Police aren’t co-creators of crime, they’re co-creators of crime statistics. Crimes that go unreported, with no arrest made, are invisible to crime statistics. When the police arrest someone and charge them with a crime, it counts as both an arrest and a reported crime.

So even if crime were uniformly distributed across the city, if police spent the majority of their time in one neighbourhood they’d make more arrests there and so it follows that the statistics would show higher crime in that neighbourhood.

I stand by my claim. Crimes are social facts. They exist within a reality supported by whichever laws those with the monopoly of violence believe in. Crimes exist within the symbol register of thought. I'll ask you a question in return, why did you choose your ontology of crime among all those that could possibly exist?

We know very well that police injure and kill people—disproportionately people of color—at a much higher rate than the general population.

We also know that they (technically legally, but c'mon, it's theft) steal large amounts of money and other property from people through civil asset forfeiture.

"Crime" has multiple elements: the law, the act, the observation, and the prosecution.

We disproportionately outlaw things that poor people do. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") We disproportionately observe poor people, as shown by this article. We disproportionately convict poor people, who can't afford bail or good legal representation.

Yet people always want to jump to that other element. The disproportionate crime rates can't be due to all those other things, it must be due to them committing more crimes.

The only thing we can say for sure is that poor people commit different crimes. They use different drugs and in different settings; they are more likely to commit theft than embezzlement; they are more likely to cause property damage than violate building codes. The rest is made murky by an unfair legal system and a societal tendency to treat crimes of poverty as individual in nature and crimes of wealth as systemic failures.