While most violent crime is indeed intrarracial, 26.7 percent of homicides where the victim is a stranger are interracial. And in 2008, the offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was seven times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000), according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
Accounting for population differences, whites are simply far more likely to be victims of interracial crime than blacks. That, of course, didn’t stop Jesse Jackson from telling the Los Angeles Times at the height of the Zimmerman frenzy that “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.”
The data, once again, suggest something quite different.
In the mid-1990s, the Center for Equal Opportunity analyzed 55,512 felony cases filed in state courts for the 75 largest counties, representing 37 percent of the U.S. population. The weighted data, taken from the BJS, revealed that juries actually acquit blacks at a higher rate than whites for 12 of the 14 types of crime studied — including murder, rape, robbery and assault. The only category that had a higher conviction rate for African-Americans was felony traffic offenses.