Who Faces the Gravest Threats of Being Murdered?
The 2013 U.S. murder rate of 4.5 means that out of every collection of 100,000 people, nearly 5 people were killed and 99,995 survived. Who were these unfortunate few that were marked for death? This statistic captures the odds of being slain for fictitious “average” Americans of all backgrounds, which is a useful social construct for certain purposes (for exam- ple, as shown above, to compare the perils faced by U.S. residents to the dangers confronting the average Canadian or Mexican). But this composite statistic conceals as much as it reveals. When the SHRs are used to deconstruct the body count, differential risks
of getting killed become evident. These findings should be especially alarming for those who fall into some or all of the high-risk categories and should be somewhat reassuring for members of other groups. The odds of suddenly expiring vary greatly from place to place: by region of the country, area of residence (urban, suburban, or rural), and specific location (which city) as was shown above. Hence, differential risks already have been uncov- ered in terms of geography: where people reside. It should come as no surprise that three other impor- tant factors are sex, age, and race or ethnicity.
SHR statistics indicate that a person’s sex is a crucial determinant of risks. Men die violently much more frequently than women. Year after year, at least three-quarters of the corpses are of boys and men (almost 78 percent in 2013). This proportion has remained roughly the same since the early 1960s. Expressed as rates, boys and men are killed at least three and during some years four times as often as girls and women. Also, over recent decades, about 9 out of 10 of the known offenders were teenage boys or men (roughly 90 percent of the arrestees were males in 2013). Therefore, most murders can be categorized as male-on-male. When females get killed, the murderers usually turn out to be males (91 percent of all girls and women were slain by boys and men in 2013). On infrequent occasions when females kill, they tend to slay their own small children or the men in their lives rather than other women.
As for the race of those whose lives were snuffed out prematurely, the UCR recognizes only these categories: white, black, and other (Asians) plus undetermined or unknown. (Note that most Hispanics were counted as whites on the SHRs.) During 2013, roughly half (51 percent) of all those who perished were black, a little less than half were white (45 percent), and the small remain- der (3 percent) were of other races (mostly Asians) or of unknown origin (1 percent). Because half of all those who were killed were black, but only about 13 percent of the population identified them- selves as people of African descent according to the U.S. Census Bureau, these UCR calculations con- firm that black communities across the country
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suffer from disproportionately high rates of lethal violence. Whites, who comprise 78 percent of the population but only 45 percent of the departed, experience disproportionately low risks. Put another way, the dangers of getting murdered are dispropor- tionately higher for blacks than for whites or others. As for ethnicity, the SHRs indicated that 18 percent of all those who were murdered were Hispanic, which is in line with the proportion of the population that was classified as Latino or Hispanic (17 percent) by the Census Bureau (see Harrell, 2007).
As for victim–offender relationships, most slayings turn out to be intraracial, not interracial, a longstanding pattern according to decades of record-keeping (see Wood, 1990). Focusing solely upon lone-offender/single-victim killings carried out during 2013, the UCR’s SHRs documented that 90 percent of black victims were slain by black offenders, and 83 percent of white victims were killed by white perpetrators.
Besides sharp differences in risks by sex and race, murder rates also have varied dramatically by age, a pattern that was discerned decades ago (see Akiyama, 1981). Children between 9 and 12 years old are the least likely age group to be slain. The risks of being murdered rise during the teenage years and peak during the early twenties, between ages 20 and 24. After age 25, the body count drops substantially with each passing year, indicating an inverse relationship: As a person grows older, risks decline smoothly. The typical victims were in their late teens, twenties, and thirties when they were killed. Almost two-thirds (62 percent in 2014) of those who died way before their time were between the ages of 17 and 39. An even higher proportion of perpetrators fall into this age range. As a result, most murders can be charac- terized as young adults slaying other relatively young persons.
So far, this listing of differential risks has been based on the 2013 UCR. But what about the recent past? A statistical portrait of all the people who were slain and all the persons arrested for murder and manslaughter between the years 1980 and 2008 appears in Box 4.1. The picture that emerged from this comprehensive analysis of the FBI’s SHRs shows that the differential risks detected in