A deep dive into murders, who murders whom

We have updated our data on who extremely concentrated murders are in the US. The worst 1% of counties (the worst 31 counties) have 20% of the population and 41% of the murders. The worst 2% of counties (63 counties) contain 30% of the population and 54% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 46% of the population and account for 71% of murders. But even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas within those counties. By contrast, 53% of the counties have zero murders and another 16% have just one murder. These 69% of the counties account for only 3% of all murders in the country.

Murderers also disproportionately have some clear characteristics, with 56.4% of murderers in 2024 being black and 55.2% in 2020. One note is the white data puts Hispanics and non-Hispanics together. The FBI data does breakdown ethnicity for whether someone is Hispanic, and while 20% of the U.S. population in 2024 is Hispanic, they make up 22% of murderers. But this is undoubtedly an underestimate of their share of murderers. A 2023 paper in Criminology compared officers’ racial classifications with individuals’ self-identification and found the most common error is officers classifying Hispanics as White. Researchers have documented that many jurisdictions either do not report Hispanic ethnicity consistently or historically reported only race. An analysis highlighted by Axios found that police agencies and jails “rarely track Latinos’ racial and ethnic data” consistently, making national estimates difficult. Even the left wing ProPublica documented this with Louisiana traffic-stop records, though their take is that this lack of recording the ethnicity of those stopped for traffic violations was done to hide the high rate that Hispanics were being stopped for traffic violations. The FBI’s CIUS Expanded Homicide Data directly illustrates this underreporting of Hispanic ethnicity. In 2024, the FBI identified the race of 7,603 murder offenders but identified whether the offender was Hispanic or not for only 5,295 of them—just 69.6%.

But a better way of seeing how disproportionately certain groups are committing murder is to compare their share of murderers to their share of the population. Black male murderers are 8.3 times blacks’ share of the population. White male murderers are about 1.2 times whites’ share of the population (again note this includes Hispanics). Including Hispanics in with non-Hispanic whites, likely raises this ratio for whites. (While 24.15% of murderers whose ethnicity is identified are Hispanic, since 19.996% of the population in 2024 was Hispanic, that is 21% higher than their share of the population. At the bottom of the post, we show that adjusting for the share of whites who are Hispanic could reduce the ratio for whites from 1.18 to 1.12.) All the other groups are murderers at a rate below their share of the population.

While many are concerned about the race of the criminals, that those who go to prison are disproportionately minority, what is ignored is that murderers overwhelmingly murder people who are the same race. In 2020 and 2024, 90% of blacks are murdered by other blacks. For whites it is about 80%. For violent crime, 70.2% of black crime victims were the victims of black criminals.

Blacks are also disproportionately the victims of murder, making up 46.2% of those murdered in 2024 — 3.6 times their share of the population. Whites make up 48.1% of murder victims, well below their over sixty percent of the population.

Whites are much more likely to be murdered by blacks than blacks are likely to be murdered by whites. Comparing 2020 and 2024, blacks are murdered by blacks at about 9 times the rate that blacks are murdered by whites, but whites are murdered by whites at about 3 to 4 times the rate that whites are murdered by blacks.

Not surprisingly, murderers are also relatively young, with 53% of murderers between 13 to 29 years of age. Unfortunately, the FBI data doesn’t provide a breakdown by each year of age for the murderers. What we can say is that for the three years from 17 to 19 14.2% divided by 3 equals 4.73 while for the five years from 20 t0 24 18.2% divided by 5 equals 3.64. Given the large gap there it is likely that 18 to 20 year olds are committing murder at a higher rate than 21 to 23 year olds.

Murder Victims are heavily concentrated among younger people 2024
Age	Share of Victims by Percent CDC
13 to 16	3.8%
17 to 19	7.9%
20 to 24	13.0%
25 to 29	11.9%

Just as a comparison, here are the rape victimization by year of age of the victims.

24 reported rape victimizations by recorded age Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer, 2024 national NIBRS master file (nibrs-2024.zip), downloaded September 2026.
Recorded age (years)	Victimizations
0	130
1	235
2	556
3	1,277
4	1,779
5	1,882
6	1,732
7	1,623
8	1,667
9	1,627
10	1,753
11	2,164
12	3,590
13	5,115
14	6,376
15	7,429
16	6,734
17	5,460
18	4,464
19	3,846
20	3,292
21	3,214
22	2,947
23	2,638
24	2,563
25	2,395
26	2,335
27	2,188
28	2,149
29	2,056
30	2,027
31	1,934
32	1,884
33	1,870
34	1,898
35	1,820
36	1,698
37	1,628
38	1,537
39	1,425
40	1,394
41	1,309
42	1,208
43	1,121
44	1,016
45	1,046
46	882
47	831
48	687
49	660
50	631
51	563
52	544
53	515
54	487
55	403
56	353
57	374
58	379
59	333
60	274
61	252
62	255
63	236
64	195
65	191
66	158
67	159
68	137
69	98
70	103
71	88
72	81
73	76
74	65
75	65
76	56
77	58
78	36
79	43
80	50
81	50
82	46
83	39
84	30
85	27
86	23
87	20
88	22
89	15
90	18
91	14
92	6
93	7
94	10
95	7
96	5
97	6
98	5
99+	32
Unknown age	925
All ages, including unknown	121,656
Ages 15–30	55,737

A note on Hispanics. The total Hispanic population in 2024 was 68,013,553 (20.0% of the U.S. population). If most are going to be classified as whites (say 91%), that means 61,913,683. The White alone, not Hispanic, population was 191,382,624. That would be a total of 253.3 million. So Hispanics who would be classified as whites would make up 24.4% of the total. Given that Hispanics commit murder at a 21% higher rate than their share of the population, that implies that the white murder rate is 5.1% higher because of Hispanics. So the ratio for white males would decline from 1.18 to 1.12.