cgod:

I find these numbers somewhat suspect.

All my data is pulled from the FBI or the BJS.

Murders in 2011: 14,612

Number of those victims that were black as a percentage is 50% so we have 7306 black victims that year.

Murder clearance rate is about 65%, so we know who committed the murder 65% of the time (we can establish the race of the killer 65% of the time). This leaves us with 4748 murdered blacks in a year that have a killer of an identifiable race. So we can shave off at least a portion of this total as murder by people of other races.

For 2010 the FBI data for homicide by committed by blacks perpetrators on black victims is listed as 2459.

This guy cites "The Blaze" which cites a BJS paper from 2005 in which the murder rate was roughly 15% higher and puts out this 93% number for murders of blacks being perpetrated by blacks. Further digging into the data which the paper cites gives a black on black rate of 42.2% of black murders being perpetrated by blacks from one of the cited sources and the 2459 number from the second cited source. There are some other sources cited in the paper, but these are the ones directly mentioned in section where the authors data comes from, I don't feel like hunting every source in the paper to find where he pulled this specific bit of information from. Needless to say I feel suspicious about the 93% figure. If you were to extrapolate by the known race of the victim and the race of the perpetrator (those figures are in the 90% range but that data's numbers don't even get close to the total number of black victims in a given year and are well below the 65% clearance rate) and apply that the number to blacks who were killed by a person or people of an unknown race you would get a failing grade in any reputable undergraduate statistics course. This guy shouldn't be using rhetoric like

    To be exact, the shameful truth is that 93% of African-American murders are committed by other African-Americans.
At the very least the author has earned another failing grade, this time in undergraduate rhetoric for his abuse of the words "exact" and "truth".

It took me all of five minutes to find the basic FBI data to make these numbers look suspicious and another ten minutes to dig out the rest of it. The reason I doubted the information was on my wrong suspicion that there were around 10-12k homicides a year and a clearance rate of 50%, but hell I'm not writing a blog or out there trying to shape public opinion, I had no need to make sure I was up to date on the figures. At the very least my cursory knowledge of homicide and clearance rate set off my bullshit detector.

That all being said his core argument is strong. If he wasn't so lazy, bombastic and dishonest or over trusting in his sources he could have written something worth reading.


posted 3932 days ago