Numbers don't lie, but people sure do. If you've spent more than five minutes on social media or watching cable news lately, you’ve probably seen some pretty wild claims about crime rates. It's one of those topics that gets people heated immediately. Most of the noise centers around one specific question: what percent of crime is black on black? Honestly, the answer is both simpler and way more complicated than most viral infographics suggest.
Crime is local. That’s the first thing you have to wrap your head around if you want to understand the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data. People generally commit crimes against people they know or people who live near them. Since America remains fairly segregated in its housing patterns, crime tends to stay within racial groups. This isn't a "culture" thing. It's a geography thing.
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If you look at the most recent full-year data sets from the FBI, the patterns are incredibly consistent. For example, in 2019—a year often used as a benchmark before the pandemic-era data shifts—the FBI reported that about 89% of Black homicide victims were killed by Black offenders. That sounds like a massive, isolated number until you look at the other side of the ledger. During that same period, roughly 81% of white homicide victims were killed by white offenders. We call this intraracial crime. It's the standard, not the exception, for almost every demographic in the United States.
The Reality of What Percent of Crime is Black on Black
We have to talk about the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). They run the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is basically the gold standard for understanding what’s actually happening on the ground. Why? Because a lot of crime never gets reported to the police. The NCVS asks people directly about their experiences.
When people ask what percent of crime is black on black, they are usually looking for a single, scary percentage. But the data shows a different story. For non-fatal violent crimes—stuff like assault or robbery—the rates of intraracial crime are actually lower than they are for homicide. In many years, the percentage of Black victims who were targeted by Black offenders in non-fatal incidents sits around 70%. For white victims, the number of white offenders is often around 62%.
The gap isn't as wide as the internet makes it out to be.
Barry Latzer, a criminologist and professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written extensively about these trends. He points out that violent crime is heavily concentrated in specific neighborhoods. If a neighborhood is 90% Black, the crime there will naturally be "Black on Black." If a neighborhood in rural Iowa is 98% white, the crime there will be "white on white." We don't have a national conversation about "white on white" crime because it’s seen as the default. It’s just "crime." But when the same statistical reality happens in Black communities, it gets a special label.
Why the Proximity Factor Changes Everything
Let's get real for a second. Most people aren't traveling three zip codes away to commit a robbery or get into a fight. They are doing it in their own backyard.
Criminologists call this the "propinquity effect." It’s a fancy word for saying you interact with the people closest to you. Because of historical redlining and modern-day economic clustering, Black Americans are more likely to live in high-density urban areas with higher poverty rates. Poverty is the greatest predictor of crime. Period. It doesn't matter what color you are; if you put a bunch of people in a high-stress, low-resource environment, crime rates go up.
Specific studies, like those from the Brookings Institution, show that when you control for income and location, racial differences in crime commission start to shrink or even disappear. It's not about race; it's about the block.
Think about it this way. If you’re looking at what percent of crime is black on black, you’re actually looking at a map of American poverty and segregation. The FBI’s 2020 Expanded Homicide Data Table 6 shows that out of 2,906 Black victims where the offender's race was known, 2,574 of the offenders were Black. For white victims, out of 3,315 cases, 2,721 of the offenders were white. The percentages are strikingly similar. Yet, the narrative remains lopsided.
The Problem With Modern Data Collection
We have a massive data problem in the U.S. right now. In 2021, the FBI switched to a new reporting system called NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System). A lot of big cities—we’re talking New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—didn’t make the switch immediately. This created a huge "data gap."
When you see a news report claiming a sudden spike or drop in what percent of crime is black on black, you have to ask where the data came from. If the NYPD isn't reporting, your national average is basically junk. Marshall Project researchers have pointed out that this lack of participation makes it easy for pundits to cherry-pick numbers that fit their "law and order" or "systemic" narratives without having the full picture.
Social media influencers love to use 2020 or 2021 numbers because crime did spike during the pandemic. But those spikes were universal. They weren't limited to one race. Domestic violence, for instance, surged across every single demographic. Since domestic violence is almost always intraracial, the raw numbers of "Black on Black" and "white on white" crime went up simultaneously.
Beyond the Homicide Stats
Homicide gets the headlines because it's the most serious, but it's a tiny fraction of total crime. What about property crime? Or drug offenses?
The BJS data indicates that for property crimes like motor vehicle theft or burglary, the racial lines blur even more. In many cases, these are "crimes of opportunity." While proximity still matters, the "intraracial" nature of property crime is less pronounced than violent crime.
Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton, wrote a book called Uneasy Peace. He argues that the decline in urban violence over the last few decades—until the 2020 anomaly—was largely due to community organizations and local "street-level" interventions, not just policing. When these community ties are strong, the what percent of crime is black on black question becomes less about "bad people" and more about "broken systems."
If you focus only on the race of the offender, you miss the "why." You miss the fact that 30% of Black children live in poverty compared to 10% of white children. You miss the fact that the unemployment rate in some of the neighborhoods with the highest "Black on Black" crime rates is triple the national average.
Distorting the Narrative for Politics
It’s kinda frustrating how often these stats are used as a "gotcha" in political debates. You’ve seen it. Someone brings up police brutality, and the immediate response is, "Well, what about the percent of crime that is black on black?"
This is a logical fallacy known as a "red herring." One has nothing to do with the other. The fact that citizens commit crimes against each other in their own communities doesn't negate the need for professional, constitutional policing. In fact, most people living in high-crime neighborhoods want more effective policing, not less. They just want the police to solve the murders that are happening in their neighborhoods.
According to the VPC (Violence Policy Center), Black Americans are disproportionately victims of homicide. In their 2022 report "Black Homicide Victimization in the United States," they found that the homicide rate for Black victims is significantly higher than for white victims. This is the real tragedy. When we obsess over the "Black on Black" label, we sometimes lose sight of the victims and the lack of resources dedicated to solving these cases. In many major cities, the "clearance rate" (the rate at which police solve a crime) for murders with Black victims is lower than for those with white victims.
Moving Toward Real Solutions
Stop looking at race as a cause. It's a correlate.
If you want to reduce the what percent of crime is black on black, you don't do it by lecturing people about "culture." You do it through targeted economic investment. You do it by fixing the clearance rates so that people who commit violence actually go to jail, which prevents retaliatory shootings—a huge driver of urban homicide.
- Economic Intervention: Programs that provide summer jobs for at-risk youth have been shown in studies (like those from the University of Chicago Crime Lab) to reduce violent crime arrests by up to 45%.
- Violence Interrupters: Groups like "Cure Violence" treat crime like a public health issue. They use former gang members to mediate disputes before they turn deadly. This addresses the intraracial nature of the crime directly without involving the legal system as a first resort.
- Better Lighting and Urban Design: Sounds crazy, right? But cleaning up vacant lots and adding streetlights has a documented effect on reducing local crime.
The data on what percent of crime is black on black tells us that the US is still a country where people live, socialise, and unfortunately, commit crimes within their own communities. It’s a mirror of our social structure.
Actionable Insights for Moving Forward
If you’re trying to make sense of these statistics in your own life or community, here are the steps to take:
- Check the Source: Always look for the original FBI UCR or BJS NCVS tables. Don't trust a screenshot of a chart on X (Twitter) or Instagram.
- Look for the Denominator: When someone says "X number of crimes happened," ask what the total population is. Rates per 100,000 people are always more accurate than raw totals.
- Demand Context: If a politician mentions "Black on Black" crime, check if they are also mentioning the poverty rates or the school funding in those same areas.
- Support Local Violence Prevention: Look into organizations in your city that focus on "community-based violence intervention" (CVI). These are the people actually doing the work to lower these percentages.
- Understand the "Data Gap": Acknowledge that 2021-2024 data might be incomplete due to the FBI's system transition. Be wary of anyone claiming definitive trends during this window.
Crime is a localized, economic, and social problem. Labeling it by race without mentioning geography or class is basically just telling half the story. To truly lower the rates of violence in any community, the focus has to shift from the color of the people involved to the conditions of the streets they live on.