Criminal Justice
Report: 49% of Murder Victims are Black
Although African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for almost half of all murder victims in 2005, a government study has determined.
A total of 49 percent of all murder victims that year were black, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. As with whites, violence against blacks is “overwhelmingly intraracial,” writes the Chicago Tribune, in a blog article that contains a link to the report, “Black Victims of Violent Crime.”
In violence against blacks,”about 80 percent of nonfatal assaults and 93 of murders were black-on-black,” the article states. “Eighty-five percent of white murder victims were slain by other whites.”
