Can pro-Muslim bias explain low Muslim crime rates?

Some evidence to the contrary

Written by Noah Carl.

In a recent article, I argued that British Muslims don’t commit a lot of crime – unlike their European counterparts. There were two main criticisms. The first was along the lines of “but Muslims are massively overrepresented in prison”. This was a rather weak criticism given that I spent the first part of the article addressing precisely that point. Indeed, it could only have come from someone who hadn’t read the article.

The second main criticism was along the lines of “there must be some kind of pro-Muslim bias in the criminal justice system that explains why Muslims don’t commit a lot of crime”. According to this line of argument, Muslims do commit a lot of crime but it simply goes unrecorded. Authorities either look the other way or let the perpetrators off with a slap on the wrist.

As an aside, it’s interesting that the two criticisms are mutually exclusive. If Muslims were massively overrepresented in prison because they commit a lot of crime, there’d be no need to invoke a pro-Muslim bias in the criminal justice system. And if there were a pro-Muslim bias in the criminal justice system, you wouldn’t expect Muslims to be massively overrepresented in prison in the first place.

With that said, the second criticism certainly shouldn’t be dismissed. After all, we know that the authorities failed to act on grooming gangs for reasons of political correctness. Indeed, an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct ruled that child sexual abuse in the town of Rotherham was ignored specifically by the police, among other public bodies.

However, the question is whether lack of action on the part of the authorities is sufficiently widespread (12 years after the initial story broke) to explain why Muslim crime rates are “unexpectedly” low. As I pointed out, Black Britons do have high crime rates and Blacks generally rank above Muslims in the left’s “victim hierarchy”. So why would the authorities have a pro-Muslim bias but not a pro-Black bias?

In the remainder of this article, I will discuss evidence that is inconsistent with the theory that Muslim crime rates are understated due to pro-Muslim bias in the criminal justice system.

Muslims and the police

Muslims are substantially underrepresented in the police force, especially at higher ranks. They comprise 7% of the population but only 3.8% of police officers. Muslims are also less likely to trust the police than the general population. In a 2020 poll, 71% of people said they trusted the police, compared to only 64% of Muslims.

What’s more, they are much more likely than White Britons to get stopped and searched by police.¹ The stop-and-search rate for White British is 5.2 per 1,000. By comparison, it is is 9.5 for Pakistanis and 11.5 for Bangladeshis. The stop-and-search rate for Arabs is only 1.5 but this is consistent with their very low crime rates.²

Murder

Since you can’t ignore a dead body, murder statistics ought to show the least bias for or against particular groups. While the authorities might turn a blind eye to grooming gangs or petty street crime when the perpetrators have a certain ethnicity, it’s hard to believe they’d do the same for murder.

Unfortunately, the national-level ethnic breakdown of homicide suspects only distinguishes between “White”, “Black” and “Other”. Though it should be noted that the vast majority of Muslims are in the “Other” category, which is marginally underrepresented relative to its share of the population.

Since most murder is intra-racial, one can also look at data on homicide victims. These show that Asians have a marginally lower homicide victimisation rate than Whites. (Taking age into account would presumably make the Asian rate even lower.) Meanwhile, Blacks have a much higher rate.

A large share of British Muslims live in London and for that city we have a slightly more fine-grained breakdown of homicide perpetrators. According to a 2021 Freedom of Information request, only 11% of those “proceeded against” for homicide were Asian, even though Asians make up 21% of London’s population. The corresponding figures for Whites were 29% and 54%, meaning that Asians were more underrepresented than Whites.³

Data for 2022 and 2023 have been collected by the organisation Action on Armed Violence. They show that 2021 wasn’t a one-off. In both subsequent years, Asians were substantially underrepresented among homicide offenders.

We also have data on unsolved murders in London thanks to a 2022 Freedom of Information request. If there were a pro-Muslim bias in the criminal justice system, you’d expect Asians to be overrepresented among the victims of unsolved murders given that most murder is intra-racial. In fact, they are substantially underrepresented.

Black crime

In response to my point that high Black crime rates indicate the authorities aren’t more lenient with “victim groups”, several people suggested there is a pro-Black bias in the criminal justice system and the true Black crime rate is even higher.

The obvious way to test this would be comparing the percentage of people dealt with by the criminal justice system who are Black with the percentage of people identified by victims who are Black. This could be done separately for different types of offence. Unfortunately, to my knowledge the main victimisation survey in England and Wales doesn’t publish data on perpetrators’ ethnicity.

However, circumstantial evidence suggests that Black crime rates are not substantially understated.

Blacks are overrepresented among homicide suspects by a factor of about 4, which is approximately the same ratio you find in the US (even though Black Britons score about a half a standard deviation higher on IQ tests than Black Americans). And victimisation surveys suggest that Black Americans are policed roughly in proportion to how much crime they commit.

Note that a major review into the “the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service” published last year concluded that Black Londoners are actually “over-policed”.⁴ I am sceptical of this conclusion for reasons I’ve outlined before, but I’m also disinclined to believe the opposite is true – that Black Londoners are “under-policed”.⁵

Conclusion

There may indeed be a pro-Muslim bias in the criminal justice system but I am sceptical that Muslim crime rates would be substantially higher in its absence. In other words, I doubt the bias is large enough to explain why Muslim crime rates are “unexpectedly” low.

Muslims are underrepresented in the police force, and are less likely to trust the police than non-Muslims. The two main Muslim groups, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, are more likely to be stopped and searched than White Britons. And when it comes to murder (the crime for which you’d expect the least bias) Asians are underrepresented among both perpetrators and victims.

What’s more, it is unlikely that there’s a strong pro-Black bias in the criminal justice system, which makes the high Black crime rate hard to reconcile with a strong pro-Muslim bias. Victimisation surveys show that crime in Britain has fallen massively since the 1990s. So it seems doubtful that a lot of crime is going unrecorded.

Noah Carl is an Editor at Aporia Magazine.

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1. Though Asians are slightly less likely to be killed by police.

2. Among the three main Muslim groups, Arabs (the smallest and therefore presumably least influential) have by far the lowest crime rates.

3. 11 divided by 21 is 52%. 29 divided by 54 is 54%.

4. The Casey Review also found evidence of Muslim officers being bullied.

5. This may change following the Casey Review.