The Demographics of Crime

Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension released its report on the state’s 2021 crime statistics late Friday afternoon. My colleague Bill Glahn was one of the few who noticed.

The BCA’s numbers indicate that in 2021, homicides were up 72% over 2019, the state’s last “normal” year. Aggravated assaults were up 63% over 2019, and robberies up 30%. Minnesota’s crime wave continues to worsen.

What I really want to focus on is the demographic numbers, specifically with regard to homicide:

The racial characteristics of murder in Minnesota are very similar to 2020. Of known victims, 123 were African American, or 65 percent of the total. Of known perpetrators (a single murder could have more than one), 209 (76 percent) were African American. Compare these figures to the share of African Americans in Minnesota’s population, which is less than 10 percent.

African Americans represent less than 10% of Minnesota’s population, but are 76% of the state’s murderers and 65% of its murder victims. These facts make nonsense of complaints by Black Lives Matter activists, and liberals generally, that law enforcement unfairly targets blacks, or that blacks are “over-represented” in arrests or any other metric.

On the contrary, these basic numbers explain why, when plaintiffs successfully sued the City of Minneapolis to force it to adequately staff its police department, in accordance with the requirements of the city’s charter, those plaintiffs were blacks who live in crime-infested North Minneapolis. Liberals should be ashamed of themselves for deliberately obfuscating reality and thereby imperiling the lives of many of our citizens.

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