shrugged off as a minor problem, or one to be solved by introducing a few new policies? I would suggest not.

The Fallacy Explained

The basic problem with the Tiny Minority Fallacy is that healthy societies can only remain healthy if the fraction of their populations consisting of seriously criminal types is an exceptionally tiny minority. The ‘tiny minority’ of 5% criminals in Zaltbommel is indicative of a Moroccan sub-society that would instantly collapse into anarchy if not held up by the long-suffering Dutch people it damaged and depraved. The even tinier minority of a 1% criminal population would still mean, in our example, that one in ten males (as opposed to one in two) in the 15-29 age group was preying on and destroying the people and wealth around them, a state of affairs completely incompatible with a civilized and prosperous society.

Those who are not yet convinced should consider Britain. Britain has a population of 61 million people, 1% of which is 610,000 (about six times as large as the combat strength of the British Army). If 610,000 males in the 15-29 age category, of whatever background, were such savages and criminals as to be labelled the enemy within by British political figures, what sort of country would we be living in? Surely one that does not much resemble Britain as it is today. If we liken the Moroccan community of Zaltbommel to Britain, then it contains what would, in the UK, be 3,050,000 ‘enemies within’ running riot, i.e. our original 5% of the whole. Does that put things in perspective a little? Of course, the burden of Moroccan crime is borne largely by the Dutch themselves rather than by other Moroccans, which is to say that the ill effects of their criminality spill outside their own group. This caveat notwithstanding, the comparison with Britain is still useful in illustrating the brute size of the pathological Moroccan population.

The Tiny Minority Fallacy is as much use in understanding crime as it is in understanding cancer. I weigh about 85kg, 5% of which is 4.25kg. If my doctor told me I had cancer of the bowel, lungs, and brain but that the total weight of all tumorous tissue in my body was no more than 4.25kg and that there was therefore no particular cause for alarm, I would find a different doctor. To imply that cancer needs to be something other than a tiny minority of one’s body weight before it constitutes an existential threat would be to misunderstand cancer. So it is with crime and criminals.

All personal and property crimes are committed by only a tiny minority of the population of any given country. What fraction of the population of South Africa engages in carjacking, or murder? What fraction of the population of Iraq cuts women’s throats for wearing jeans? What fraction of the population of Mexico is involved in that country’s vicious drug wars? Only tiny minorities of the populations of these countries are engaged in these crimes, yet their very futures as countries are significantly dependent on whether these and other similar types of crime can be reduced. Those who apply the ‘tiny minority’ argument should ask themselves why anyone cares about serious crime at all. It is all committed by tiny minorities, everywhere and always.

It bears saying again that the Tiny Minority Fallacy is fallacious because it implicitly assumes that, in a healthy and functional society, anything other than the tiniest minority could be committing serious crime. This is the core misunderstanding. It will avail the Dutch little to observe that 50-year old Moroccan women are not beating people up on the streets of Zaltbommel. This observation, while undoubtedly true, fails to engage with the meat of the problem. Moroccan males are to the Netherlands what nerve gas is to the human body — a little goes a long way, and its effects are not benign. And given that Moroccan males are not some minor excrescence on the face of the Moroccan population of the Netherlands, but one biological half of an indivisible whole, one must observe that the Moroccans, tout court, are the problem and must be treated as such.