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Racial And Ethnic Differences In Crime Essay

Decent Essays

By examining data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization Survey, it becomes clear that there are large racial and ethnic differences in offences in the United States. There are discrepancies between what is perceived and what is actually proven to be fact, and the notion that most of the criminals in the United States are African American is not supported by any federal data.
Victims
One of the largest differences between offenders of different races and ethnicities are the races and ethnicities of their victims. According to the Uniform Crime Report on homicides in 2015, 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders and 89% of African American victims were killed by African American offenders. “Crimes of robbery, sexual assault, aggravated assault, and simple assault of African Americans are predominantly intraracial” (Walker, Spohn, and Delone, 2012), and combined with the fact that the …show more content…

According to the 2015 Uniform Crime Report, white people make up about five and a half million of the eight million arrests made, while African Americans made up only about two million. This statistic entirely contradicts the stereotypical notion that many people have of a criminal. The average criminal is not an African American man, it is a white one. Some of the disparity between what is widely thought and what the facts are actually showing might come from the types of offences that are widely reported on. While murder and nonnegligant manslaughter make up only 1% of crimes in the UCR (2015), the cases, especially ones with white female victims, make national news headlines far more than any other type of crime. Because this is one of the only 3 UCR categories where African Americans commit the majority of offences, it becomes a common thought that African Americans are committing the most

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