Explaining the Difference in Offending

• Lea and Young see crime as a product of relative deprivation and that crime made up of 90% of reports rather than police investigating showing that relative deprivation lead to an increase of crime in ethnic minorities
• Gilroy and Hall reject official statistics as reflecting reality but say crime is a social construct
• Gilroy says that being an ethnic minority is being criminalised
• Gilroy says that crime from ethnic minorities is a way to adopt resistance
• Hall et al says the moral panic over black 'muggers' was a distraction from issues of capitalism
• Bourgois studied ethnic minority communities in East Harlem and that discrimination had excluded these groups from legitimate economic opportunities so created alternative economies
• Another reason for ethnic minority crime is poverty (black people were 2x more likely to be poor)