Still Dangerous to be Black: Race and Lifetime Murder Victimization Chances

• In Event: Race, Gender and Victimization

Abstract

The 1999 Crime in the United States report, the annual report on crime in the United States published as part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) System, contained a section entitled The Chances of Lifetime Murder Victimization, 1997 that presented lifetime chances of murder victimization for age, sex, and race categories. That section of the UCR report was a replication of a 1978 report on lifetime murder victimization. Using these two reports as a starting point, we combine murder victimization data from the 2008 UCR Supplemental Homicide Report with 2008 life table and 2008 population estimates from the National Center on Health Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau in order to replicate the earlier reports and calculate current lifetime chances of murder victimization by age, race, and sex. Our results show how declines in the overall homicide rates since 1997 have been differentially experienced by the demographic subgroups of age, sex, and especially race. We show that the chances of murder victimization continue to be extraordinarily high for young black males, despite overall declines in the murder rate and we suggest that policy discussion and implementation for the past decade have done little to remedy this situation.

Authors

• James Kanan, Western Kentucky University

• Carrie Trojan, Western Kentucky University