The Geography of Homicide

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The single most important fact about crime in the United States is the extraordinarily high rate at which African Americans die violently: almost ten times the rate of white Americans. That’s one of the most gigantic racial ratios in all the social sciences.

In contrast, Hispanics, who are roughly comparable to blacks in average income, education, and age, die by homicide just over twice as often as whites. The black homicide death rate is thus 4.8 times the Hispanic rate, a gap that is hard to explain in any politically correct fashion, so almost nobody ever mentions it.

The second-highest homicide rate is among American Indians, who die violently over four times as often as whites. Asians get killed only half as much as whites.

Despite making up only about one-eighth of the population, over half of homicide victims in the U.S. are black, with a little over a quarter being white. In all likelihood, a pie chart of perps would be even more lopsided.

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Note that the CDC tracks the race of victims, but not the race of perpetrators. Presumably, the offending rate of groups that get killed a lot, such as blacks, tend to be even somewhat higher than their victimization rate—the FBI counts blacks as 56.5 percent of known murder offenders in 2020—while those with low rates of dying by homicide, such as Asians, probably do unto others even less often than they are done unto. But most killings are intraracial, so counting victims can help us get a general sense of the number of perpetrators.

Crime shot upward in 2020, whether due to Black Lives Matter declaring the “racial reckoning,” the pandemic, increased gun purchases, stimulus checks, sunspots, or whatever. A simple way of measuring the change is to compare total homicides in the two years 2020–2021 with the previous pair of years, 2018–2019. {snip}

Over the past two years, black homicide deaths shot up 45 percent, Hispanics 37 percent, whites 17 percent, American Indians 16 percent, and Asians (whose victimizations have probably gotten the most publicity per capita) 9 percent.

More concern should be paid to the fact that Hispanics, after becoming notably better behaved since the 1990s, have regressed considerably over the past two years. More than anybody else during America’s tough-on-crime decades, Latinos seemed to get the message. Their murder rate declined relative to blacks and whites (and my vague impression is that they also drive drunk less often than in the 20th century).

But, as The Establishment signaled over the past two years that they were just kidding about rule of law, more Hispanics seemed to have decided that the gringos weren’t serious anymore about law and order.

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The African American homicide rate is similar to that of cartel-plagued Mexico, and lags Nigeria, South Africa, and Jamaica. {snip}

Not surprisingly, within the U.S., a state’s total homicide rate tends to correlate closely with how black its population is:

If you count Washington, D.C., as a state, the correlation coefficient is a very high r = 0.82.

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The black homicide rate is twice as high in the safest state (Massachusetts) as the white rate in the most dangerous state (Mississippi). {snip}

Still, there are major differences among states in the black rate. The pattern, though, is perhaps unexpected: As far as I can tell, blacks tend to get themselves killed the most in states, north or south, near the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri Rivers.

In recent years, due to the Ferguson Effect, the black rate has been the worst in the state of Missouri, followed by Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. {snip}

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