Loaded on June 1, 2021 by Matthew Clarke published in Prison Legal News June, 2021, page 62
Filed under: Statistics/Trends. Location: United States of America.
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by Matt Clarke
In a January 2021 statistical brief, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics addressed the issue of the race and ethnicity of perpetrators of violent crimes in 2018.
Based on data compiled by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, it found that while Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population, they were 33% of persons arrested for non-fatal violent crime (NVC), which includes rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and other assaults. Black people were 36% of those arrested for serious non-fatal violent crimes (SNVC), including rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Similarly, Hispanics make up 18% of the US population and were 21% of those arrested for serious non-fatal violent crimes. Whites, who are 60% of the population, were 46% of persons arrested for non-fatal violent crimes, and 39% of those arrested for serious non-fatal violent crimes.
The designation “Black” and “white” often did not include those who are Hispanic. In 9% of single-offender incidents and 12% of multiple-offender incidents, the victim was unable to tell whether the offender was Hispanic.
The study compared the UCR statistics with those from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Whereas the UCR relies on reports of criminal arrests submitted by law enforcement officials to the FBI, the 2018 NCVS was based on interviews from 151,055 U.S. households. Thus, the NCVS identifies crimes that are not reported to law enforcement. In the 2018 NCVS, Blacks accounted for 29% of violent crime perpetrators in 35% of the violent crimes reported to police. By comparison., the UCR statistics showed Blacks were 33% of all people arrested for violent crimes.
In the NCVS, whites accounted for 52% of violent crime perpetrators and 48% in those reported to police. The UCR showed whites accounting for 46% of the people arrested for NVC.
Hispanics made up 14% of violent crime perpetrators in the NCVS and 13% of the violent crimes reported to police, but made up 18% of the people arrested for NVC according to UCR statistics.
The report concluded that for whites and Blacks, “there were no statistically significant differences by race between offenders identified in the NCVS and persons arrested per the UCR. White and Black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in SNVC overall and proportionate to their involvement in SNVC reported to the police.”
At 21%, Hispanics were overrepresented among the persons arrested for serious non-fatal violent crimes compared to 12% of those reported to police. “However, some of this difference may be due to victims not knowing the ethnicity of the assailants, even if they knew their race.”
Victims were able to identify the race or ethnicity of their assailants in 86% of violent crimes.
The average number of assailants was 1.29 and did not vary significantly by the victims’ race or ethnicity. Crimes involving multiple assailants, 43% of the assailants were Black, 38% were white, and 16% were Hispanic. For single-assailant crimes, 22% of the assailants were Black, 59% were white, and 14% were Hispanic.
Other racial groups were tracked, but lacked sufficient numbers for reliable statistics except Asians, who were consistently underrepresented among violent offenders with the exception of rape and sexual assault. For those crimes, Asians were 5% of assailants, about the same as their 5.7 percent representation in the U.S. population.
Source: OJP.gov (Report II NCJ 255969)
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