Black-on-Black Crime Is Real and So Is the Bigger Picture — Both Things Are True

Timothy E. Parker

Guinness World Records Puzzle Master · Author · Data Analyst

There is a woman in Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago. I will not print her name. She has suffered enough exposure without receiving any of its help. She buried her second son on a Tuesday in October. Her first son was killed in 2019. Her second in 2024. Both were killed by other Black men. Both were under twenty-five.

She is not a statistic. She is not a talking point for cable news. She is a mother who has run out of children to lose. She represents thousands of women in this country. Their grief has become so routine that it no longer qualifies as news. Their funerals have become so frequent that the church ladies know the program by heart.

I begin with her because our conversation has been poisoned. Some wield numbers as weapons. Others refuse to look at numbers at all. In the space between these two cowardices, children are dying. Real children with names and futures and mothers who will never recover. So let us look at the numbers. We must look because refusing to look at them has become its own form of violence.

What the Data Actually Says

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has tracked homicide data for decades. The numbers are consistent enough across years. Disputing them requires either ignorance or dishonesty (FBI UCR, Expanded Homicide Data Table 6, 2022).

• 13.6% — Black Americans’ share of the U.S. population
• About 53% — Their share of known homicide victims and a similar share of known offenders
• More than 90% — The share of Black homicides involving Black perpetrators

These numbers are not new. They are not contested by serious researchers on any side of the political spectrum. They are the empirical reality of who is dying and who is doing the killing. They have been roughly stable, with modest fluctuations, for thirty years.

Now here is the point at which the conversation typically derails. One camp seizes these figures as proof of inherent pathology. This conclusion is so stupid it does not deserve the dignity of rebuttal. Another camp rushes to deflect the data entirely. This has become the most popular and most misleading response in American racial discourse.

The Deflection and Why It Fails

The deflection goes like this. “All crime is intra-racial. White people kill white people too.” And this is true. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly 80% of white homicide victims are killed by white offenders (Cooper & Smith, Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008, BJS, 2011). Crime is overwhelmingly a proximity phenomenon. People victimize those who live near them. America remains profoundly segregated.

This is an accurate observation. It is also a profoundly dishonest argument. It obscures the single most important variable in this entire discussion — rate.

The homicide rate for Black Americans is approximately 7.4 times higher than for white Americans. In 2020, the Black homicide victimization rate reached about 37 per 100,000. The white rate was about 5 per 100,000 (CDC WONDER Database, National Vital Statistics System, 2020).

Saying “all crime is intra-racial” while ignoring a six-to-eight-fold rate difference is like saying “all countries have weather” while ignoring that one country faces a hurricane. The proportionality matters. Each unit of that rate represents a body. It represents a mother like the woman in Englewood. It represents a community that cannot build wealth or retain teachers. The ambient threat of violence poisons every other measure of human flourishing.

Why We Refuse to See It

I understand the deflection. The fear behind it is legitimate. For more than a century, crime data involving Black Americans has been weaponized. White supremacists, eugenicists, and politicians running on barely coded racial platforms used it. They justified everything from lynching to mass incarceration.

When someone hands you a number and uses it to build a cage, you learn to be wary of numbers. This wariness is not irrational. It is the survival instinct of a people. They have watched their reality be distorted in the mouths of their enemies for generations.

But here is what the wariness has cost us. While we have been arguing about who is allowed to discuss this data, we have not been protecting the children. While we have been policing the conversation, we have not been protecting the children.

• Homicide is the No. 1 killer of young Black men in America (CDC, 2021)
• It has held that position for decades
• It is not the leading cause of death for young white men in any age bracket
• Our collective response has been to argue about whether it is appropriate to say so

Sit with that. In a country with the most advanced medical system on earth, the most lethal threat to a young Black man is another young Black man. And our collective response has been to argue about vocabulary.

The Structural Truth

Let me be unambiguous about something. The people who will attempt to misuse this article need to hear it clearly. The structural factors that created the conditions for concentrated urban violence are real, documented, and significant.

• Redlining in the 1930s through 1960s created the hyper-segregated neighborhoods where violence concentrates (Rothstein, The Color of Law, Liveright, 2017)
• The destruction of Black business districts stripped neighborhoods of their economic base. This includes the literal burning of Tulsa’s Greenwood in 1921 and the “urban renewal” projects of the 1950s.
• The War on Drugs flooded those neighborhoods with law enforcement while draining them of fathers. Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman admitted it was designed to target Black communities.
• Mass incarceration removed men from families. It returned them years later with felony records that rendered them unemployable.

All of this is true. All of it matters. And none of it is sufficient to explain why the violence continues at its current rate. The structural argument, taken alone, is also a form of evasion. It locates all agency outside the community. It says Black people are acted upon but never act. They are shaped by forces but never shape their own culture. They are victims of history but never participants in it. This is not empowerment. It is the most sophisticated form of dehumanization available. It strips an entire people of moral agency while pretending to defend them.

Both things are true. The structures are real. The cultural factors are real. The refusal to discuss either one honestly is cowardice. Cowardice has a body count.

What Is Actually Working

The good news is that community-based violence intervention programs are producing measurable, replicable results. This news receives a fraction of the coverage devoted to the arguments. These programs do not wait for structural transformation. They do not wait for reparations debates to conclude. They go into the streets now, with the communities as they are, and they save lives.

CURE Violence was founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin in Chicago. It treats violence as a contagious disease. It deploys “violence interrupters.” These are credible messengers, often former gang members. They mediate conflicts before they become shootings. An independent evaluation by the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research found that CURE Violence sites in Chicago experienced a 41% to 73% reduction in shootings compared to matched control areas (Skogan et al., Northwestern University, 2009).

Advance Peace operates in Richmond and Sacramento, California. It takes the most lethal individuals in a community and wraps them in intensive services.

• Mentorship and cognitive behavioral therapy
• Life skills training and a modest stipend contingent on participation
• Richmond’s homicide rate dropped 71% over a decade during the program’s operation
• 77% of fellows had no gun-related activity during or after the program (Corburn & Fukutome, UC Berkeley, 2019)

Bob Woodson has spent four decades showing that neighborhood transformation is possible. It must be led by the people who live there. It cannot be led by academics, politicians, or professional activists who parachute in with theories and leave with grants. His work has shown that when you empower indigenous community leaders, violence drops. These leaders are the grandmothers, the ex-offenders who turned their lives around, the pastors who never left. The violence drops not because the structures changed overnight, but because the culture within those blocks shifted (Woodson, Lessons from the Least of These, Woodson Center, 2020).

The Community-Based Violence Intervention Movement

The federal government has begun to recognize what these programs demonstrate. The Community-Based Violence Intervention initiative channels resources to programs that use credible messengers. It uses hospital-based intervention. This means reaching shooting victims before they seek retaliation. It uses group violence intervention strategies pioneered by David Kennedy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (Kennedy, Don’t Shoot, Bloomsbury, 2011).

Kennedy’s work in cities like Oakland and New Orleans demonstrated two critical findings.

• Most urban violence is driven by fewer than 0.5% of a city’s population
• Focused deterrence strategies targeting that network can produce dramatic reductions

These programs work because they refuse the false binary that has paralyzed the national conversation. They do not pretend that structural racism is irrelevant. They do not pretend that individual choices are irrelevant. They engage real people in real neighborhoods with real strategies. They measure results with real data. They are not ideological. They are operational. They save Black lives while commentators argue about vocabulary.

The Puzzle and the Solution

A puzzle master looks at that question and identifies the variable nobody wants to name. Both political camps have built their identities around the half of the truth that serves them. The right uses the data to justify abandonment. The left uses the deflection to avoid accountability. Neither serves the mother in Englewood. Neither has stopped a single bullet.

“You cannot cure what you refuse to diagnose.”

The diagnosis is a crisis of proximity and consequence. The primary mechanism of harm is the predictable outcome of a social and economic ecosystem. This ecosystem was deliberately engineered for failure. It includes concentrated poverty, fractured families, underfunded schools, and a predatory street economy. It is policed by an occupying force concerned with containment, not safety. The result is a closed system of trauma. In this system, violence becomes the most accessible form of conflict resolution, status acquisition, and economic survival.

Top 5 Solutions That Are Already Working

1. Cure Violence Global (formerly CeaseFire Chicago) — Founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, this program treats gun violence as a contagious disease. It deploys trained “violence interrupters” with lived experience. They mediate active conflicts in high-violence neighborhoods before shootings happen. It now operates in 27 U.S. cities and 15 countries. The Chicago evaluation by Northwestern University found a 41–73% reduction in shootings. It found a 52% reduction in killings at program sites. Retaliatory murders were eliminated entirely. Baltimore sites cut killings by up to 56%. Across all non-Baltimore evaluated sites, 95.8% showed reductions in violence. The cost is approximately $5,000 to $11,000 per participant annually. Cities saved up to $18 for every $1 invested (Skogan et al., U.S. Department of Justice, 2009; Cure Violence Evidence Summary, 2022).

2. Advance Peace (Richmond and Sacramento, CA) — This program identifies the most lethal individuals in a community. It enrolls them in an 18-month Peacemaker Fellowship. Fellows receive mentoring, life skills training, cognitive behavioral therapy, and a stipend. The stipend is up to $1,000 per month for meeting milestones. In Richmond, gun homicides and assaults dropped 55% between 2009 and 2016. Of all fellows, 97% were still alive and 83% had not been injured by a firearm. In Sacramento, gun homicides fell 22% overall and 39% in the Del Paso Heights neighborhood. A cost-benefit analysis found a return of $18 to $41 per dollar spent in Sacramento. In Stockton, the return was $47 to $123 per dollar (Corburn & F-Lopez, UC Berkeley, 2020; Journal of Urban Health, 2022).

3. Newark Community Street Team (Newark, NJ) — This is a community-led violence intervention program. It uses credible messengers to mediate conflicts. It relocates high-risk individuals. It deploys rapid-response teams to neighborhoods experiencing spikes in violence. Since 2020, the NCST has relocated 122 individuals from high-risk environments. The results are striking. Newark reached a 70-year low in homicides in 2023. There were just 31 murders, the fewest since 1953. A UCLA evaluation confirmed that the program’s high-risk interventions were directly associated with reductions in violent crime. The U.S. Department of Justice awarded the program a $2 million expansion grant in 2022 (UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, 2026; Newark Department of Public Safety Crime Statistics, 2024).

4. LA GRYD — Gang Reduction and Youth Development (Los Angeles, CA) — This city-run program combines youth development services, family case management, and community intervention workers. It aims to reduce gang joining and gang-related violence across designated GRYD zones citywide. Among prevention participants, 83% decreased their risk of gang joining. Violent crime in GRYD zones fell 18%. Gang-related homicides dropped 45% compared to 2023. They dropped 56% compared to 2022. Youth risk factors declined 55% after one program cycle. School disciplinary actions dropped from 28% to 9.8%. The program runs on roughly $26 million annually (Urban Institute Year 4 Report, 2016; BSCC CalVIP Evaluation, 2023; Mayor Karen Bass press release, 2024).

5. San Francisco Make-it-Right Program (San Francisco, CA) — This is a restorative justice program for youth ages 13 to 17 facing serious felony charges. Instead of prosecution, it uses facilitated meetings. Offenders, victims, and community members meet to develop accountability agreements. A randomized controlled trial was published in Econometrica. This is one of the top economics journals in the world. It found a 44% reduction in the probability of rearrest within six months. The rearrest rate was 24% for program participants versus 43% for the control group in the randomized controlled trial. The reduction persisted four years after randomization. The trial ran from 2013 to 2019. This makes it one of the most rigorously evaluated justice interventions in the country (Shem-Tov, Raphael & Skog, Econometrica, January 2024).

The Bottom Line

The numbers tell a story that no political narrative can override.

• 37 vs. 5 — Black vs. white homicide victimization rate per 100,000. This is a 7.4x multiplier (CDC WONDER, 2020)
• No. 1 — Homicide’s rank as cause of death for Black males 15–34. It has held this rank for decades (CDC, 2021)
• 0.5% — The share of a city’s population that drives most urban violence. This is a network, not a community (Kennedy, 2011)
• 41–73% — Shooting reductions at CURE Violence sites vs. matched controls (Northwestern, 2009)
• 71% — Richmond’s homicide rate drop during Advance Peace operation (UC Berkeley, 2019)
• 77% — Advance Peace fellows with no gun-related activity during or after the program (UC Berkeley, 2019)

The structures are real. The cultural factors are real. The solutions exist and they are producing documented results. What is missing is the courage to fund them at scale. We need the honesty to name the problem without weaponizing it. We need the discipline to measure outcomes instead of arguing about vocabulary. The mother in Englewood buried two sons while America debated whether it was acceptable to discuss who killed them. She does not need a political ally. She does not need a cultural critic. She needs a violence interrupter on her block. She needs a funded intervention program in her ZIP code. She needs a country that cares as much about stopping the bullets as it does about controlling the conversation.