In 2023, the FBI reported that there were 9,284 Black murder victims in the United States and 7,289 white murder victims. In comparison, there were 554 murder victims of unknown race and 586 victims of another race. Victims of inequality? In recent years, the role of racial inequality in violent crimes such as robberies, assaults, and homicides has gained public attention. In particular, the issue of police brutality has led to increasing attention following the murder of George Floyd, an African American who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Studies show that the rate of fatal police shootings for Black Americans was more than double the rate reported of other races. Crime reporting National crime data in the United States is based off the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new crime reporting system, which requires law enforcement agencies to self-report their data in detail. Due to the recent implementation of this system, less crime data has been reported, with some states such as Delaware and Pennsylvania declining to report any data to the FBI at all in the last few years, suggesting that the Bureau's data may not fully reflect accurate information on crime in the United States.

In 2023, 8,842 murderers in the United States were white, while 6,405 were Black. A further 461 murderers were of another race, including American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. However, not all law enforcement agencies submitted homicide data to the FBI in 2023, meaning there may be more murder offenders of each race than depicted. While the majority of circumstances behind murders in the U.S. are unknown, narcotics, robberies, and gang killings are most commonly identified.

The homicide rate registered in Brazil impacts ethnicities very differently. Whereas the number of homicides per 100,000 black or brown people increased by 33 percent between 2006 and 2017, the homicide rate of non-black or brown individuals declined by nearly 19 percent in the same period. In 2022, the homicide rate for the black ethnic group decreased compared to the previous year.

These data examine the effects on total crime rates of changes in the demographic composition of the population and changes in criminality of specific age and race groups. The collection contains estimates from national data of annual age-by-race specific arrest rates and crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary over the 21-year period 1965-1985. The data address the following questions: (1) Are the crime rates reported by the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data series valid indicators of national crime trends? (2) How much of the change between 1965 and 1985 in total crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary is attributable to changes in the age and race composition of the population, and how much is accounted for by changes in crime rates within age-by-race specific subgroups? (3) What are the effects of age and race on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (4) What is the effect of time period on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (5) What is the effect of birth cohort, particularly the effect of the very large (baby-boom) cohorts following World War II, on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (6) What is the effect of interactions among age, race, time period, and cohort on subgroup crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary? (7) How do patterns of age-by-race specific crime rates for murder, robbery, and burglary compare for different demographic subgroups? The variables in this study fall into four categories. The first category includes variables that define the race-age cohort of the unit of observation. The values of these variables are directly available from UCR and include year of observation (from 1965-1985), age group, and race. The second category of variables were computed using UCR data pertaining to the first category of variables. These are period, birth cohort of age group in each year, and average cohort size for each single age within each single group. The third category includes variables that describe the annual age-by-race specific arrest rates for the different crime types. These variables were estimated for race, age, group, crime type, and year using data directly available from UCR and population estimates from Census publications. The fourth category includes variables similar to the third group. Data for estimating these variables were derived from available UCR data on the total number of offenses known to the police and total arrests in combination with the age-by-race specific arrest rates for the different crime types.

Number, percentage and rate (per 100,000 population) of homicide victims, by racialized identity group (total, by racialized identity group; racialized identity group; South Asian; Chinese; Black; Filipino; Arab; Latin American; Southeast Asian; West Asian; Korean; Japanese; other racialized identity group; multiple racialized identity; racialized identity, but racialized identity group is unknown; rest of the population; unknown racialized identity group), gender (all genders; male; female; gender unknown) and region (Canada; Atlantic region; Quebec; Ontario; Prairies region; British Columbia; territories), 2019 to 2023.

In 2022, the prevalence of violent crime increased for all races in the United States in comparison to the previous year. In that year, around 1.23 percent of White Americans experienced one or more violent victimizations and approximately 1.39 percent of Black or African American people were the victims of a violent crime.

There has been little research on United States homicide rates from a long-term perspective, primarily because there has been no consistent data series on a particular place preceding the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which began its first full year in 1931. To fill this research gap, this project created a data series on homicides per capita for New York City that spans two centuries. The goal was to create a site-specific, individual-based data series that could be used to examine major social shifts related to homicide, such as mass immigration, urban growth, war, demographic changes, and changes in laws. Data were also gathered on various other sites, particularly in England, to allow for comparisons on important issues, such as the post-World War II wave of violence. The basic approach to the data collection was to obtain the best possible estimate of annual counts and the most complete information on individual homicides. The annual count data (Parts 1 and 3) were derived from multiple sources, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports and Supplementary Homicide Reports, as well as other official counts from the New York City Police Department and the City Inspector in the early 19th century. The data include a combined count of murder and manslaughter because charge bargaining often blurs this legal distinction. The individual-level data (Part 2) were drawn from coroners' indictments held by the New York City Municipal Archives, and from daily newspapers. Duplication was avoided by keeping a record for each victim. The estimation technique known as "capture-recapture" was used to estimate homicides not listed in either source. Part 1 variables include counts of New York City homicides, arrests, and convictions, as well as the homicide rate, race or ethnicity and gender of victims, type of weapon used, and source of data. Part 2 includes the date of the murder, the age, sex, and race of the offender and victim, and whether the case led to an arrest, trial, conviction, execution, or pardon. Part 3 contains annual homicide counts and rates for various comparison sites including Liverpool, London, Kent, Canada, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.

These data provide information on the number of arrests reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program each month by police agencies in the United States. Although not as well known as the "Crimes Known to the Police" data drawn from the Uniform Crime Report's Return A form, the arrest reports by age, sex, and race provide valuable data on 43 offenses including violent, drug, gambling, and larceny crimes. The data received by ICPSR were structured as a hierarchical file containing (per reporting police agency) an agency header record, and 1 to 12 monthly header reports, and 1 to 43 detail offense records containing the counts of arrests by age, sex, and race for a particular offense. ICPSR restructured the original data to a rectangular format.

As of 2021, Black men had the highest firearm homicide rate in the United States, with 52.95 homicides by firearm per 100,000 of the population. In comparison, Black women had a firearm homicide rate of 7.47 per 100,000 of the population. In that year, the risk of gun homicide was lowest among Asian people across all genders.

This dataset contains aggregate data on violent index victimizations at the quarter level of each year (i.e., January – March, April – June, July – September, October – December), from 2001 to the present (1991 to present for Homicides), with a focus on those related to gun violence. Index crimes are 10 crime types selected by the FBI (codes 1-4) for special focus due to their seriousness and frequency. This dataset includes only those index crimes that involve bodily harm or the threat of bodily harm and are reported to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Each row is aggregated up to victimization type, age group, sex, race, and whether the victimization was domestic-related. Aggregating at the quarter level provides large enough blocks of incidents to protect anonymity while allowing the end user to observe inter-year and intra-year variation. Any row where there were fewer than three incidents during a given quarter has been deleted to help prevent re-identification of victims. For example, if there were three domestic criminal sexual assaults during January to March 2020, all victims associated with those incidents have been removed from this dataset. Human trafficking victimizations have been aggregated separately due to the extremely small number of victimizations. This dataset includes a " GUNSHOT_INJURY_I " column to indicate whether the victimization involved a shooting, showing either Yes ("Y"), No ("N"), or Unknown ("UKNOWN.") For homicides, injury descriptions are available dating back to 1991, so the "shooting" column will read either "Y" or "N" to indicate whether the homicide was a fatal shooting or not. For non-fatal shootings, data is only available as of 2010. As a result, for any non-fatal shootings that occurred from 2010 to the present, the shooting column will read as “Y.” Non-fatal shooting victims will not be included in this dataset prior to 2010; they will be included in the authorized dataset, but with "UNKNOWN" in the shooting column. The dataset is refreshed daily, but excludes the most recent complete day to allow CPD time to gather the best available information. Each time the dataset is refreshed, records can change as CPD learns more about each victimization, especially those victimizations that are most recent. The data on the Mayor's Office Violence Reduction Dashboard is updated daily with an approximately 48-hour lag. As cases are passed from the initial reporting officer to the investigating detectives, some recorded data about incidents and victimizations may change once additional information arises. Regularly updated datasets on the City's public portal may change to reflect new or corrected information. How does this dataset classify victims? The methodology by which this dataset classifies victims of violent crime differs by victimization type: Homicide and non-fatal shooting victims: A victimization is considered a homicide victimization or non-fatal shooting victimization depending on its presence in CPD's homicide victims data table or its shooting victims data table. A victimization is considered a homicide only if it is present in CPD's homicide data table, while a victimization is considered a non-fatal shooting only if it is present in CPD's shooting data tables and absent from CPD's homicide data table. To determine the IUCR code of homicide and non-fatal shooting victimizations, we defer to the incident IUCR code available in CPD's Crimes, 2001-present dataset (available on the City's open data portal). If the IUCR code in CPD's Crimes dataset is inconsistent with the homicide/non-fatal shooting categorization, we defer to CPD's Victims dataset. For a criminal homicide, the only sensible IUCR codes are 0110 (first-degree murder) or 0130 (second-degree murder). For a non-fatal shooting, a sensible IUCR code must signify a criminal sexual assault, a robbery, or, most commonly, an aggravated battery. In rare instances, the IUCR code in CPD's Crimes and Vi

In response to a growing concern about hate crimes, the United States Congress enacted the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990. The Act requires the attorney general to establish guidelines and collect, as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, data "about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage or vandalism of property." Hate crime data collection was required by the Act to begin in calendar year 1990 and to continue for four successive years. In September 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act amended the Hate Crime Statistics Act to add disabilities, both physical and mental, as factors that could be considered a basis for hate crimes. Although the Act originally mandated data collection for five years, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 amended the collection duration "for each calendar year," making hate crime statistics a permanent addition to the UCR program. As with the other UCR data, law enforcement agencies contribute reports either directly or through their state reporting programs. Information contained in the data includes number of victims and offenders involved in each hate crime incident, type of victims, bias motivation, offense type, and location type.

In 1980, the National Institute of Justice awarded a grant to the Cornell University College of Human Ecology for the establishment of the Center for the Study of Race, Crime, and Social Policy in Oakland, California. This center mounted a long-term research project that sought to explain the wide variation in crime statistics by race and ethnicity. Using information from eight ethnic communities in Oakland, California, representing working- and middle-class Black, White, Chinese, and Hispanic groups, as well as additional data from Oakland's justice systems and local organizations, the center conducted empirical research to describe the criminalization process and to explore the relationship between race and crime. The differences in observed patterns and levels of crime were analyzed in terms of: (1) the abilities of local ethnic communities to contribute to, resist, neutralize, or otherwise affect the criminalization of its members, (2) the impacts of criminal justice policies on ethnic communities and their members, and (3) the cumulative impacts of criminal justice agency decisions on the processing of individuals in the system. Administrative records data were gathered from two sources, the Alameda County Criminal Oriented Records Production System (CORPUS) (Part 1) and the Oakland District Attorney Legal Information System (DALITE) (Part 2). In addition to collecting administrative data, the researchers also surveyed residents (Part 3), police officers (Part 4), and public defenders and district attorneys (Part 5). The eight study areas included a middle- and low-income pair of census tracts for each of the four racial/ethnic groups: white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Part 1, Criminal Oriented Records Production System (CORPUS) Data, contains information on offenders' most serious felony and misdemeanor arrests, dispositions, offense codes, bail arrangements, fines, jail terms, and pleas for both current and prior arrests in Alameda County. Demographic variables include age, sex, race, and marital status. Variables in Part 2, District Attorney Legal Information System (DALITE) Data, include current and prior charges, days from offense to charge, disposition, and arrest, plea agreement conditions, final results from both municipal court and superior court, sentence outcomes, date and outcome of arraignment, disposition, and sentence, number and type of enhancements, numbers of convictions, mistrials, acquittals, insanity pleas, and dismissals, and factors that determined the prison term. For Part 3, Oakland Community Crime Survey Data, researchers interviewed 1,930 Oakland residents from eight communities. Information was gathered from community residents on the quality of schools, shopping, and transportation in their neighborhoods, the neighborhood's racial composition, neighborhood problems, such as noise, abandoned buildings, and drugs, level of crime in the neighborhood, chances of being victimized, how respondents would describe certain types of criminals in terms of age, race, education, and work history, community involvement, crime prevention measures, the performance of the police, judges, and attorneys, victimization experiences, and fear of certain types of crimes. Demographic variables include age, sex, race, and family status. For Part 4, Oakland Police Department Survey Data, Oakland County police officers were asked about why they joined the police force, how they perceived their role, aspects of a good and a bad police officer, why they believed crime was down, and how they would describe certain beats in terms of drug availability, crime rates, socioeconomic status, number of juveniles, potential for violence, residential versus commercial, and degree of danger. Officers were also asked about problems particular neighborhoods were experiencing, strategies for reducing crime, difficulties in doing police work well, and work conditions. Demographic variables include age, sex, race, marital status, level of education, and years on the force. In Part 5, Public Defender/District Attorney Survey Data, public defenders and district attorneys were queried regarding which offenses were increasing most rapidly in Oakland, and they were asked to rank certain offenses in terms of seriousness. Respondents were also asked about the public's influence on criminal justice agencies and on the performance of certain criminal justice agencies. Respondents were presented with a list of crimes and asked how typical these offenses were and what factors influenced their decisions about such cases (e.g., intent, motive, evidence, behavior, prior history, injury or loss, substance abuse, emotional trauma). Other variables measured how often and under what circumstances the public defender and client and the public defender and the district attorney agreed on the case, defendant characteristics in terms of who should not be put on the stand, the effects of Proposition 8, public defender and district attorney plea guidelines, attorney discretion, and advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics of a defendant. Demographic variables include age, sex, race, marital status, religion, years of experience, and area of responsibility.

Intentional homicides are estimates of unlawful homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.

African American males in the United States are much more likely to die from homicide than white males. In 2016, the death rate by homicide for African American males was 38 per 100,000 population, compared to a rate of just 5.2 per 100,000 population for white males. African American males are twice as likely to die from firearm-related injuries than white males, with handguns involved in the largest share of homicides in the U.S.

Homicide as a leading cause of death

While the leading causes of death for black and white residents in the U.S. are similar in many ways, there are two distinct differences. Homicide is not in the leading 10 causes of death among whites, but it is the seventh leading cause of death for blacks, accounting for around three percent of all deaths in this group. However, suicide is the ninth leading cause of death among whites, while it is not included in the 10 leading causes of death for blacks.

Death rates

Overall, the death rate in the United States is higher among non-Hispanic whites than any other ethnicity. Furthermore, males across all ethnicities in the U.S. have higher death rates than females. The two leading causes of death for every ethnicity in the U.S. are cancer and heart disease.

Police-reported hate crime, by type of motivation (race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, language, disability, sex, age), selected regions and Canada (selected police services), 2014 to 2023.

This interactive mapping tool, created for the 33N blog, displays homicides in the City of Atlanta between January 2007 and February 2017 by race/ethnicity and sex of the victim. The data for this tool was provided by the Washington Post as part of an investigative project which compiled information on 54,000 homicides in the U.S. to identify hot spots where homicides rates are high but arrests are low.

Investigator(s): Federal Bureau of Investigation Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as periodic nationwide assessments of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. With the 1977 data, the title was expanded to Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data. Each year, participating law enforcement agencies contribute reports to the FBI either directly or through their state reporting programs. ICPSR archives the UCR data as five separate components: (1) summary data, (2) county-level data, (3) incident-level data (National Incident-Based Reporting System [NIBRS]), (4) hate crime data, and (5) various, mostly nonrecurring, data collections. Summary data are reported in four types of files: (a) Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, (b) Property Stolen and Recovered, (c) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), and (d) Police Employee (LEOKA) Data (Law Enforcement Officers Killed or Assaulted). The county-level data provide counts of arrests and offenses aggregated to the county level. County populations are also reported. In the late 1970s, new ways to look at crime were studied. The UCR program was subsequently expanded to capture incident-level data with the implementation of the National Incident-Based Reporting System. The NIBRS data focus on various aspects of a crime incident. The gathering of hate crime data by the UCR program was begun in 1990. Hate crimes are defined as crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. In September 1994, disabilities, both physical and mental, were added to the list. The fifth component of ICPSR's UCR holdings is comprised of various collections, many of which are nonrecurring and prepared by individual researchers. These collections go beyond the scope of the standard UCR collections provided by the FBI, either by including data for a range of years or by focusing on other aspects of analysis. NACJD has produced resource guides on UCR and on NIBRS data.

Between 2021 and 2024, the homicide rate for people of the Black ethnic group was 39.8 homicides per million population in England and Wales, far higher than that of the white ethnic group, which was 8.5 victims per million population for the same time period.