Two Countries

Scott Adams recently proposed looking at the US murder rate as if the US was two countries, one white and one black.  Sounds like a plan to get himself canceled.  However, I had seen a graphic on the internet - a known reliable source - that did something like that.  I found some numbers for a variety of countries on Macrotrends.net.  Here are the murder rates for 2018 per 100,000 people.

Yes, the United States looks pretty bad.  It would appear that the further south one travels in North America, the worse the murder rate.  Now, let's take a look at the FBI data for 2018 murders.

Now that we have the raw number of murders by race, let's determine the rate per 100,000 so we can plug it into the previous chart.  Working backwards, we can determine the population by this formula:

Population = Murders/(murder rate/100,000)

Macrotrends used 326,895,161 for the US population.  Let's stick with that number.  According to the Census bureau, Whites made up 73% of the population and blacks accounted for 12.7%.  What does that give us?

Clearly, we have imperfect data but it should give us some ballpark idea.  In order to determine the murder rate by race, we use the reverse of our population formula above:

Murder Rate = Murders/population*100,000

Wow, that's quite the range there.  Scott Adams makes an interesting point.  These numbers certainly demand his cancellation.  Let's plug them into the countries chart and see what we get.

Clearly, the murder rate just for white America is still more than double the rate for any of the European countries.  However, it is around half of what the comprehensive number showed.  As for black America, it is more dangerous than Mexico.  One must consider that the murder rate has spiked in the last two years and the numbers are now much worse.

Murder Rates

Lately, I have seen this posted repeatedly:

Interesting.  Sounds like an attack on Democrats and gun control supporters.  If true, this is a strong argument against both.  Let's fact-check it.

First step: Does the US really have the 3rd highest murder rate?  A quick search returned this link and it has the United States way down at 76th, not 3rd.  As of 2018, the US had a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 people.  El Salvador had 10 times that number.  However, if we look at just the number of people murdered, the US ranks 6th with 16,214 murders.  Just looking at the piles of corpses, Nigeria is the most deadly with 64,201 people murdered in 2016.  Based on this, it looks like the maker of the above graphic may have been using murder totals rather than murder rates.

Next step: How many murders are there in the listed cities?  The FBI maintains crime statistics by city that are available here.  The most recent data available that includes all of the mentioned cities is for 2018.  Let's go with that:

That does amount to 12.4% of all murders in the US for 2018.  Doesn't seem like that would move the US from 3rd place to 189th place.  In order to test, we need to subtract those murders from the total and see where the US places then.  16,214 - 2,325 = 13,889.  After changing that on the table used in step one, we get... 6th place.  Yes, 7th place was Colombia with 12,586 murders.  The US position is unchanged.

Let's try the murder rate.  Sure, it was at 76th place when we used the murder rate, but maybe we'll move the needle by using that instead.  So, we'll have to take out those murders from the total and, to be fair, we'll need to factor out the populations of the listed cities to calculate a murder rate for the rest of the country.

Look at that.  Our murder rate has been greatly improved.  After plugging in 4.37 and resorting by murder rate, the US moves from 76th all the way to 82nd, putting us between Chile (4.405) and Latvia (4.356).  That is a far cry from 3rd to 189th.

Conclusion: the graphic is propagandistic crap.