The 100,000; Understanding Inter-Racial Murder in the USA from 1968-2021 Crime Stats
Blacks are 9.8x more likely to commit Inter-Racial Murder than Whites. It could be much higher. Est. using data from FBI UCR 2021 (NIBRS) & CDC WONDER 2022 NVSS. Updated Mar 24, 2023
Updated March 24, 2023 with additional data in the final section.
Interest in crime — and its attendant stats — has rapidly increased since May 25, 2020. But, somehow, interracial crime seems left behind in much reporting.
We often hear from uneducated commentators about the “unprecedented” “outlier” nature of crime in the 2020s. They’ll often blame COVID-19 & government-ordered shutdowns and use “the pandemic” to excuse criminals.
But are the 2020s really an outlier without precedent?
Of course not. The 2020s are a reversion to the mean.
In the past, crime has been worse and crime has been better. But for now, we’re back to the 60-year historic average rate of murder. Rates of interracial violence are also at historically average levels.
Due to the limitations of the datasets, within this article “White” includes “Hispanic” for all years.
This is a supplemental article intended to elucidate some history of this woefully underreported topic through the use of public data.
This supplement is standalone, but complements the previous — much more comprehensive — review article. These two articles can be read in any order, and the other can be found here. All of the data found in these articles (and much more) can be found on my Twitter account @fentasyl.
100,000 More Whites Murdered
Interracial murder data is extremely unpopular to report on, for reasons that become quite obvious. That is, the reality is the exact opposite of The Narrative.
The historical record available from the CDC makes it clear that Whites have always borne the burden of interracial violence. Perhaps this was different before good records were kept, but speculation on anthropological studies is outside of my purview. I speak only of data.
And we can make something of an informed estimate by combining interracial victimization data derived from FBI NIBRS with the actual number of murder victims of each race & sex taken from death certificate data from the CDC. From this, we can estimate, since 1968:
~193,500 Interracial Murders
~145,500 White Victims of Black Murderers (75.3% of total)
~35,000 White Female Victims of Black Murderers (85.4% of Female total)
~48,000 Black Victims of White Murderers (24.7% of total)
~6,000 Black Female Victims of White Murderers (14.6% of Female total)
This nets out to nearly 100,000 more White Victims of interracial murder than Black Victims of interracial murder from 1968-2021; this averages out to about 1,800 more White Victims of interracial murder every year for the past 54 years.
The primary limitation is in assuming all years have the same interracial rates as 2021. This methodology most likely:
underestimates the number of interracial (esp. Black-on-White) murders in the 1970s-80s
overestimates the number of interracial murders around 1999-2014
100,000 is Lower than Expected? 2021 as Case Study
To understand this a bit more, we can look at interracial & intra-racial victimization rates of 2021 specifically.
Projecting 2021 rates across a lifetime (see this section of previous article for details on this calculation), gives us some more comparable numbers as seen in the bottom row of this table.
This is fairly complex, so let’s dig into it. Specifically, we see in these projections that:
Per capita by Murderer’s race:
0.403% of all Blacks (Male & Female) will commit an interracial murder against a White Person
0.041% of all Whites (Male & Female) will commit an interracial murder against a Black Person
Per capita by Victim’s race:
0.224% of all Blacks (Male & Female) will be the victim of an interracial murder committed by a White Person
0.071% of all Whites (Male & Female) will be the victim of an interracial murder committed by a Black Person
This tells us a couple important facts:
A random Black person is 9.8x more likely than a random White person to commit interracial murder (403/41)
A random Black person is 3.2x more likely than a random White person to be the victim of an interracial murder (224/71)
Together, this essentially tells us that, when controlling for population effects nationwide, a random Black person is only ~3.1x more likely to commit interracial murder than a random White person.
“9.8x individually? And only 3.1x more on a population basis? Isn’t that a lot??” you may be thinking.
They could instead be 65x and 11x
In a randomly distributed population, with both groups having the exact same murder rates, we’d expect about 6x from the different population sizes alone.
But Blacks and Whites do not have the exact same murder rates.
Black-on-Black murder happens at 11x the rate as White-on-White murder (going back to the table above: 2057/187).
If the USA was fully integrated, and Black-on-White murders happened at the same rates as Black-on-Black: we’d expect the average Black person to be about 65x more likely to commit interracial murder than the average White person.
De facto segregation — stemming primarily from the government-sponsored ethnic cleansing campaign euphemistically called “White Flight” — is the reason it’s merely 9.8x and 3.1x right now.
An Alternate History: 10,000 per year
In 2021, there were over 25,000 homicides, including an estimated 4,250 interracial and an estimated 2,900 Black-on-White.
This gives ~1,550 more Black-on-White than White-on-Black for the year.
Across 1968 to 2021, we estimate ~1,100 to ~2,700 excess interracial murders per year against Whites.
In the fully integrated statistical world imagined in the section above, we’d expect 2021 to have about 15,300 interracial homicides, with about 14,000 of them being Black-on-White.
This would give ~12,700 more Black-on-White than White-on-Black.
Imagine not “just” ~1,100 to ~2,700 excess interracial murders per year against Whites, but over ~10,000 every year instead.
With that context, the otherwise shocking “100,000 more Whites murdered in 54 years” starts to sound almost reasonable.
But the FBI said…
The FBI has historically published some numbers for “single-victim, single-offender, both with races known to local police and reported to UCR.”
This limited dataset told us there were ~200 White-on-Black murders and ~500 Black-on-White murders each year during the least violent period in US history (2001-2015).
Added March 24:
The reason the FBI reports like this is presumably because Blacks are more likely to murder Whites in a gang of 2+ offenders than the other way around.
We see that, if we include the victims who were murdered by 2+ offenders, this more than doubles the differential from their standard reported value.
This 34,731 excess Black-on-White Murders over the 41 years from 1980-2020 is the absolute minimum value possible. This number disregards 100,603 victims across those 41 years with Unknown assailants.
Extrapolated to 54 years, this bare minimum would be about 45,750 excess Whites murdered by Blacks. And we would estimate 132,500 victims with Unknown assailants.
We can also look at this from the victim side to incorporate the Unknowns and derive ranges of possible values. Below shows the Theoretic Minimum & Maximum number of yearly Black-on-White murders from 1980-2020.
Assuming a 25% interracial share across all years gives an average of 2,240 Black-on-White murders per year, and an expected 120,900 Black-on-White murders across 54 years.
The minimum is 1,360 yearly, and 73,400 54-year-total Black-on-White murders.
The maximum is 3,440 yearly, and 185,800 54-year-total Black-on-White murders.
We can also look at all Known Offenders by number of Assailants.
In recent years, with fewer Unknown assailants, we note how the share of Black Murderers consistently increases.
Indeed, by 2020, nearly 1/3 of gang-style multi-offender murders of Whites were committed by Blacks.
At the same time, not even 1/5 of single-offender murders of Whites were committed by Blacks.
Together, this shows us that Blacks were about 1/4 of Known offenders in murders of Whites in 2020.
End of Updated Content
As reported by US News in 2016:
killings of blacks by whites and whites by blacks accounted for about 12 percent of the roughly 6,000 homicides last year in which police had information about the race of both victim and killer – a slight increase from around 11 percent in 2014. About 15.8 percent of white victims were killed by blacks last year, and 8.6 percent of black victims were killed by whites.
In 2015, there were ~6,000 homicides with sufficient data from the FBI, giving us the oft-recited ~200 White-on-Black and ~500 Black-on-White.
In 2015, there were actually ~8,000 homicides… of Black Males alone.
In total, the CDC reports over 17,500 White & Black homicide victims in 2015.
Do the math.
That’s all folks. Thanks for reading.
Follow me on Twitter @fentasyl for more in-depth data on this topic and others.
Check out my previous article for a much more comprehensive treatment on this topic:
Sources
The CDC WONDER datasets can be found at:
https://wonder.cdc.gov
The FBI NIBRS 2021 Estimation dataset can be found at: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads
The EZASHR 1980-2020 dataset can be found at:
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezashr/
The 100,000; Understanding Inter-Racial Murder in the USA from 1968-2021 Crime Stats
“People like you” whoa Gerry. Yea they basically sainted a deadbeat fentanyl addict for overdosing while being arrested so if the data went the other way we’d never hear the end of it. I’m just saying us whites have more pressing problems than violent blacks killing us. Interesting nonetheless
Okay, so I have few issues with the analysis.
1. For interracial ratio's, you use the NIBRS, which according to your Twitter thread is a lot more skewed than larger FBI data, both with the Hispanic+White categorization issue showing a roughly 3:1. (Something like 28% vs 10% for whites and blacks respectively for victimization) Further, the NIBRS has weaker national coverage than the later, doesn't? So I can't shake the feel that the FBI is closer to the actual ratio. For example, inquisitive Bird used offender data for a similar questions a month or so back and used FBI crosstabs instead.
Not saying the typical FBI supp. Is sufficient in terms of absolute numbers, common knowledge due department reporting gaps and unsolved cases , but using data on unsolved cases and Cooper's 2008 algorithm, this average of around 1300 annually, rather than 1800, was developed by this guy.
https://www.justfacts.com/racialissues.asp
Further, there becomes a smaller disparity, with the ratio being closer to 2:1 than 3:1, though the FBI data fluctuates between the two depending on the year.
2. I really find your baseline of a hypothetical integrated population where black and white victims have the same rate of murder by blacks despite a stranger-nonstranger effect still likely influencing homicide patterns.
More pressingly, Integration fueled by blockbusting and public housing expansion was more disruptive to the status quo (that is the baseline mobility of lower class blacks) than White flight (which if anything maintained such dissimilarity). So while mathematically plausible, your framing of such a scenario in the same light like Murder rates sans medical advancements is misleading. I am mainly focusing on Northern dynamics here, as in the South patterns of segregation by dissimilarity indexes are a different matter for cities, plus the available space for blacks to be concentrated.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/national-rise-in-residential-segregation/C6CDA8CE8E2A0F2523EAE4C7BACB8E2A
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26332180?seq=3
2. Not sure why, given the short duration in most places of maintained segregation in this period, that the 70s-80s would be underestimated. Honestly could be missing something here.
3. The whole "reversion to the mean" point I have partial issue with. While pandemic conditions would match 20th century levels, the simple fact is that fluctuations seen in pre-Floyd disruptions like the Ferguson era still dissipated according to the data. Unless there was some sort of institutional resurgence I am unaware of, what the relavant mean to expect is still a debateable here.
The real question is this just another spike that happened to be more severe given the more unusual demographic conditions, or is this long term?