ROBERT VERBRUGGEN: The Justice Department’s Hidden Race Data.

Back in 2010, Ron Unz of The American Conservative set off a debate by arguing that Hispanics didn’t have higher crime rates than non-Hispanic whites, and therefore crime shouldn’t be a concern when it comes to immigration from Latin America. He had to argue this using a variety of roundabout calculations and obscure data sources, however, because good, national data weren’t readily available.

For example, the federal government’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks people about their experiences with crime, didn’t allow interviewees to identify their attackers as “Hispanic.” And the racial and ethnic offender breakdowns stopped being published in routine reports after 2008, though the raw numbers were still available in the full data sets.

It turns out the Justice Department has been holding out on us. It fixed the way it asked about offenders’ races, but this went unnoticed because the data were no longer publicized.

Here’s the chart:

Read the whole thing.