Interracial homicide stats

As the media does their best to stoke another moral panic about interracial homicides, it’s good to be reminded of the actual facts – statistics – regarding homicide in the US.

From US News, 2016: Race and Homicide in America, by the Numbers

The chart they included, based on FBI data, is almost the bottom line:

The article notes correctly that, despite this disparity, 89.3% of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks, and 81.3% of white homicide victims were killed by other whites. That fact alone, you would think, would preclude a moral panic about interracial killings.

But while the article notes that “Black people have consistently accounted for close to half the country’s homicide victims,” while comprising only 13.3% of the population, they strangely fail to point out what relative population levels mean for interracial homicide rates. I find this very odd. After all, the outrage is all based on the narrative that black people are “literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step outside” their homes. (I especially find it strange that US News seems to have chosen, in this case, a definition of “white” that helps their narrative. According to US census data for 2018, non-hispanic whites are only 60% of the population, not 77%, while blacks are 13.4%.)

Despite that, let’s use US News’ numbers. (I don’t know how “white” is defined in the FBI stats.) Here’s the calculation they omitted:

• whites are 77.1% of the population

• whites killed 229 blacks in 2015

• blacks are 13.3% of the population

• blacks killed 500 whites in 2015

By a simple ratio, blacks killed 2.2 times as many whites in 2015, as the reverse. However, there are 5.8 times as many whites as blacks in the US. Therefore when you control for relative population levels, blacks killed 12.6 times as many whites in 2015. And those numbers have been relatively constant as far back as you want to look.

Is there something wrong with my math?

How come this is not the number that generates outrage?