Homicide Rates by Race, and the Medhi Hasan Controversy
Mehdi Hasan, an MSNBC host, Tweeted:
“White people kill other white people at almost the same rate black people kill other black people & yet you never hear anyone complaining about ‘white on white crime’. These aren’t points of sage wisdom from Maher. They are classic racist dog whistles.”pic.twitter.com/VZlCoqfet9
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 28, 2023
There’s some controversy about the “reader context” reaction, but I think the reaction is factually correct and Hasan was mistaken. Here’s a screenshot from the FBI statistics; they naturally have the usual set of imperfections, for instance excluding the many cases where “the offender age, sex, race, and ethnicity are all reported as unknown,” but my sense is that they are the best data we have:
So while the numbers of white-on-white homicides and black-on-black homicides were virtually identical, the rate of black-on-black homicide was almost 5 times the rate of white-on-white homicide (since the black population in 2019 was indeed apparently about 1/5 that of the white population).
And of course it makes sense to compare rates (numbers divided by population) rather than raw numbers in this
Article from Reason.com
