When people talk about violent crime in America, there’s no shortage of opinions.
A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) tries to cut through the politics by digging into the FBI’s latest homicide data. The findings cover where murders happen, who commits them, who the victims are, and how often murders cross racial lines.
Some of the numbers may surprise you.
One of the biggest takeaways is just how concentrated murder is in the United States. As we discussed earlier this week, the worst 1% of counties account for 41% of all murders while containing only about 20% of the country’s population. Expand that to the worst 2% of counties, and they account for 54% of murders despite making up just 30% of the population.
On the flip side, most counties rarely see a homicide at all.
More than half of U.S. counties—53%—recorded zero murders in 2024. Another 16% had just one. Together, those counties make up 69% of all counties in America but account for only 3% of the nation’s murders.
The report also looks at who is committing those murders.
According to the FBI data analyzed by the CPRC, Black offenders accounted for 56.4% of known murderers in 2024. Lott notes that the FBI’s race data combines Hispanic and non-Hispanic White offenders into a single “White” category. He argues likely understates the number of Hispanic offenders because ethnicity isn’t reported consistently across jurisdictions.
The report also compares each group’s share of murderers with its share of the overall U.S. population.
The ratio is meant to answer one simple question: Is this group represented among known murderers more or less often than its share of the population?
If every demographic group committed murders strictly in proportion to its share of the population, everyone would score 1.0. Instead, the CPRC found one group stood far apart from the rest. Black males registered 8.3, White males were 1.2, and every other demographic group came in below 1.0.
Another finding challenges a common perception about violent crime.
According to the report, most murders happen within the same racial group, not between different racial groups.
In both 2020 and 2024, about 90% of Black homicide victims were killed by Black offenders. For White victims, roughly 80% were killed by White offenders.
The report also found that Black victims are murdered by Black offenders about nine times more often than by White offenders. White victims are murdered by White offenders roughly three to four times more often than by Black offenders.
Age also plays a major role.
According to the FBI data, 53% of known murderers were between 13 and 29 years old in 2024, meaning more than half of all known homicide offenders fell into that relatively young age group.
As with much of John Lott’s research, the report is likely to spark debate. But regardless of readers’ political views, the data paints a picture of violent crime that is far more concentrated than many people realize: concentrated in a relatively small number of places, committed disproportionately by specific demographic groups, and overwhelmingly affecting victims of the same race as their attackers.
For Lott, that’s exactly why the numbers matter. He argues that understanding who commits violent crime, who is most often victimized, and where those crimes occur is essential to having an honest conversation about public safety.
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