Chamblee54

Nate Silver likes to keep busy during a non election year. He issued a report recently, Black Americans Are Killed At 12 Times The Rate Of People In Other Developed Countries. The Silver report was published June 18. The various internet content recyclers only picked up the story a day or two ago.
“If you’re a white person your chance of being murdered every year is 2.5 out of 10,000… If you’re a black person it’s 19.4, so almost eight times higher…. the murder rate for white Americans is similar to the murder rate for people living in Finland, Chile or Israel. The murder rate for black Americans, on the other hand, is similar to the rate found “in developing countries that are war zones even, like Myanmar, or Rwanda, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, places that have vast disorder.”
If there is one thing you can find on the internet, it is statistics. Since we are dealing with totals, not averages, the numbers used in this post should be fairly reliable. There might be some under reporting, or questions about how to deal with mixed race people. For the purposes of this post, we are going to take the numbers at face value.
The numbers used today are from 2013. The population of the United States was 316,128,839. Of this total, 77.7% are white, and 13.2% are black. There are 5.88 times as many white people as black people. There were 245,632,107 white people, and 41,729,006 black people. For purposes of this study, these numbers will be rounded off, to 316m total, 246m white, and 42m black.
Expanded Homicide Data Table 6 was produced by the FBI. For white people, there were 3,005 murders in 2013. This is 12 per million. For black people, there were 2491 murders in 2013. This is 59 per million. These numbers are different from those quoted by Nate Silver.
Who is committing these murders? For the white people, 2,509 (83%) were killed by a white person, and 409 (13%) were killed by a black person. (These numbers will not add up to 100%, as there are “other” and unknown killers.) For the black people, 189 (7%) were killed by a white person, and 2,245 (90%) were killed by a black person.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.