'American Slaughter,' the murders go on

At least 150,000 young black men have been murdered since 1994 by other black men. 5,000 per year. Where’s the media outrage? Why are the country’s black leaders silent? The grim, ignored stats.

Earlier this year I wrote about the slaughter in America of young black males by other young black males. Along with the national death toll, I focused on Chicago and Pittsburgh. So far this year, murders in Chicago, Pittsburgh and nearly every major city are down compared to 2023. But young black men still make up a disproportionate percentage of the country’s annual homicides.

American Slaughter

January 1, 2024

1993 was an especially bloody year for the City of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County.

As Post-Gazette crime reporter Mike Fuoco reported in his year-end roundup of local homicides 30 years ago today, 118 men and women were murdered in a city/county population of about 1.3 million. It was the highest number since 1917.

As usual, and as Fuoco pointed out early in his article, those Pittsburghers who were killed in 1993 were disproportionately young, black and male and virtually all of them were killed by young black males who used handguns.

Homicide-wise, not much has changed in Pittsburgh in 30 years, except for the steady shrinking of its population and the names of this year’s list of dead young black men.

In 2023, according to the Post-Gazette’s year-end wrap-up of city and county homicide statistics, there were 97 homicide victims — 49 in the city (pop. 303,000) and 48 in the rest of the county (1.2 million).

Like most cities, the city of Pittsburgh’s homicides fell in 2023. Its total of 49 was lower than the 71 murders the city had in 2022, a year when national violence rates were still spiking as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.

In terms of who died and who killed whom, 2023 was a typical year in Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs and rusted steel towns, which are known for having low crime and murder rates.

As usual, about 82 percent of the murder victims in the city and the county were black. Few were women and 32 of the 41 black victims in the city were under age 34. Seven were under age 17.

Since 1993, roughly 50 black males between 14 and 34 have been murdered every year in the city of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Over three decades, that adds up to about 1,500 dead young black men and teens.

Pittsburgh’s 30-year death toll is tragic, but it’s puny compared to Chicago’s.

Chicago, Chicago, that murdering town

Chicago, aka the murder capital of the United States, is the national media’s poster child for deadly weekend shooting sprees and urban drug gang violence.

HeyJackass is a ‘humorous’ but thorough historical and real-time breakdown of murder/shooting stats in Chicago that every newspaper in America should have been doing for decades for their cities but never did.

Every July 4th weekend, the national media runs the shocking statistics:

By  Sun-Times Wire

19 killed, 86 wounded in shootings during extended Fourth of July weekend in Chicago — Updated Jul 6, 2024, 11:48pm EDT

But Chicago doesn’t have the highest murder rate per 100,000 people in the country. St. Louis (69) Baltimore (51) and New Orleans (40) are the top three.

Chicago is a distant No. 10 with 24 murders per 100,000 people — but murder rates are cold, dry numbers.

In 2023 there were total 632 homicides in Chicago, down 15% from 2022. This year, as of September 22, the number was 456, so the final toll might be lower than last year.

Since 1994, the city has been a permanent killing field for young black men. Every year in Chicago at least 300 young black men have been shot, stabbed and beaten to death by other young black men.

That 300 murder figure is a conservative estimate, given that Chicago’s annual death toll has averaged over 500 homicides for 30 years and roughly 80 percent of those killed were black. But it still adds up to nearly 10,000 young black men killed by their peers since 1994.

That’s a shocking number. But Chicago’s murders make up only a fraction of the country’s annual slaughter of young black men.

The homicide gap

In 2022, according to Statista, there were 19,196 homicides in the U.S. The total number of black victims was 10,470. Though whites outnumber blacks in the population by about 5-1, the number of white homicides that year was 7,704.

The glaring black-white homicide gap in the U.S. is decades old and it happens every year. July 4th shooting sprees and multiple gangland murders on weekends get mentioned in the news all the time — like sports scores.

But no one important or influential in the media or elsewhere has seemed very interested in digging into or publicizing the specific details of annual black homicides.

If they did, they’d find that the homicide statistics for the whole country are macro versions of Pittsburgh’s and Chicago’s.

They’d also learn that each year since 1994 roughly 5,000 black men under 34 have been killed in America by other young black men, usually with handguns. That means the running toll of murdered young black men since Bill Clinton was elected is a staggering 150,000.

It’s a figure so shocking — and never pointed out in the national media — that it’s hardly believable. It’s 50,000 more Americans than were killed in Vietnam and Korea combined.

So where are the Million Man marches for those 150,000 slain young black men? Where are the cries and outrage of national black -- and white -- leaders?

Where are Obama and Oprah and Lebron and Kamala and all the famous politicians and pundits and moral preachers of every color and political party who supposedly care about important racial issues?

What could possibly be more important to the country than trying to end a bloody 30 years war on young black men by other young black men?

Young people of all colors commit a disproportionate number of crimes — and the most murders. But the country’s annual murder toll goes up and down for all kinds of social and economic reasons. So does the murder rate per 100,000 people — an abstract crime statistic used by the media that means nothing to the average American.

In 1993 there were nearly 25,000 homicides in the U.S. By 2014 they had fallen to 14,300. But by 2021, thanks largely to the effects of BLM madness and covid lockdowns, homicides spiked to 22,536 from 17,000 in 2019.

But let’s make things clear and simple, skip the murder-rate stats and just count all the dead people.

Let’s say there are 20,000 murders in the USA in an average year. That comes to roughly 54 murders per day. About 60 percent of those homicide victims — roughly 32 a day — are black Americans. Mostly they are males under age 34.

In 2023, the country’s final homicide toll, though down compared to the covid years, will include roughly 10,000 blacks of all ages. Again, based on the numbers, at least 6,000 of the victims will be a black male under 34 who was killed by a black male under 34.

Reducing this perpetual urban killing field should have been the chief concern of black leaders and the legacy news media for decades. It’s hardly a secret to the black community.

A group called the Gifford Law Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence knows what’s going on. It says that “For decades, gun violence has taken a disproportionate and grueling toll on Black communities—leading to tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun injuries.”

The report says, “Homicide has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than half a century” and that “for young Black men, gun homicides are the leading cause of death and more than outstrip the next leading causes of death combined.^”

Yet black leaders apparently do not realize the scope of the national slaughter of young black men or don’t want to discuss it. And the major news media is AWOL.

Journalists have either been too clueless to have noticed the deaths of 150,000 young black men or been too chicken to ask national and local black leaders why the black culture is so violent and what they are doing to fix it.

As in previous years, no black leaders, movie stars, politicians or important media figures will jump in front of the cameras and declare a national crisis or call for a national crusade to slow the killing.

They’ll do what they’ve always done — call for more gun control or blame poverty or racism or slavery or bad cops or food stamp cuts for the murders of thousands of young black men.

Meanwhile, the American Slaughter will continue to be what it has been for more than 30 years — the bloody elephant in the American newsroom that people can’t see or are afraid to say anything about.

***

To prove how little has changed when it comes to the disproportionate murders of young black males, here is a snippet of a column I wrote in 1994:

Worried to death about violent crime? Afraid you'll be America's next rape or murder victim? Are you one of nine in 10 Americans who think violent crime is at an all-time high?

Well, discount what you see on the nightly murder roundup on TV. Discount the TV tabloid shows and the fear-mongering on newstalk radio. Discount this morning's front-page crime stories.

Money magazine wants you to get a good grip on this reality the reality of violent crime un-distorted by the news media: "The risk of being a victim of violent crime for most Americans is really very small and is actually lower than it was 10 years ago."

In other words, says Money, despite what most of us think, feel, fear or suspect and no matter whether we're white, black, rich, poor, urban or suburban we're probably much safer than we think.

Attempting to counter what it calls "the widespread and near-hysterical" fear about violent crime m America, Money spent four months crunching the last 20 years of Bureau of Justice crime stats.

The magazine doesn't pooh-pooh the violence in American society, especially among black male teenagers. But it puts it in perspective for an American public that apparently has a severe case of Reality Deficit Disorder when it comes to violent crime.

The rate of violent crime today is not at an all-time high, as 90 percent of the people that Money polled as part of its analysis believes.

The overall chance of being a victim of violent crime which varies widely depending on your age, race, sex and neighborhood is now at 32.1 per 1,000 people, off 9 percent since its 1981 peak.

The rate of serious violent crime such as rape, robbery and aggravated assault is down 16 percent since 1976. (The raw number of violent crimes is up, or course, because the population has grown.)

But what about murder? Nearly eight in 10 people polled by Money thought the murder rate was at an all-time high. It isn't.

The raw numbers are up, but the 1993 rate of 9.5 murders per 100,000 people is 7 percent below 1980's all-time high of 10.2 and even lower than the level reached in 1933 at the end of Prohibition.

Only 5 to 10 percent of Americans today are becoming crime victims at record rates — black and white youths.

The murder rate for black males 15 to 24 is nine times higher than whites the same age. A black male teen is also 10 times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than an adult white man.

Money, which also ranks the country's safest and most dangerous cities, also shows in its poll that few people have a clue about violent crime. They don't know who commits it, who the likeliest victims are and they dramatically overestimate their odds of being attacked by someone of another race.

The reason for this crime confusion, says a May American Demographics editorial that takes up the same subject, could be TV.

The three major networks ran 1,700 news stories about crime in 1993, twice as many as in 1992. That may explain why 31 percent of us ranked crime as America's worst problem in a Washington Post poll in March, compared to just 5 percent who thought so last June.

***

Ex-newspaperman Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle's original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. And in 2022 he published Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington, a satirical kids book for all ages that all polar bears and lovers of freedom will like.

2022 homicide stats

Here, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are the 2022 homicide numbers for Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and the entire USA:

In 2022, of the 64 homicide victims in Allegheny County in the 18-36 age group, 59 were black. Six were women, 53 were black males. Ten victims under age 17 were also black males. The population of the City of Pittsburgh is about 300,000. Allegheny County’s population is about 1.2 million.

2022 national homicide stats

Published by Statista Research Department, Oct 20, 2023:

Homicide victim demographics

There was a total of 21,156 reported homicide cases in the U.S. in 2022.

When looking at murder victims by gender and ethnicity, the vast majority were male, while just over half of victims were African American.

In addition, homicide victims in the United States were found most likely to be between the ages of 20 and 34 years old, with the majority of victims aged between 17 to 54 years old.

Are murders up?

In short, no – since the 1990s the number of murders in the U.S. has decreased significantly.

In 1990, the murder rate per 100,000 people stood at 9.4; it stood at 6.3 in 2022.

It should be noted though that number of homicides increased slightly from 2014 to 2017, although figures declined again in 2018 and 2019, before ticking up again in 2020 and 2021.

Despite this decline, when viewed in international comparison the U.S. murder rate is still notably high. For example, the Canadian homicide rate stood at 2.06 in 2021, while the homicide rate in England and Wales was even lower.