Homicide Is Pandemic’s Biggest Killer of Young Black Men
It isn’t exactly news that young Black men run a much higher risk of being murdered than the rest of us, writes Justin Fox.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a big increase in murder and manslaughter (aka homicide) in the U.S. By the accounting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the homicide rate went from 5.8 per 100,000 Americans in 2019 to 7.5 in 2020. It appears to have continued to rise, albeit at a much slower rate, in 2021.
Who suffers when the homicide rate goes up like that? Black Americans, mainly.
In 2020 those identifying or identified as Black or African American made up 13.5% of the U.S. population, according to CDC estimates (that for definitional and other reasons don’t quite match the results of the 2020 U.S. Census). They also made up 55.6% of the homicide victims, and 65.6% of the increase in homicides relative to 2019. To put it another way, the homicide rate for Black Americans rose from 22.9 per 100,000 in 2019 to 30.7 in 2020. For all other Americans, the rate went from 3.2 to 3.8.
Homicides have also gone up faster during the pandemic for those of Hispanic or Latino origin than for non-Black non-Hispanics but (1) the increase hasn’t been as steep as for Black Americans and (2) the starting point was much lower, even though Hispanics make up a larger share of the population (18.7% in these CDC statistics).
Among Black Americans, homicide deaths were concentrated among one group in particular, younger men. Homicide deaths during the pandemic have been highest for Black men ages 18 through 30, but there have also been substantial increases over pre-pandemic levels among those a couple of years younger and several years older, so I’ve gone here with an age range of 15 through 44.
It isn’t exactly news that young Black men run a much higher risk of being murdered than the rest of us. It also isn’t exactly a mystery who’s killing them. Data on who commits homicides is for obvious reasons less complete than data on victims, and “clearance rates” — the percentage of crimes that are solved — were especially low for homicides in 2020. But the information that is available indicates that young Black men are the main killers of young Black men. This is neighborhood gun violence, for the most part.
The CDC statistics, based on death certificates filed by doctors and medical examiners, do offer a starker and timelier view of the effects of the pandemic murder wave than I’ve seen elsewhere, and also make it easier to put into epidemiological context. Covid-19 was twice as deadly for younger Black men as it was for all Americans in the 15-through-44 age group, for example, but it was far less of a threat to them than homicides (and also less deadly than drug overdoses, traffic accidents and suicides).
In 2021 Covid killed many more under-65 Americans than it did in 2020, so these rate comparisons will look a bit different — although probably not enough to really change the picture for younger Black men. Homicides were the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 through 44 in 2020 and are running just behind accidents of all kinds (including drug overdoses, which the CDC lumps together with traffic fatalities and the like in its leading-causes-of-death rankings) in the 2021 data available so far. For Americans overall, heart disease remained the No. 1 cause of death in 2020 and 2021 as it has been for decades, and homicides don’t make it into the top 15.
This does not exactly square with media coverage of the pandemic murder wave, which tends to underplay the ongoing carnage among young Black men as it focuses on other, presumably more shocking, killings. It also doesn’t neatly slot into the debate since mid-2020 over crime and the role of police. According to the Mapping Police Violence project, police killed 249 Black Americans in 2020, which amounts to just 1.8% of the year’s 13,654 Black homicide victims. Excessive use of force by police is a real problem, and one that weighs heavily on younger Black men. But if police presence reduces violent crime, and the evidence that it does is reasonably strong, then the lack of police poses far greater risks to Black men in their teens through early 40s than the police do.
Most of all, looking at the pandemic murder wave through this lens reinforces what an emergency it is. Its victims are disproportionately young men who ought to have long lives ahead of them. This has got to stop.
The Federal of Bureau of Investigation’s more frequently cited estimates are lower but show a similar increase.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
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