3 Comments

I only skimmed your article, and I'll admit my math isn't strong enough to follow it. But I have looked at simpler (2020) data. Here are some take-aways: Blacks commit roughly 57% of known homicides. But wait: about 30% are done by unknown perp. Depending upon what assumptions one makes, it will change the the estimate of actual Black homicide rate as follows:

The overall Black rate is as low as ~ 50% IF one assigns a strict portion of the unknowns at the same rate as the knowns.

But wait, there are some common-sense observations that mere math doesn't address. That the majority of victims killed by "unknown" are Black. Since we know that race of killer and victim are almost always same, from this we can infer that the majority of unknown perps are likely Black.

Another inference: Blacks commit violent crime at multiples of other races. In large metros with large or majority Black populace, Blacks commit very nearly all of the violent crime including murder.

There is also a poltical issue: Many jurisdictions do not report their crime data to the FBI. There are many reasons for this, but prime suspect would be hiding unfavorable data to promote a "progressive" or "woke" point of view. Thus, we must assume the FBI data are incomplete.

From the above, I can safely assume that most (probably > 75%) of the "Unknown" are committed by Blacks, which leads to the unhappy conjecture that Blacks commit a lot more than 57% of killings. At least we know they don't commit more than about 87% of them. Using the 75% of unknowns, we'd get 79.5%, a bit better, but still nothing to be proud of.

I admit that above are based on only a few statistics. I may be wrong. Feel free to do your own research if you like. Or perhaps there is a simple explanation, like White Supremacists are killing young black males and driving into the inner city to dump their bodies, and somehow they are eluding capture.

Expand full comment

Thanks.

One thing I can add is that Hispanic homicide victimizations dropped sharply after the financial crash of 2008, driving down the white total and the white % of offenders in your model. I'm not sure why: perhaps the most marginal Latinos returned to their home countries? Unfortunately, the Hispanic rate got quite a bit worse in 2021-early 2022.

Expand full comment