Maybe not exactly like that, but pretty close and pretty useful. If you visit the FBIs Uniform crime statistics page there’s all kinds of good data of the type you are looking for.
The big difference is that that “crimes responsible for” is a category you seem to have defined and not one that is being measured. Instead there are arrest rates, conviction rates, victimization rates and what have you.
I think the difference that Levitt is always clear on the fact that a correlation is not a causation. The problem with Bennett’s statement is that he leaps to race as his argument.
In a nation and to a listenership where most people don’t understand or don’t bother to distinguish (which is worse) the difference between correlation and causation, his disclaimers before and after were meaningless because they simply protested too much. How much of his career has he spent trying to educate and explain to the public the relation and difference between correlation and causation, what is his audience supposed to think? For themselves? Fat chance. Thinking requires a thorough education and then hard work for each thought. Radio ain’t it.
Levitt, by contrast, spent his entire book educating the readership on the difference between correlation and causation, as others have pointed out in this thread.
The fact is Bennett said exactly what he is alleged to have said when anyone with a lick of sense would have chosen a different example entirely. Why do pundits like Bennett and George Will almost always go to race? Because they are obsessed with the issue. Let’s face it, skin color by itself doesn’t cause any events or crimes (except prejudice related crimes and sunburn.) Suggesting that skin color causes crime is not a legitimate subject for debate among educated people for the very reason that educated people know it isn’t a cause. Nor is it a legitimate subject for supposedly educated people to discuss among the teeming millions for the simple reason that the teeming millions will of course misinterpret it. A supposedly virtuous and/or educated person ought to know his/her audience well enough to know you don’t dicuss things like race causing crime or why denying the holocaust is prejudiced outside of a controlled environment where educated people understand the context. Bennett is a fool who does not understand his context/audience.
One only has to look at the news reports from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to find out that the USA has a racist streak running through the media straight to it’s core. Was it Yahoo that ran with the news stories with the “black looters” and the white people “looking for food” photographs in the same story?
While I find it amusing that a gambling addict can blow millions of his family’s fortune on slots while writing and publishing and promoting “The Book of Virtues” pointing out the failures of others, if his first reflex is to retract and then say despite the advance retraction, that blacks correlate to crime, but I really mean don’t abort the babies, he has just polluted the debate (in the larger sense) with his non-suggestion suggestion. Levitt was clear in his book that he was talking about poverty, not race, which is just a skin color.
Are Bennett, and his fellow travellers George Will and others, racists? Certainly not in the sense that they would don klan robes and secretly gather in a konklave and talk about the dangers of the uppity negroes. In the sense that they are always discussing the subject of race and the superiority of the morals of traditional “Western Culture” in a way that embarasses even this middle aged white guy who loves the classical canon, yes. Yes, they are embarassments on the issue of race. I hang around a lot of conservative white guys of middle age or greater, and their anxiety about white people losing opportunity to non-white people is embarassing and just stupid. I don’t care what skin color my human competitor has. I hope my competitor is human, and not a computer or something. I hope that he/she is a loving human being, not a self-centered jerk,etc. But I really don’t see what difference skin color makes, or could possibly make other than the prejudicial value that people give it.
And I’ve got to say, I’m surprised that so many posters in this thread don’t understand why statements to the effect of “you must agree that it is a fact that black communities have higher crime rates than white communities” is so uneducated, offensive, prejudiced and stupid: no, it is not a “fact” because you cannot show why skin pigmentation causes crime, and it is prejudiced for an educated person to link those together repeatedly without offering a valid theory of causation, such as: prejudice has lead to poorer opportunity and ghettoization and then to poverty and statistics show that poorer populations historically and worldwide have had higher crime rates. To shorthand this is to play to the bigoted, prejudiced and poorly educated.
The problem with any statistical interpretation is that any fool with high school math can find all sorts of correlations, but most are meaningless. Statistical interpretation requires skills beyond that of the ordinary college graduate, but idiot pundits spout crap statistics in the media as if they had doctorates in sociology, anthropology and economics all in one.
Even a qualified statistician must offer a theory of causation, which must then be tested against the evidence of the real world by other people gathering the data and doing the testing. Falsification is a common result with career setbacks to these scientists who are sloppy in proposing ideas when caught. Sloppy pundits are rewarded by their political sponsors and their sloppiness defended ad nauseum.
For once I agree with you. You’re right, it’s not the fetuses. (Feti?) It’s the punk teens we have to kill. The ones that mostly don’t do the bad things, yet, but will in a few years when they hit their 20’s. And the whole wearing your underwear so it shows more fabric than your pants is reason to kill anyone. Unless you’re a super-hot lingerie model. But I digress. Those are the ones we need to eradicate. The problem is, murder is illegal while abortion is legal, so we have to do this legally.
And no, I’m not going to use the sarcasm tag. It’s much more entertaining leaving them out. 
Of course you didn’t say it. It’s my illustration of the meme that results from the more innocuous defenses. You did mention accuracy over sensitivity, so I apologize for not quoting you - I didn’t think it was necessary because it is not specific to you - it’s the first line of defense that was floated regarding Bennett’s comments.
If you want to see an example of how a seemingly reasonable and logical defense mutates into “the meme”, go back to Levitt’s blog and scan down the comments. As you said yourself:
Unfortunately, you don’t need to go to Stormfront to see it - it’s on every political blog out there to some degree or another. And the meme doesn’t even need to be spelled out to infect the unconscious mind of anyone reading along.
So where is the context, Scylla? Bennett wasn’t quoted out of context - he inserted his comment without context. Read the transcript. The caller wasn’t asking about race or crime statistics.
And did Bennett follow up on his remark to provide context after the fact? No, he did not. His audience didn’t get the benefit of a discussion about all the related factors, i.e., poverty, or institutional bias.
But then the defenders of Bennett (conservative blogs and pundits) had a springboard for their own comments, but never framed as a discussion about race and crime and all the possible factors, so no context was supplied then either. The final result is “the meme” as an unexamined idea in the minds of even more reasonable people. See how it works?
“Accuracy over sensitivity” is a false choice. No one was asking Bennett to lie about the crime statistics for the sake of political correctness. No one was asking him about the crime statistics at all.
I don’t blame you personally for spreading the meme (if I did, you would have read about it directly before this). But your defense of Bennett is disingenuous in other ways:
It has already been pointed out to you that Bennett clearly stated he disagreed with Levitt’s theory. How is it reasonable to surmise that?
Too bad you can’t also read Levitt’s mind and reasonably surmise why he termed the race-based crime data unreliable.
I think it is safe to assume that he feels it is unrealiable because race has nothing to do with the causation of crime in the absence of a theory that satisfies scientific method that explains why. There isn’t one as far as I know and anyone who suggests there is is a racist.