Paul Gilroy: The Myth of Black Criminality

Last Updated on September 20, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Paul Gilroy argues that black criminality is not a fact to be explained but an idea to be accounted for. His 1982 essay “The Myth of Black Criminality” makes four moves:

1. The figure of the black criminal is an ideological construction, produced by policing, politics and the press rather than discovered by them.
2. It does political work: it supplies a justification for extending police power at a moment when the authority of the state is in trouble.
3. It cannot be understood outside its history — the end of empire, post-war migration, and the growth of popular racism after Enoch Powell’s 1968 intervention.
4. Sociology is part of the problem, not the solution. Gilroy’s sharpest criticism is aimed not at the police but at left-wing criminologists who had accepted that “black crime” was a real object needing a special explanation.

That fourth point is the one A-level textbooks leave out, and it is the one that makes the argument coherent.

This post covers the neo-Marxist and anti-racist strand of the crime and deviance module, AQA Paper 3 (7192/3). It is usually taught alongside Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis and criticised using left realism.

A note on what was here before, and why it changed

For nine years this post carried a summary of Gilroy taken from a single A-level textbook. In November 2016, shortly after it went up, a comment appeared underneath from Paul Gilroy:

This is a complete travesty of what I actually wrote. Please do not put this in your A-level answers. They will be heavily marked down for being simplistic and shallow.

I replied at the time that the summary was the textbook’s rather than mine, and that A-level students reproducing it would in fact be rewarded rather than marked down — which was true, and also not much of a defence. The comment has sat there ever since, and the post did not change.

It has now been rewritten from Gilroy’s 1982 essay and from the academic literature on the debate it started, rather than from a textbook paraphrase. The comments are still below.

Two things worth saying about this, because both are examinable in their own right. There is a real gap between “A-level sociology” and sociology, and a summary compressed to fit a specification will always lose something. But there is also a difference between compression and distortion, and the version that was here had crossed from one into the other. The textbook account had Gilroy claiming that most black crime is political resistance to white rule. That is not his argument. It is closer to the caricature his critics made of him — which is how it ended up being repeated as though it were his position.

What Gilroy actually argued

The myth is the category, not the crime rate

The common student reading is that Gilroy says black people commit no more crime than anyone else, and the statistics are just police racism. That is part of it, but it is the shallow part.

Gilroy’s stronger claim is about the category itself. By the late 1970s, “black crime” had become a thing that politicians discussed, police forces organised around, journalists reported and sociologists studied — a distinct problem, with its own causes, requiring its own explanation. Gilroy’s argument is that this object was manufactured. Once it exists, every piece of research into “why black people offend” confirms that there is something there to investigate.

This is why he calls it a myth rather than an exaggeration. An exaggeration would mean the figures are too high. A myth means the question is wrong.

It does political work

Gilroy locates the myth in a specific moment: the 1970s, when law and order moved to the centre of British politics, police powers expanded, and the law was drawn into political conflicts it had previously stayed out of.

His account is that the image of alien criminality — carried by the figures of the mugger and the illegal immigrant — became a political resource. It offered politicians and senior officers a way of shoring up authority that the crisis was eroding, and it did so through an appeal to the nation that was racist in its structure. He ties this directly to the growth of popular racism and nationalism after Powell.

The overlap with Hall et al. is obvious and deliberate — both are working from the same Birmingham school of cultural studies. The difference is emphasis. Hall et al. explain the panic by reference to a crisis of hegemony. Gilroy is more interested in how race itself gets constructed as a political relation, and in the longer colonial history behind it.

It has to be understood historically

Gilroy insists the question of black crime must be approached historically, through the end of empire and the post-war settlement, rather than as a contemporary social problem that appeared in the 1970s.

This is the part the textbooks garble. Gilroy does write about traditions of resistance carried from the Caribbean into black British political culture — but he is describing political culture, not mugging. The claim is that black communities in Britain drew on anti-colonial traditions in organising against the police and the state. It is not the claim that street robbery is revolutionary.

Collapsing those two into “Gilroy thinks crime is resistance” is exactly the move that produces a version of him that is easy to knock down.

Sociology is in the dock too

Gilroy reserved his hardest words for other sociologists. In the same period he co-wrote work attacking mainstream British race-relations research for treating black family life and black culture as pathological — a critique developed across the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham.

His complaint was that a supposedly progressive sociology had accepted the terms the police and press had set, and then gone looking for causes of black criminality in black families and black subcultures. That made it, in his view, part of the apparatus rather than a check on it.

The argument with Lea and Young

This is the exchange the specification actually wants, and it is more interesting than the bullet list of criticisms most students learn.

Left realists John Lea and Jock Young replied to Gilroy in What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? (1984). Their case:

• The offending is real. They cited victim survey data in which 36% of victims of robbery and violent theft in London described their assailant as black. Victims are not the police, so this cannot be dismissed as police racism.
• Most crime is reported, not detected. If the public bring offences to the police, prejudice at the point of detection cannot account for the overall pattern.
• The police would have to be selectively racist. Asian offending rates were similar to or lower than white rates. A racist police force ought to over-criminalise both groups.
• Gilroy romanticises the offender. Most victims of street crime in black areas are themselves black, which makes it hard to read that crime as resistance to anything.
• First-generation migrants were notably law-abiding, which sits awkwardly with an unbroken tradition of anti-colonial resistance.

Gilroy’s reply was blunt. He accused Lea and Young of “startling ignorance” and pointed out what their own explanation contained: West Indian life characterised by disordered family relations and generational conflict, combined with aspirations the second generation could not satisfy, producing a propensity to crime.

His point was that left realism had reproduced the pathology account in more sympathetic language. It had not escaped the myth; it had explained it.

This is the exchange to use in an essay. Most candidates present Lea and Young’s criticisms as though they settle the matter. Showing that Gilroy had an answer — and what that answer was — is analysis rather than description, and it is worth more marks.

Evaluation

Strengths	Limitations
Shifts the question from “why do black people offend?” to “how did that become the question?”, which is a genuine theoretical move rather than a complaint about statistics	The strongest version is very hard to test. If evidence of higher offending is itself part of the myth, it is unclear what evidence could count against the argument
Anticipated the institutional racism findings of Macpherson (1999), Lammy (2017) and Casey (2023) by decades	Lea and Young’s selective-racism point still has force: current data shows Black people searched at 3.8 times the White rate but Asian people at only 1.4 times
The critique of sociology’s own role has been borne out — criminologists still debate whether categories like the “gang” do the same work today	Offers nothing practical to a community being over-policed now. Criticising the state is not a crime-reduction strategy
Explains why the figures survive every reform: the category outlives the policy	Most victims of street crime in deprived areas are from the same communities as the offenders, which the resistance framing handles badly
Historical framing connects crime to empire and migration, which a purely contemporary account cannot do	Left realists argue relative deprivation and marginalisation explain more of the pattern, and do so testably

Does the argument hold in 2026?

Testing a 1982 essay against current evidence is where the analysis marks are. The picture is genuinely mixed, and saying so is stronger than picking a side.

Where Gilroy looks vindicated. Three official inquiries have now found what he argued for: Macpherson (1999) on the Metropolitan Police, the Lammy Review (2017) across the whole criminal justice system, and the Casey Review (2023), which found the Met institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Casey also found the force could not adequately explain why it used stop and search on the scale that it did.

The single most useful current statistic for his case: Black people are searched at 3.8 times the White rate, and yet something is found in 29.9% of searches of Black people and 28.4% of searches of White people. Near-identical find rates alongside a near-fourfold difference in search rates is hard to explain as good policing. It is much easier to explain as a category being applied.

Where his critics look vindicated. The disparity is not uniform, and that is Lea and Young’s point in current form. Asian people are searched at 1.4 times the White rate against 3.8 for Black people. The custody rate barely varies by ethnicity — 33% for White defendants and 35% for Black defendants — and MoJ regression finds no significant effect of ethnicity on sentence length for indictable offences overall. A system uniformly constructing black criminality ought to show its hand more consistently than that.

Where the argument has moved on. The stop and search disparity has fallen from 9.7 times in 2018/19 to 3.8 today. Gilroy’s framework would predict that the category persists and reattaches itself to something new rather than disappearing — and criminologists have argued precisely that about the “gang”, which is now applied overwhelmingly to young black men and which the evidence links only weakly to serious violence.

That is a strong closing move in an essay: the myth did not die, it changed its name.

Exam application

A note on where Gilroy fits. He is classified as neo-Marxist or anti-racist depending on the textbook. The safe answer is that he draws on Marxism and on labelling theory, and belongs with Hall et al. in the critical tradition. Do not spend marks on the label.

In a 30-mark essay on ethnicity and crime, Gilroy is the strongest version of “the statistics measure the system, not offending”. Pair him with Hall et al., criticise both with left realism, and use the current data to show which parts survive. For a worked example see this 30-mark answer.

In a 10-mark question on criticisms of the police-racism explanation, the selective-racism point (Asian 1.4 times against Black 3.8 times) is the best-evidenced criticism available and almost no candidate has the current figures.

A warning. If you write that Gilroy thinks black crime is political resistance to white rule, you are writing the textbook caricature. It will not be marked wrong at A-level — but the more accurate version, that he treats black criminality as an ideological category rather than a behaviour, is a better answer and takes no more words.

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Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, where it appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).

The companion study in the same tradition is Policing the Crisis: Hall et al. on mugging and moral panic.

The main criticism comes from left realist explanations for ethnic differences in crime, and the opposing explanation from the role of cultural factors.

For the figures themselves, see official statistics on ethnicity and crime.

For the theoretical framework behind this tradition, see The New Criminology.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

References

Gilroy, P. (1982) ‘The Myth of Black Criminality’, Socialist Register, vol. 19. London: Merlin Press.

Gilroy, P. (1987) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson.

Amos, V., Gilroy, P. and Lawrence, E. (1982) ‘White Sociology, Black Struggle’, in Robbins, D. (ed.) Rethinking Social Inequality. Aldershot: Gower.

Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984) What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? Crisis in the Eighties. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.

Williams, P. and Clarke, B. (2018) ‘The Black Criminal Other as an Object of Social Control’, Social Sciences, 7(11), 234.

Home Office (2025) Police powers and procedures: stop and search, arrests and mental health detentions, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2025.

Ministry of Justice (2025) Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2024.

Casey, L. (2023) An Independent Review into the Standards of Behaviour and Internal Culture of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Lammy, D. (2017) The Lammy Review: An Independent Review into the Treatment of, and Outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Individuals in the Criminal Justice System.