Race and Violence

Race and ethnicity continue to be among the most important predictors of violent crime commission and victimization in the United States. The media have given great attention to this issue, and in the last decade of the twentieth century, social scientists also focused on it. Recent figures indicate that young African American males have eight times the homicide offending rates of their white counterparts, and for the violent crime of robbery, the arrest rate for African Americans is almost eleven times that of whites. This information, obtained from official police reports, should be interpreted with caution, because as it may be biased by certain police practices; however, independent data obtained from victimization and self-report surveys tend to confirm the pattern of higher rates of involvement in violent crime by blacks.

Minorities, and in particular black Americans, are also more likely to be victims of violent crime. Despite the fact that rates of violent crime declined during the 1990s, mortality from homicide among minority groups is still extraordinarily high. Homicide remains the leading cause of death for black males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and it is the second leading cause of death for Hispanic males in the same age group. With regard to robbery, survey data indicate that in 1998, the black robbery victimization rate was about 5.9 per 1,000, compared to 3.7 per 1,000 for whites. This higher rate of victimization has profound social, economic, and psychological consequences for the African American community in inner cities.

Despite the social import of this issue, scholars for many years chose not to study the racial disparities in violence in depth, due to its inherently controversial nature. In the latter part of the 1990s, however, a number of criminological studies have begun to address the topic, focusing almost exclusively on the differences between whites and blacks.