Currently, there is insufficient data to calculate the breakdown of the races of victims and perpetrators of violence and police shootings.
A viral photo on Facebook claims to break down the ethnicities of murder victims and murderers. The photo also lists comparative figures of the number of blacks and whites killed by the police. The image says the data has been sourced from Wikipedia, which is crowdsourced, making it impossible to verify it. The photo was first shared on July 6. There is no mention of the period for which this data is applicable.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program publishes annual crime statistics for violent crimes. The clearances section of the FBI’s UCR report lists the percentage of property and violent crimes that the police resolve through arrest or other means. According to the clearance section, in 2018, 37.7 percent of murder cases, 66.6 percent of rape cases, 69.6 percent of robbery cases, and 47.5 cases of aggravated assault were unsolved. One of the expanded homicide data tables shows that the number of cases where the offenders were unknown is considerable, implying that the race of the offenders was not determined in such cases.
In 2018, there were 6,570 homicide cases of a single victim and a single offender, where the race of both the victim and the murderer were known. There were 3315 white victims, 80.8 percent of whom had been murdered by white individuals and 15.5 percent by blacks and the rest by perpetrators of other races. There were 2,925 black victims of murder in 2018. In 234 cases (8 percent), the offender was white, and in 2600 cases (88.9 percent), the victim was killed by a black individual. The complete data set for 2019 is yet to be released, but according to the FBI’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report which contains data from more than 14,000 law enforcement agencies for January to June 2019, all categories of violent crime offenses decreased between the first half of 2018 and the first half of 2019.
As far as police shootings are concerned, as of July 29, 2020, The Washington Post’s police shooting database shows from January 1, 2015, to the date mentioned above, 24% of victims of police shootings – 1305 people were blacks. The percentage of white people killed by police for the same period is 46%, with the number of victims at 2502. The database is updated regularly as fatal shootings are reported and as facts emerge about individual cases.
At the moment, there is insufficient data about cases of violent crimes, including homicides, to calculate the breakdown of the victims and perpetrators' races. Hence the claim is unverifiable.
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