Louisiana has the second-highest black homicide victimization rate in the nation, according to a report released in January by the Violence Policy Center. The Violence Policy Center is a national non-profit organization aiming to educate people about violence in the United States. The center compiled the most recent FBI homicide victimization data from 2004 to conduct the study. The study found Louisiana’s black homicide victimization rate was 29.48 per 100,000 people, with a total of 441 black victims in 2004. Louisiana ranked second only to Pennsylvania, which had 29.52 homicides per 100,000 people. Indiana, California, Missouri, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada and Arizona filled out the top 10 states with the highest number of black homicide victims “Blacks in the United States are disproportionately affected by homicide,” according to the report. “For the year 2004, blacks represented 13 percent of the nation’s population, yet accounted for 47 percent of all homicide victims.” Matthew Lee, associate professor of sociology, said urban homicide rates are higher than those in rural areas. Lee said some of the states on the list, including Arizona and Minnesota, made the list because they have a relatively small black population and do not actually have a lot of black murder victims. “Compare Louisiana with more than 440 black homicide victims with Arizona’s 48,” said Lee, the Crime and Policy Evaluation Research group’s coordinator. “The latter has a high rate because the denominator in the calculation is comparatively small. This doesn’t mean it is not a problem there, but these are qualitatively different contexts.” CAPER is a group of researchers at the University that aims to promote education about crime rates in Louisiana. Josh Sugarmann, the report’s co-author, told The Daily Reveille the correlation between black homicide victimization rates and firearm usage is overwhelming. The study found that 84 percent of the victims in the top 10 states were shot and killed with guns in cases where the weapon could be identified. Handguns were used in most of the reported homicides. Of the 6,644 black homicide victims included in the national data, 85 percent were male and 15 percent were female. Gender data for three victims were unavailable. And in Louisiana, 384 were male and 57 were female out of the 441 victims. The report found that black homicide victims in Louisiana seemed to know the people who murdered them in 83 percent of cases where the victim’s relationship to the murderer could be identified. Forty victims were killed by strangers. Lee said there are several reasons for Louisiana’s high homicide rate. “There are no doubt many reasons, including the persistence of structural poverty, in some places cultural norms that are more tolerant of violence than you find in other states, and racial inequalities which circumscribe the life chances of many minority group members,” he said. Six percent of black homicide victims in Louisiana were less than 18 years old, and one percent were 65 or older. The average victim’s age was 28 years old in Louisiana. Lee said recent research states that structural causes of homicide, including poverty and family breakdown, are similar for blacks, whites and Latinos. He said large segments of the black population experience setbacks like poverty, joblessness and high school withdrawal. “It is difficult to find any predominantly white neighborhoods that are as bad off as the average urban African-American neighborhood,” Lee said. “If whites, or Latinos for that matter, lived in the same social circumstances, recent research indicates that their homicide rates would also be much higher. This is referred to as the ‘racial invariance thesis.’ That is, the causes of violence don’t actually vary across races.”
—–Contact Angelle Barbazon [email protected]