by Brendan OÃFlaherty & Rajiv Sethi
January 15, 2010
African-Americans are six times as likely as white Americans to die at the hands of a murderer, and roughly seven times as likely to murder someone...
The magnitude of the difference in murder and victimization rates far exceeds any difference in characteristics that appear to predispose people to kill and be killed: being poor, being a high school dropout, living in a dense urban environment, or being raised in a single-parent household, for instance. Blacks are about 2.75 times as likely as whites to be poor, 2.2 times as likely to be high-school dropouts, 2.9 times as likely to live in a large city, and 2.7 times as likely to grow up in a single parent household all ratios that are far below the observed ratios for murder victimization and offending.
Table 2. Homicide Offending by Race, 1976-2005, per 100,000 population
***** Black * White *Ratio
1976 * 46.6 * 4.9 ** 9.5
1980 * 51.5 * 6.4 ** 8.1
1984 * 33.1 * 5.3 ** 6.3
1988 * 41.2 * 4.9 ** 8.4
1992 * 47.0 * 5.2 ** 9.0
1996 * 35.9 * 4.5 ** 8.0
2000 * 25.6 * 3.5 ** 7.3
2004 * 24.1 * 3.6 ** 6.7
2005 * 26.5 * 3.5 ** 7.6
Source. US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2007
http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/Homicide.pdf