Myrdal then paints a picture of the South no Southerner would recognize. For a jaw-dropping example of the strange fabrications that have made Myrdal’s work notorious, consider the following: In the South, inequality of justice seems to be the most important factor in making the statistics on Negro crime and white crime not comparable: ... [I]n any crime which remotely affects a white man, Negroes are more likely to be arrested than are whites, more likely to be indicted after arrest, more likely to be convicted in court and punished. Negroes will be arrested on the slightest suspicion, or on no suspicion at all, merely to provide witnesses or to work during a labor shortage in violation of anti-peonage laws. The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro’s lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. In the Southern court, a Negro will seldom be treated seriously, and his testimony against a white man will be ignored, if he is permitted to express it at all. When sentenced he is usually given a heavier punishment and probation or suspended sentence is seldom allowed him.... Myrdal goes on to remark that when white lawyers, installment collectors, insurance agents, plantation owners, and others cheat the Negroes of the South, they are “never” regarded as criminals. But stealing by Negroes from whites is almost always punished as a crime. These things occur in the North, Myrdal asserts, although in a much smaller degree. In the North, the trouble is that the Negro has brought certain cultural practices with him from the South. Also, the Negro is poor. He cannot bribe policemen to let him off; he has no influential connections; he does not know the important people who can help him out of trouble. In brief, Myrdal says, the statistics “do not provide a fair index of Negro crime.” And for a typical example of the fallacies that permeate the statistics, “the Negro rape rate, like other Negro crime rates, is fallaciously high: white women may try to extricate themselves from the consequences of sexual delinquency by blaming or framing Negro men; a white woman who has a Negro lover can get rid of him or avoid social ostracism following detection by accusing him of rape; neurotic white women may hysterically interpret an innocent action as an ‘attack’ by a Negro.”