A new blog post from Ron Unz examines the correlation across large US cities between the percentage of the population that identifies itself as black and rates of various violent crimes. The correlations are remarkably stable over time and run around 80% for measures like homicide and robbery. Unz remarks that his findings were a surprise to several social scientists with whom he had discussed them while a few other social scientists were aware of this relationship.

While he shows graphs of the correlations over time he doesn’t provide much in the way of detail city by city. Curious, I quickly downloaded state level statistics for homicide rates and percentage of population that is black. A quick scatter is here:

I don’t know how this will render on the WordPress blog: if there is interest I will try to put up more legible and focussed versions. Overall, the correlation between murder rate and percent black in the state data is 0.82, essentially duplicating Unz’ result for urban areas.

By states (including the District of Columbia as a state) the rate varies from around 1 per hundred thousand per year in Vermont, New Hampshire, Hawaii, and Minnesota to nearly 20 in DC. As Unz discusses, the rates would presumably be much higher and the correlations with percentage black also much higher is nearly a quarter of the populations of young black males were not in prison.

For states with very low black populations the range is from 1 to nearly 8 in New Mexico. European national figures are between 1 and 5, so homicide rates in, say, Vermont, are much like those of European nations. Why is there so much more homicide in New Mexico? Greg may suggest that the high percentage of hispanics in the population is responsible but we must not forget that New Mexico’s Rio Grande valley, from Los Alamos to White Sands has a remarkable high concentration of Ph.D. physicists. Hmmmm.

While our nation is obsessed with the Zimmerman-Martin dustup, these numbers reveal in my opinion the real tragedy of the sociology of our black population. Zimmerman-Martin is a sordid circus created by unscrupulous journalists, prosecutors, and race hustlers. These homicide rates, on the other hand, reflect premature deaths of thousands of our citizens, year after year.