The short answer , to put on my Marxist hat , is historical conditions . The UK doesn ' t have anything comparable to the conditions faced by black Americans throughout historyI ' m going to quote part of a comment I wrote a while back explaining the unique circumstances black Americans have had to struggle with . For sake of brevity I ' m skipping up to the post WW 2 periodThe two biggest causes of modern innercity crime are the GI Bill and home owners associations prior to the 1980 s . Consider this , after the socalled great migration in which black Americans fled the south en mass major industrial cities like Detroit , LA , Chicago and so on boomed . WW 2 allowed many black families well paying jobs in these industrial regions as labor was in such demand . A black middle class very comparable to the white equivalent began to form . However black Americans quickly experienced a practice called red lining . Home owners associations and neighborhood covenants forbid houses in those neighborhoods from being sold to black families . This is one of the lesser remembwred forms of de facto rather than de jure segregation . Then WW 2 ended and the soldiers came home Despite what any free market conservative will tell you the massive economic boom of the 1950 s was caused almost entirely by government spending . Namely in the form of a feature of the GI Bill which offered subsidized housing loans to veterans . Buttloads of houses were bought and built and people were able to develop equity due to the resulting rise in property values . But those subsidized loans were explicitly not available to black veterans . Instead they got subsidized public housing . They didn ' t get to own property they had to rent and thus couldn ' t develop that sort of equity that leads to generational wealth . This is where modern ghettos came from . The 60 s happen , oh hey all of these cool black leaders are murdered and jailed and you have a generation growing up in the 70 s with the same anger and oppression but no direction . Did you know the Crips were originally formed in an effort to recreate what the Black Panthers were ? Suddenly manufacturing jobs are disappearing . This is no problem for the white kids because their parents had been able to sell houses for way more than they bought them for and send them to college Not so for the black kids . They ' re dealing with unemployment and begin turning to the drug trade for survival primarily in the form of heroin . Then crack happens . Suddenly the Reaganites decide they need to stop this epidemic so crack will send you to jail for 5 times longer than cocaine a drug mostly used by white yuppies . So by the 90 s you ' ve got an entire generation with at least 1 parent behind bars . A generation that like those before it is oppressed and angry and stuck in a cycle of poverty . They have kids young due to a lack of education and you get a new generation raised by children , oppressed abused and angry with no way out but the drug trade and sportsAnd here we are . Any given problem on a macro scale exists because of everything that happened in the preceeding 50 years . Nothing exists in a vacuumYou want to lower gun crime in the US ? Ok you need serious radical economic reforms . You need to decouple school funding from property taxes , you need free child care within poor black communities and well funded schools pre k 12 , you need free college tuition offered to all those who graduate , you need jobs programs and you need the immediate decriminalization of recreational drugsThat will reduce gun crime to almost nothing in a decade . But that shits complicated and messy and involves helping people so of course it ' ll never get done