black on black murder

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. Those statistics don't mean what you think they mean.

There are roughly 6 times as many white people as black people in the USA (roughly 72% to 12%), so absolute numbers don't really mean anything; the meaningful number is per capita.

That table has 6131 murders in it, of which 5718 were identified as involving whites and blacks only:

In this table, the first column is the number of murders in that category, the second is the number you'd get if anyone were equally likely to be murdered by anyone, and the third is the ratio.

White people killing white people 2,630 4200 0.63
Black people killing black people 2447 0116 21.1
Black people killing white people 0448 0700 0.64
White people killing black people 0193 0700 0.28

What the statistics show is that there are far, *far* more black on black murders per capita than there are any other combination of victim's race and murderer's race.

If you control for wealth/poverty, that will become less striking *within any given wealth band*, but it's not obvious that that's the right way to look at it.