Still, Short2 notes: “The ethnicity of criminals and their victims often has reflected the recency of arrival in this country of immigrants.” Will this be the case for Latinos? If so, how and why? There is no doubt that racial and ethnic groups display variations in their homicide rates for a variety of reasons, including differences in the causes leading to their location of settlement in the United States, the manner in which they were received, and the community conditions they encounter

daily. For these reasons it is easy to see why many would speculate that the circumstances confronting Latinos should impact violent crime, although, as we saw in the previous chapter, the impact of neighbor­ hood-level influences was less extreme than predicted. This chapter considers these characteristics relative to Blacks and Whites throughout a period when sharp rises in violence captured the national imagination and high crime rates were often characterized as an ethnic minority group attribute.3