Ben Singleton: Missing link in discussion of race and police is poverty

(August 3) – I served for 10 years as a police officer in North Texas. During that time, I became interested in the grand scope of crime and common criminal profiles. Plenty of studies have investigated the people who commit the most atrocious crimes. But what about the person who chooses to burglarize a home for $200? What motivates him, I wondered. Eventually, I started to see the common denominator among the majority of offenders I dealt with: Poverty.