Crime, Black-on-Black

Crimes committed by black people against black victims. According to official U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 94 percent of black Americans killed between 1976 and 1999 were killed by other black Americans, and black Americans are six times more likely to be murdered than whites.

Such daunting numbers have prompted African American leaders to take a close look at the reasons for black-on-black crime rates and to look for ways to combat the problem. It is important to note, however, that what is said about black-on-black crime is also true of whites and other groups—that is, the vast majority of violent crimes against whites are committed by whites. Still, African American leaders are concerned about crime within the black community and are looking for answers.

Black-on-black crime is nothing new. In the South in the period after Reconstruction, crime within the black community was largely ignored by the legal system. Only when a black person committed a crime against a white person did the police intervene. Thus, if blacks wanted justice, they had to take it into their own hands.

When African Americans moved to the North during the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, they brought with them the idea that the police would not bother to enforce the law in the black community. The belief that vigilante justice was the only justice, combined with overcrowding and the easy availability of guns and alcohol in urban areas, led to a sharp rise in crime in many northern cities and elsewhere. By the 1930s, the rate of homicides among black men nationwide was 75 deaths per 100,000, seven and a half times greater than the homicide rate of whites.

Not all black-on-black crimes are committed as a form of rough justice. Many such crimes have been committed by black men on black women. Because some disadvantaged men link their sense of manhood and self-respect to the number of women they can claim, jealousy and possessiveness can sometimes lead to violence.

In the 1990s, disturbing new statistics revealed that both the victims and the perpetrators of violent crime are younger than they once were. African American children born to poor women, raised without fathers, sometimes find the social support they seek in urban gangs, and young men from gangs kill one another at alarming rates. In addition, several studies have uncovered disturbing statistics about the number of very young African American children who have witnessed criminal activity. One such survey in Chicago reported that 73 percent of eighth graders in one neighborhood had witnessed a violent crime. Some experts suggest that this early exposure to violent crime may make those exposed more prone to commit violent crime as adults.

When asked what to do about black-on-black crime, the Reverend Aaron Greenlea, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Greater Cincinnati, laid much of the problem on the sale and use of drugs and the fact that much of the violent crime is committed by youth involved with drugs. He was quoted in the Cincinnati Enquirer, “We know we have a serious problem … [but] we really don't know how to attack it.”

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