This year's race for Durham mayor will reveal a lot about us. The dominant issue is violent crime -- crime that disproportionately hurts black residents and is most often waged by young black men. Our two candidates are African-American males with contrary notions about winning this war on crime. And the person whose influence will determine the final tally is an African-American woman with a firm grip on what has been the most powerful black political group in North Carolina.

But first, a recap of the City Council primary results. In The Durham News before the primary, I predicted the six winning candidates in this order: Catotti, Brown, Ali, Funderburk, Harris and Peterson. I was wrong only about Victoria Peterson coming in sixth -- she came in seventh instead. Steve Monks, who burned a few bridges running for district attorney last year, surprised me and others by bumping Peterson.

My fear of a replay of the '94 election was partly borne out. While some largely Republican precincts were clocking 14 to 16 percent turnout, a number of predominately Democratic precincts influenced by the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People came in at 5 to 8 percent. This contributed to Monks defeating their endorsed candidate, Peterson, by fewer than 500 votes. In addition to losing a candidate, the Committee's snub of neighborhood leader David Harris leaves him with a lot of ground to make up from a fifth-place finish.

The Committee's electoral weakness under the leadership of Dr. Lavonia Allison bodes well for Thomas Stith. If Stith continues to take the Committee endorsement away from his Democratic opponent, as he has in every election since 1999, he could come out on top. Bell's history will still get him lots of "Committee" voters regardless of the endorsement, but it may not be enough. Even if Bell keeps the endorsement, the Committee's low turnout could still doom his campaign.

And what of those campaigns? Stith contrasts Durham's crime rate with the lower rates of our whiter and wealthier neighbors (the black populations of Cary, Chapel Hill and Raleigh are 3 percent, 16 percent and 22 percent, respectively).

Incumbent mayor Bill Bell compares Durham's crime rate with cities more similar in race and income demographics -- Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Both have a population that is 37 percent black and crime rates higher than ours. The City of Durham has been roughly 50-50 white and black for more than a century.

Which comparison matters most? In the 23 years I have lived in Durham, Republicans have complained on an almost daily basis that because our crime rate is worse than our neighbors' (and our tax rate and our schools, roads, etc.), "no one will want to move here." But somehow 100,000 people -- of all races and ethnicities -- ignored their real-estate agents' dire warnings and moved to Durham anyway.

Maybe what the complainers meant was that no Republicans would move here. So the comparison Stith uses hasn't been effective in slowing Durham's growth, and I would argue that it's also not helpful in getting a handle on crime.

When there's a rough correlation between crime rates and proportion of poor and black people in American cities, what we are seeing is a map of the aftershocks of prejudice based on race and income. Only a small percentage of the people subjected to prejudice are going to react by adopting a violent or drug-ridden lifestyle, but it doesn't take many before you've got 20 or 30 people a year being murdered or nearly 100 women being raped or about a thousand drug addicts creating a market that sustains various criminal retail enterprises.

Criminals -- including the people who broke into my garage last year -- need to be in prison, but I don't think Stith can arrest his way out of this problem.

When he compares us with whiter cities, does he think they are somehow tougher on crime? Does he really think their police policies explain the crime rate disparities? When I see we have lower crime rates than Greensboro and Winston-Salem, I believe it comes from strengthening families through city policies like affordable housing, after-school programs, public transit and living wage, as well as community policing efforts that Bell has supported and Stith has voted against.

While middle-class neighborhoods face occasional break-ins, poorer neighborhoods strive weekly to overcome murders, rapes, armed robberies and assaults. That both mayoral candidates are of the same race makes this debate about winning the war on crime more clear-cut: Are we going to buy Stith's notion that "getting tough on crime" will persuade aimless young men to be "kinder and gentler," or are we going to dry up the supply of criminals by strengthening families as Bell has worked to do for a quarter century?

(Frank Hyman is a former member of the Durham City Council.)