An analysis examining killings over the past decade in 52 of the largest cities in the United States found that black victims were less likely than any other racial group to have their killings result in an arrest.

The Washington Post's analysis released Wednesday finds that African Americans accounted for the majority of homicide victims. According to the data, out of the 26,000 killings analyzed across the 52 cities, the victim was black in 18,600 of the cases.

The analysis also found that police arrested someone in just 47 percent of the killings of African-American victims, compared to arrests made in 63 percent of the killings of white victims.

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The newspaper found that in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia alone, more than 7,300 homicides involving black victims led to no arrests.

But smaller cities, where white residents accounted for the majority, were also found to have a high number of killings of black victims with no arrests made in the past 10 years, including Columbus, Ohio, where 422 such cases were discovered, and Buffalo, N.Y., where 277 were found.

Boston, Mass., was found to have the largest gap in arrests made between homicides involving white victims and those involving African-American victims. According to the analysis, twice the number of cases were solved involving the killings of white residents in the city in comparison to black residents.

Some police officials told The Post that gang and drug-related shootings, which reportedly account for the majority of unsolved cases, are more difficult to solve than other types of killings.

“Let’s face it, when you talk about murder in our urban communities — black and brown, where gang and group violence is prevalent — you got that retaliation piece,” Detroit Police Chief James Craig told The Post.

“And those are the most challenging kind of homicides to investigate,” added Craig.

The Post noted that Detroit's police department has a 12 percentage point higher rate for arrests made for white victims than in the cases of African-American victims.

The Post's analysis relied on racial classification for victims as recorded by local police in addition to local news reports and public records.