The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) recently diced homicide data for 2023. ¹ Some of the data is not surprising, and some is.

Take-aways

• Homicides and gun use skew significantly to the demographics of street gangs.

The Dismal Reminder

Much of the BJS’s report amplifies what has been seen in criminology data for decades, namely that being a young, black male puts you in the crosshairs… quite literally.

The homicide rate for blacks of all ages is staggeringly high. As we noted in many Gun Facts studies, the rate is strongly correlated with both age and the degree of urbanicity, which are the same vectors that the National Gang Center found were associated with street gang membership.

Accounting for age, and knowing that the active street gang years are from the late teens through early 20s, it is completely unsurprising that the latter age group is where most people are murdered.

Since gangs are the prime suspect, it is also unsurprising that the police don’t/can’t do a great job in preventing more homicides.

The Un-Clearance Multiplier

In criminology parlance, “case clearance” means resolving a case via an arrest or at least identifying the corpse of the perpetrator.

A “case clearance rate” indicates what percentage of cases the local cops resolve. The lower the clearance rate for murders, the higher a city’s murder rate tends to rise, as we showed in our Top 15 Murder County study.

The clearance rate for homicides by race is anything but uniform. The clearance failure rate for homicide of a black person is 30% higher than that for whites. The street gang participation rate for blacks is also 30% higher than for whites. ²

A univariant comparison is not a whole story, but the nearly exact correlation, when combined with the other data, makes a compelling case that (as we already knew) street gangs are the primary source of deadly violence.

The Racial Gun Multiplier

Unexpectedly, we also see a very significant divergence in who uses guns for homicides.

Guns are the primary tool for homicides in the United States, hands down. But their use for such is not evenly distributed by race.

And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (look that up, kids), blacks use guns 29% more often than whites for their homicides. Let’s just round that up to 30% to agree with the same data for overall homicide rates and gang participation rates by race.

As if we needed more correlation, next comes…

The Unknown Killers

We discussed the lackluster clearance rates for homicides for blacks. One reason is that (aligned with higher gang participation rates) the police have less to work with. Gang members are notoriously uncooperative with the authorities. But often the victim doesn’t even know that attacker.

For blacks, the rate of a homicide perpetrator being unknown is 60% higher than for whites (glad we didn’t say 30% again?). This is a function of street gang MOs. A body in an alley with no witnesses (or at least none who will talk to the cops) is common in the inner-city neighborhoods where gangs are “the law.” Hence, low clearance rates are in part due to high rates of unknown (and unknowable) assailants.

Triangulation and Priorities

At Gun Facts, we avoid making policy recommendations. There are plenty of activist groups, both pro- and anti-gun, who are more than happy to proffer policy opinions.

But we do believe that all big problems are a set of smaller problems, and it is always best to attack the biggest of those first. The biggest problem with gun violence in America is street gangs. It is a complex problem involving culture, economics, social issues, and more. But the core is that gangs will continue to commit the lion’s share of gun homicides, 85% of them by our estimate, until gang culture is broken and there is long-term, adequate and professional policing in the neighborhoods where gangs dominate.