CDC: Total Homicides Up 37% during Black Lives Matter Decade of 2014-2023
Although the homicide rate has declined since peaking in 2021 during the “racial reckoning,” black deaths by homicide were 51% higher per capita in 2023 than in 2014, the year that Black Lives Matter emerged after Michael Brown’s death at Ferguson, MO. Hispanic deaths by homicide were up 42%, while white deaths white up 14%, but homicides of Asians were up only 1%. Overall, Americans died by homicide at a 37% higher per capita rate in 2023 than in 2014.
That’s bad.
The Centers for Disease Control tabulate the causes of death listed on all death certificates filed in the United States. For certain causes of death, such as homicide, suicide, and motor vehicle accident, the CDC enforces a six month lag to allow local coroners time to come to a studied conclusion about the real cause of death. So, complete 2023 data only has become available in the last few days.
Unlike FBI murder data collected from local police departments, the CDC does not attempt to enumerate who committed the homicides, just who the victims were according to the doctors who signed off on the death certificates. The CDC data does not suffer from the two main problems with the FBI data in which some local police departments have been tardy in updating their data collection to handle the FBI’s new preferred methodology for handling multiple crimes in a single incident and for dealing with Hispanics.
The black rate of dying by homicide remained enormously higher than that of other major races:
Blacks died by homicide 7.4 times as often per capita as non-Hispanic whites died in 1999, but blacks died by homicide 10.3 times as often as whites in 2023.
What about blacks vs. comparably poor and uneducated Hispanics? Blacks died by homicide (almost all at the hands of other blacks) 2.6 times as often per capita in 1999 but 4.3 times as often as Latinos in 2023.
Finally, blacks died by homicide 6.8 times as often per capita as Asians in 1999, but 17.4 times as often in 2023.
Since most Americans don’t grok weird ratios like blacks vs. Asians, but are obsessed with nonwhites vs. whites, here are per capita homicide victimization ratios for nonwhite groups vs. whites:
2001 is distorted by most of the ~3000 homicide victims of 9/11 being white white-collar office workers.
Other than the fluke year of 2001, the black/white ratio doesn’t change much until 2019, and then suddenly soaring during the George Floyd racial reckoning and remaining historically high through 2023.
The Hispanic to white homicide victimization ratio dropped from about 3 to 1 to about 2 to 1 during the Great Recession as many of the most marginal Latinos went home when unskilled jobs evaporated.
The homicide victimization rate was similar for whites and Asians in the early 21st Century, but has since become considerably lower for Asians, although it narrowed in 2023.
In short, America has a massive problem with blacks shooting each other, and perhaps an even more massive problem with white public intellectuals not being allowed to mention that flagrant fact.
Talking of statistics: I wish it was possible to quantify - with charts and graphs - the rise in the number of public intellectuals becoming full of sh**t over a period of, say, 1960 - 2024....and perhaps another data-set plotting the increase in those public intellectuals' cognitive disonnance and inability to deal with 'inconvenient' bits of reality. (You can probably tell from this that I am not an academic in an elite university social sciences faculty.)
The contrast is even more striking when you separate out young black men from the rest of the black population. That group constitutes just 2% of the total national population and yet commits about half of its annual homicides. A rate an astounding 49 times higher than the 98% rest of the population. The racist act of crossing the street to avoid a group of black men is unfortunately rooted in a degree of reality.