Why are Black men murdered so often?

"In the United States, the Black murder rate isn't just marginally higher than the rest of the country … it’s seven times higher than Whites and well above every other ethnic group they track." -- Ken

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Transcript

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What's going on with the black murder rate? In the United States, it's not just marginally higher than the rest of the country, it's seven times higher than whites and well above every other ethnic group that they track. More black men between the ages of 15 and 34 die by homicide than any other cause. And it's not even close. Heck, over twice as many are murdered than die in car accidents. I'm Ken LeCourt, and that's today's Elephant in the Room. So there are lots of theories in all of this, and I'll do my best to give it to you as straight as I can. Here's where we're going. We'll start with an ugly body count, looking at the numbers. But it wasn't always that way, and we'll see that in the rise and fall of murder. Then we'll start with the weaker explanations before we get to what holds up, the reasons that seem to make more sense. Okay, so black Americans make up only about 13% of the U.S. population, but they account for over half of all murderers and half of all murder victims. It's an ugly body count no matter how you look at it. By raw numbers, we're talking about 10,000 victims per year. In 2023, we saw a rate of 3.2 deaths per 100,000 people for white Americans compared to 21 for black Americans. And that gap has run about that wide for at least 50 years. And it's not just a black-white story. Latinos are roughly 5 to 6 per 100,000, and Asian Americans below 2. Now, a small part of that gap is demographics. Young people are more violent, and black Americans are, on average, about six and a half years younger than others. Still, a young man in some Chicago zip codes was three times more likely to be shot to death than a U.S. soldier deployed during the Iraq or Afghanistan War. Look, if I were black, this whole topic might drive me a bit crazy, because there's a lot of people out there to use it as a way to beat up on a whole community. So first let's take a look at another set of numbers. Because they show that number of black murderers and victims is roughly two people out of every 10,000 per year. So we're talking about a tiny fraction of one group of people committing the worst crime there is. And that violence is highly concentrated. FBI county level data shows that about 2% of U.S. counties account for just over half of all murders. Well, most counties report no murders in a typical year. And within those high murder counties themselves, the killings cluster in small sets of streets and blocks. So when you hear these numbers, don't picture 45 million people. Picture a smaller group of men within small neighborhoods doing the majority of it. Everyone else on those blocks, they're not committing the violence, they're living inside of it. So to get a better understanding of the high black murder rate, before looking at the difference between the races, let's take a look at the rise and fall of murder. Because those numbers for all races can vary dramatically in short order. Murder in America can double in a decade, then get cut in half the next. Underneath that movement, though, it's a slower story that explains the racial gap, and I'll focus on that in the next two sections. So, first of all, you'd think it might be easy to count murders since, I mean, there's a body, but that wasn't always the case. Before 1937, national homicide figures were pretty unreliable. The federal death registration system was new, and the cause of death reporting wasn't standardized. So as we look at a chart from 1937 to now, the biggest standout is the rise that started in the mid-1960s, where the murder rate climbed and gave us the deadliest 30-year stretch of violence in modern American history. The national rate hit 10 murders per 100,000 people, but in major cities, it was triple that, with over 30 per 100,000 in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. By comparison, New York City's murder rate last year was only 3.7. That's only an eighth of its high. Now, it's hard to exaggerate how unsafe the big cities looked and felt in those days. If you rode the New York Subway in the mid-1980s, the graffiti, the broken windows, there was certainly a sense that no one was really in charge anymore. The Bronx was full of open-air drug markets running in broad daylight, and kids played in lots full of rubble, and in some places, American cities looked more like bombed-out blocks in the 1980s Beirut. That was ordinary life in a lot of black neighborhoods for the better part of two decades. Now, the black-white racial breakdowns in the data didn't really get reliable until the 1970s, and to be honest, there's still some squishiness in those numbers. For instance, there's not even a uniform way of defining a murder victim's race in a country that's increasingly becoming more multiracial. Still, a few things are pretty clear. First, the murder rate in the 70s grew nationwide, but it grew more in the black community by a wide margin. Black and white murder rates usually move up and down together, but for blacks, every swing lands harder, with sharper spikes and drops. Alright, before I get into the whys here, I need to start with bigger caveats than I usually give. And the first is that there's no single obvious answer that people agree on, especially the experts. Now, that's usually the most difficult parts of my videos. I mean, if there was one straightforward answer to a question, there probably wouldn't be much of a debate or a mystery, and it wouldn't be worthy of a video. Instead, all the time we see overlapping, intermixed reasons that change by person and over time. So I try to give insight, but this just isn't two plus two equals four stuff. Also, specific to this, every single theory here is disputed and has been the subject of articles, books, conferences, even the ideas I just mentioned in passing. And for each one of those, you'd be able to find a professor with a fancy degree who says, I'm dead wrong. That's just the playing field here. So with that said, here's my best take on all this. Let's start again with the 1960s. The post-World War II baby boomers were coming of age, so there were more people in that age group more likely to cause problems. There was also a weakening trust in institutions and more social unrest. But a few other factors really seemed to move the needle. The first was drug use. It exploded starting in the 60s. Heroin and cocaine took over in the 70s and 80s and hit the cities the hardest. Then came crack in the mid-1980s, and things got much worse, especially in poor black neighborhoods. It was cheap, fast, and hooked people easily. The users often robbed to fund their habit, and the dealers shot each other over sales turf. You can see it in the murder rates directly. Between 1984 and 94, homicide rates of black males aged 14 to 24 doubled. But the rate among black men over the age of 25? That stayed roughly the same. The 1960s also saw a real shift towards leniency and away from jail time. Sentences got lighter, paroles got earlier, and the rights of the accused increased, all as the murder conviction rates dropped. Now, I have both personal knowledge and certainly my own biases here, because I lived through this era and saw it firsthand too closely. In 1976, my sister and her boyfriend were hiking in the foothills near Los Angeles when a random stranger murdered them both. I made a difficult video about this where I detailed how their killer was caught and sentenced to death. But with the changes in the national and state laws, he was eligible for parole in just five and a half years. In that era, there were hundreds, probably thousands, of stories similar to that. So there's a reason why movies about a vigilante family man or a vigilante San Francisco cop became popular in those days. We even saw real-life vigilantes like Bernie Getz viewed as a hero by many. Politicians, they eventually responded. And it wasn't just white conservatives demanding crackdowns either. Black mayors, pastors, and parents. In those neighborhoods, they pushed hard for tougher sentencing because they were the ones bearing their kids. The experiment in leniency came to an end. Mandatory minimum drug sentences arrived in 1986. Washington state passed the first Three Strikes Law in 1993, and California followed a year later. That year, Congress and President Clinton, they passed a sweeping federal crime bill funding 100,000 new police officers and expanding the list of crimes eligible for the death penalty. And as always, the pendulum swung. The murder rates dropped sharply through much of the 1990s and continued downward with only a couple minor spikes until a handful of years ago. The next upswing was quicker and more dramatic, and it started right after George Floyd's death in 2020. Some cities cut police budgets. Police pulled back on their own. A new breed of district attorneys took office, the kind who'd never be called tough on crime. Guaranteed bail increased in some places, others backed off tools like gunshot detection sensors or video. Crime rose fast, and so did the backlash. Defund the police died quickly. In just a year, the number of people who wanted more, not less, police spending in their area grew dramatically, especially among black Americans. Several of the new DAs were recalled. Voters in California undid some of the laws they called reforms just a few years earlier. It was the same movie, played twice, 60 years apart. Loosen consequences, watch violence crime, tighten it back up. But notice what it doesn't do. It doesn't explain why the racial gap holds steady through both versions of that cycle. Whatever's driving that, it isn't the way that the police pendulum happens to be swinging this decade. We'll start with those that I believe are the weaker explanations. They're poverty, guns, genetics, and contemporary racism. And there are a few, like lead exposure or other demographic changes, that I don't think much of and I just don't have time to get to here. So let's start with poverty, which is usually the first out of the gate when people are looking for ways to explain the racial gap. It's a straightforward theory. Black Americans have been historically poorer than other groups. Poverty breeds desperation. Desperation breeds crime. As with all theories, we have to look at correlation versus causation. For instance, you see ice cream sales and drownings both spike in summer. But that's not a causal relationship. They're both caused by hotter weather. The poverty correlation falls into the same camp. Beverly Hills is 16 miles away from Compton. One's rich and safe, the other is poor and dangerous. So poverty and murder do correlate, but they do it weakly and inconsistently. Raw income data shows poorer people commit more murder, but that relationship falls apart under some real scrutiny, especially when you look at county level data. And we also see it play out in heavier poverty areas like Appalachia, and excluding race, we see this play out in counties where the county murder rates don't move in lockstep with their poverty levels. Asian Americans also hit hard against the whole poverty equals crime concepts. I did a whole video on how infrequently Asian Americans commit crimes even when they're poor. The numbers are astounding. Something else is going on, and poverty isn't the answer people think it is in either direction. Now let's talk guns. They certainly make it easier to kill someone, and to many, they seem like an easy way to reduce violence. And also, there's a lot of misrepresented or cherry-picked data in that entire debate. But certainly the murder wave that began in the 70s didn't coincide with easier gun access. It was the opposite. For most of American history, getting a gun was trivially easy, and ownership was higher than it is now. And racially, the correlation is backwards. Black Americans own guns at one of the lowest rates of any major ethnic groups, yet they have the highest murder rate. White Americans own the most guns. Pew research estimates that almost half of white households own guns compared to about a fifth of black Americans. Then there's genetics, since somebody always brings it up. But through all my videos here, I've seen very little evidence to show that genetics play more than a sometimes almost trivial role in complex human behavior. We see it specifically in the case of violence. By the numbers, the American black homicide rate runs roughly double the average rate across sub-Saharan Africa, the opposite of what a shared genetic trait would predict. Mexico's homicide rate runs several times higher than the rate for Latinos in the United States. Again, the opposite of what you'd expect if crime were following people across a border. And new African immigrants in America? I couldn't find murder-specific numbers, but their overall crime rates are substantially lower than U.S.-born black Americans. That leaves racism. It's the last element in this section, but also shows up in the next one because it means different things. I think it's important to separate into contemporary racism, I don't like you because of your skin color, and the historical racism that shaped culture and societies over centuries. It's hard to make the case that contemporary racism drives the murder rate. If you lean hard on the poverty equals violence argument, you can maybe stretch it to get it there, since poverty in black communities has its own history tangled up with racism. But if racism itself were the direct cause, you'd expect to see it show up in the form of interracial killing, white offenders targeting black victims, or vice versa. And that's usually not what happens. About three-quarters of murder victims are killed by someone of their own race. In fact, most victims know their own murderers and are often related to them. Killings are spurred by reasons like drugs, disrespect, money, or girlfriends. Racism usually isn't in that room. The surge and murder in the 1960s and 70s, they came along right at the same time that American civil rights were surging as well, with overt racism in retreat. Segregation was dismantled, voting rights passed, black incomes and black college enrollment climbed, all while the black homicide rate doubled. Too many conservatives, though, hear these points and they they scratch racism off the list entirely. But again, we'll get into it in a second. Hey, I researched this carefully, but there's a lot of statistics. If I made a mistake, send me straight to jail. Alright, don't do that, but let me know in the comments and I'll address it below. And I also have my script, notes, and sourcing there as well. Alright, now let's take a look at what holds up better as theories, because it's a combination of family, drugs again, and sometimes even getting away with murder. Family First. And it started with a guy that nobody wanted to listen to. In March 1965, I was a month old, a labor department official named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report on black families. It noted that the non-white out-of-wedlock birth rate had climbed from 16.8% in 1940 to 23.6% by 1963. Moynihan was a New Deal Democrat from New York City, and his report landed like a lead balloon. Some black leaders called it one of the most dangerous things written about black America in a generation. It was so radioactive that serious academic work on black family structure mostly stalled for a generation. The chilling effect is worth thinking about because 20 years later, a sociologist ran the numbers anyway. Robert Sampson studied crime in over 150 American cities and found that family disruption, kids growing up without a father in the house, predicted the murder and robbery rate on its own, independent of income, employment, or how much welfare a state paid out. And it worked exactly the same way in white communities as it did in black ones. His conclusion, and a number of other correlational studies back this up, shows that the primary drive of black crime rates was fathers, or the absence of them. Moynihan eventually became a long-standing U.S. Senator, and a lot of what he warned about came true, and the fatherless numbers continued to rise. Part of the reason is baked into a policy from that same era: aid to families with dependent children. AFDC was the main cash welfare program of Johnson's Great Society, and its rules often meant a mother lost her check and her Medicaid the moment she married her child's father. What came to be known as the marriage penalty, it wasn't aimed at black families. It hit poor families of every race. Single motherhood became the path to more benefits, and marriage became the way to lose them. Poor Americans across the board responded to that incentive, and it landed on the black communities first and hardest. Today, 69% of black children in America are born out of wedlock. The white rate is 26%. Substantially lower, but higher than the black rate when Moynihan was ringing the alarm. By comparison, Hispanic rates are somewhere in between the two, and the Asian rate is the lowest at 11.5%. Now, welfare rules weren't the only thing working against marriage. Societal rules and the economy were too. The great black migration in the early 1900s had seen six million blacks move from the countryside to the cities for industrial jobs. And those were hit particularly hard. Between 1967 and 1987, New York City lost roughly a half million manufacturing jobs. Chicago, more than 300,000. Philadelphia, 160,000. That was over half of these cities' manufacturing bases. The jobs that once let a man without a college degree support a family. In the neighborhoods where those men lived, they vanished in a single generation. The result was self-evident. When the men who could support a family disappear from the job market, marriage disappears with them. Now, I've already covered how drugs drove the overall crime wave, but I just want to reiterate how much it hit black neighborhoods specifically. Because the business of street drugs, it runs on violence. And an illegal business runs on violence in a way that a legal one doesn't. There's no court that you can sue when your corner boy shorts you on a product, or no police report you can file when someone muscles in on your block. So business issues are settled with violence. We saw the same up and down during Prohibition. I'd also like to take a moment again and talk about the clearance rates of murders, because as I mentioned before, they've been dropping. Now, I made an entire video on this once, and the numbers in it, they're troublesome. In 1962, American police cleared 93% of homicides. Today, it's closer to half. If you run the numbers all the way through, between arrests, convictions, and plea deals, around 13,000 killers a year walk away with no sentence at all in America. And that's with tools that police in 1962 couldn't have imagined, like DNA, security cameras, and cell phone location data. Much of that has to do with an increased level of evidence needed to convict someone. And on one hand, that's great because it means fewer innocent people going to jail. But there's a cost to it in more killings, and that hits the black community harder. Homicides with black victims, they clear at a lower rate than homicides with white victims, and they have for decades. Sometimes that's financial. Sometimes that's because guns make it easier to kill somebody from a distance and more likely to get away with it. And guns are disproportionately used in black killings. And for many of the gang-related murders, people are just often unwilling to talk to the cops. So when we look at all of these issues altogether, we're not looking at disparate issues. We're looking at a larger narrative that's the definition of culture. I looked at the murder statistics for my city, and it was zero. Over a decade. Heck, I've never even seen a fist fight in my city. Now, we're older and mellower here, but it's a visible difference that I see when I go into other places. It reminds me of an anecdote that J.D. Vance wrote about in Hillbilly Elogy, which was an eye-opening look at the dysfunction in Appalachian culture. And it was also interesting because it was distinct from race and a slavery history. He talked about how defending your honor was so important that a young kid would certainly be expected to beat up a neighbor who insulted him or his family. And that instilled value stayed with him for years, even when he was a lawyer in Washington, D.C. I mean, enough so that a traffic incident would rile him up enough to almost assault somebody. It was interesting to see that an honor code that at a young part of your life would be celebrated would send you to jail at another part of your life. And we certainly see that in the black culture. Sociologists call it street code or a subculture of violence, and others have earthier names for it. But all of these cultural elements didn't pop up out of nowhere. And that brings me back to the part of the racism question I didn't complete earlier. Historical racism. It's something that I think conservatives often don't pay enough attention to. It started as bad as you can get. You're black, you're in chains. And while it's easy for some to dismiss that as being hundreds of years ago, cultures change slowly. Heck, legal segregation for housing and public services, and laws banning interracial marriage, they didn't end until the late 1960s. That was in my lifetime. It can take generations for that kind of history to work its way out of a culture. Distrust of police, being abused by a legal system, being excluded from jobs in the financial system. I mean, you don't pass a law and watch beliefs change overnight. That's not an excuse. Nothing excuses a murder. But if you're looking for where things like street code comes from, you can't leave this part out. Hey, thank you for your time. I hope I did a good job here, and that you came away with some more insight into all of us. Until next time.