Murder in Black and White It is well known that young men commit the most murders and that young black men are particularly murderous— but exactly how murderous? A reader has called to our attention a Department of Justice web page (http://www.ojp. usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/propor tiontab.htm) that presents racial calcu-lations of the kind that almost never see the light of day. For every year between 1976 and 1999, it lists the percentages of the population accounted for by white males, aged 14-24, and by black males of the same ages. It then cites the percentage of all homicides committed by these two groups. The results are eye-opening. Since 1992, blacks of the most homicidal ages have accounted for only 1.1 percent of the population but in 1999 they committed 27 percent of the mur- ders. That means they kill at 24.5 times the national rate. It was in 1993 that the 1.1 percent were friskiest, accounting for 33.2 percent of all killings. Whites aged 14-24 account for 6.1 percent of the population and in 1999 committed 18 percent of the murders, which means they killed at just under three times the national average rate. Simple arithmetic tells us blacks of the most dangerous age kill at eight times the rate of the most murderous whites, which is the proportion that holds for both populations as a whole. In fact, since the Department of Justice’s figures for “whites” include Hispanics, they in-flate the white murder rate, so the racial differences are even greater than their figures suggest. [FBI, Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-1999.]
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