But it is true that a disproportionate amount of murders and other violent crimes are committed by black Americans.
Because detailed FBI data on crime can lag by
several years, the most-cited statistics on this point refer to 2009 data. According to that data, out of all violent crimes in which someone was charged, black Americans were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the country’s 75 biggest counties — despite the fact that black Americans made up just 15 percent of the population in those places.