White murder rates by state

++Addition++Hail looks at white homicide rates 45 years prior and compares them to the contemporary figures in a post that should be read in full. To his discussion of "Hispanic inflation", I'll note that 'whites' in the now heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California were more murderous in 1960 than they are today, though Texas has become a bit less violent, as Steve explains in the comments of Hail's post.

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Steve Sailer is curious about white murder rates by state. One of Steve's commenters pointed to an online database out of the University of Michigan that uses the SDA interface. Because of my familiarity with said interface, I'll give it my best.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Data Series provides detailed homicide data by state with accessible reports from 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2003. Steve wants a decade of data to account for year-to-year randomness in small states. For now, we'll have to settle for half of that.

There are a few technical issues to address before diving in. Most importantly, murder rates among the total population are a lot easier to determine definitively than murder rates by subgroups within a population are. Murder is unlikely to go unreported--a corpse usually provides pretty good evidence of a homicide if it occurred. Take the number of murders by the overall population over a year and, voila, we have the homicide rate. However, the perpetrator(s) is sometimes unknown. Consequently, the sum rates of any number of non-overlapping subgroups is always going to fall short of the rate for the total population, even if the entire population falls into one of the various non-overlapping subgroups being considered.

To address this, for each state I figured the percentage of homicides perpetrated by whites among those homicides for which the race of the killer was known and then assigned this percentage of the unknown perpetrator number to the white total. This assumes that the racial breakdown of unidentified murderers mirrors that of their identified brethren. Shows like CSI would have us believe that lots of the hard-to-catch killers are white. On the other hand, structural racism suggests that society often turns a blind eye to blacks killing blacks in the ghetto. Who knows? My guess is that this method overstates the true white rate but that the effect is overstated pretty uniformly across states.

Another issue is ethnicity, specifically with regards to the question of Hispanic origin. The data are broken down into five categories: White, Black, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Unknown. Hispanics may be of any race, meaning most of them are included in the white numbers. This becomes obvious in the visualization subsequently linked to, as the states along the Southwest border are conspicuously more murderous than the rest of the country is (excepting, perhaps, Florida, which apparently does not participate in the UCR).

Because 2006 is conveniently both the mean and median year employed, the white homicide rate per 100,000 people is calculated by averaging the number of murders in each state over the included five years and comparing it to a state's total white population (including most Hispanics) in 2006.

Only non-negligent homicides, which constitute the vast majority of all murders, are included.

Finally, data are available from all states for each of the five years under consideration with the exception of DC (2009 data only) and the aforementioned Florida no-show. Estimated white murder rates during the aughts per 100,000 whites by state:

State	Rate
1. District of Columbia	12.43
2. Nevada	6.64
3. New Mexico	6.63
4. Arizona	6.43
5. California	5.81
6. Oklahoma	4.45
7. Texas	4.38
8. Alaska	4.12
9. Hawaii	3.64
10. Maryland	3.52
11. South Carolina	3.52
12. Tennessee	3.51
13. Louisiana	3.42
14. Missouri	3.42
15. West Virginia	3.05
16. Arkansas	3.00
17. Alabama	2.91
18. North Carolina	2.90
19. Colorado	2.86
20. Georgia	2.68
21. Kentucky	2.66
22. Kansas	2.51
23. Wyoming	2.49
24. Virginia	2.44
25. Washington	2.43
26. Indiana	2.41
27. New York	2.35
28. New Jersey	2.27
29. Mississippi	2.21
30. Michigan	2.19
31. Pennsylvania	2.16
32. Idaho	2.10
33. Connecticut	2.03
34. Oregon	1.98
35. Montana	1.84
36. Rhode Island	1.84
37. Massachusetts	1.74
38. Ohio	1.73
39. Delaware	1.69
40. Utah	1.63
41. Maine	1.60
42. Vermont	1.58
43. Wisconsin	1.34
44. Illinois	1.27
45. South Dakota	1.21
46. Nebraska	1.19
47. North Dakota	1.19
48. Iowa	1.14
49. Minnesota	0.91
50. New Hampshire	0.86

Here's a cartographic visualization (requires Java).

Live free and don't die!

In addition to the white Hispanic/non-white Hispanic factor, proximity to the Canadian border appears to be associated with pacifistic tendencies. The upper Midwest does best (Nazis these Nordics and Teutons are not!), followed by the Northeast.

DC's whites are conventionally thought to be a cut above the rest of the country. They're the elites, after all. Even the white kids with parents who don't get them into private schools are as sharp as tacks. As Steve sardonically asks:

Has anybody checked out what Ezra Klein, Chris Matthews, and Cokie Roberts are up to?

As noted previously, data on DC are only available for 2009, a year in which there were 12 identified white killers and another 87 who went unidentified. That's a small sample size to work with. Fewer than one-in-five DC whites are Hispanic, so that offers little in the way of explanation, either. While it is a completely urban 'state' and the jokes about the district of corruption practically write themselves, I suspect something else is up with the data from the capital.

Parenthetically, when compared to the rest of the developed world, the US does notoriously bad on measures of criminality (among other things). Race, of course, is a major reason why this is the case. Taken as nations of their own, the upper Midwest and the Northeast look just fine when measured against Europe.

Variables used: V2, V16(a), V25,