Due to the Ferguson fiasco, every now and then I’ll hear someone try to pretend that black-on-black crime in the USA is some crazy rumor. That’s a shame.
Since all hospitals and police stations are required by law to report crimes to the FBI, the FBI’s numbers are the final authority on the raw numbers. Any respectable report or study is based on these numbers. Everything else is either an approximation based on speculation or pure hogwash. So if you ever hear a report from a talking head or journalist that sounds suspicious, you can check with the FBI’s website on your own.
Here are a few good places to start:
FBI Crime Statistics: http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats
This is a launching pad to all sorts of particulars about crimes in the USA.
Victim data: Expanded Homicide Data Tables 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 13
Offender data: Expanded Homicide Data Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6
Based on these reports, here’s my summary on homicides:
- For 2013, there were over 12K murder victims in the US.
Over 9,000 were men.
5,500 were white, 6,200 were black, 1,799 were Hispanic/Latino.
(Bear in mind that whites make up over 65% of the population and blacks are ~13% ..yet more blacks were killed than whites. Bottom line: blacks continue to be killed by fellow Americans at a disproportionate rate.) - For 2013, over 14K people were involved as offenders in homicides.
9,000 were males.
4,300 were white, 5,300 were black, 1,000 were Hispanic/Latino (many were unknown).
Again – remember that blacks only represent 13% of the US population. - Regardless of race, the overwhelming majority of homicides is committed by males 17-34 years old.
- On average, 228 blacks are shot/killed by the police. (The FBI doesn’t provide these numbers. This came from other sources)
- Conclusion: Less than 0.2% of homicides are done by cops. In raw numbers, the majority of homicides are black people killing other black people. If we take population percentages into consideration, blacks are killing at a wildly disproportionate rate when compared to whites, Hispanic/Latinos and Asians.
Bottom line: black people have far more to fear from other blacks than they do from the police or from whites, Hispanics/Latinos or Asians. The Bureau of Justice Statistics states that this isn’t just a onsie – this has been a trend since 1976: On average, 92% of black deaths is due to other blacks.
If we want to have a conversation about race in the country, we need to try and figure out why the black community is killing itself off. That trumps any and all other racial discussions.
