"... is your opinion, contradicted by the available evidence"

This is false.

In fact - the evidence points much more strongly towards 'behaviour' than it does 'economic status'.

(By the way, I'm not making the case entirely that 'ethnicity is it' - rather, saying that there's tons of evidence to support it. I believe that it's rather more complicated).

'Economic status' is loosely correlated with crime in the USA for example. More crime is committed in poorer areas. Ok - so are they poor and therefore commit crime - or they have bad behaviours and are therefore poor?

The problem is - 'ethnicity' is considerably more correlated with crime, particularly violent crime.

For example, poor African Americans commit considerably more violent crime than their poor White or Asian peers.

Now - you could argue it's due to 'racism' etc. - and that's a good point, but it only goes so far.

Also - I'd argue that this is not about 'racism' - it's about 'ethnicity'. What is 'ethnicity' but a group of values, behaviours, norms, viewpoints, beliefs, patterns etc? Two groups with different ethnic backgrounds are likely to have very different outcomes overall in life. That's just reality - and it doesn't have to have anything to do with race.

I'm not actually making an argument one way or another - I think there's a lot to be said for how hard it is go grow up poor, or how hard it is to grow up facing racism and injustice - but at the same time - behaviours, mannerism, values etc. will define most of an individuals future - and those are passed down to children from their parents, and close community members, i.e. ethnicity. So it would be basically crazy to ignore this issue as well.