And here we have the reason that the answer to your question is "maybe."
Do you know what else is correlated? US government spending on space, science and technology and the number of suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (99.97%). Per capita cheese consumption has a 94.7% correlation with the number of people who die after becoming tangled in their bedsheets. The per-capita consumption of margarine has a 99.26% correlation with the divorce rate in Maine. (Source and more fun:
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)
And yet nobody is going to suggest that if we spent less on the space program that there would be fewer suicides, that eating cheese makes you get tangled in your bedsheets or that margarine is a cause of divorce. Hell, nobody is even going to suggest that these things are more likely based on their pair (ie, nobody is going to claim that eating more cheese increases your chance of dying tangled in your bedsheets.) And if somebody did, we would mock them for a fool and dismiss them. Yet somehow we're okay with people going no further than that when it comes to race and crime, two subjects I hope we can all agree are much more important and much more complex than cheese or bedsheets.
Nobody denies that there is a
correlation between race and crime; the numbers are readily available. What conclusion one uses that information to jump to, however, is what determines whether or not the person uttering it is a racist fool or something more.
The reality is we don't even
know the cause for most crime. We can trot out spurious correlations all we please, but we have absolutely no idea if we're making a valid point or simply talking out of our backside.