After a Ukrainian woman who had fled in her home country was stabbed in a commuter train in North Carolina, the alarming act of violence inflamed a bitter racist and political rhetoric about victims and perpetrators in America.
The deadly attack last month, in which the alleged perpetrator was identified as a black man, shouted such visceral reactions partly, partly because it was caught on surveillance videos that became online. On Tuesday, the legislator of North Carolina adopted a criminal justice package that was named after the victim to restrict the authorization of the accused for the deposit and to encourage them to undergo a mental assessment.
The rhetoric about the attack, including claims about “Black-on-White-Crime”, has spread from social media and transferred air waves to the halls of the congress and the White House. Some of them employ cherry -complained cases and poorly framed crime statistics to reproduce age-old harmful stories about black crime and threats to white population.
At a time when the Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have rhetoric as part of a focus on urban cities with a call of violence. Despite the rhetoric, the data show that most US communities are usually the same breed or ethnicity.
Violent incidents in which the criminals and the victims of different races are “are extremely unusual,” said Charis Kubrin, criminology professor at the University of California Irvine. It is “the exception and not the rule”.
People are more likely to become a victim of people who know them and with whom they interact regularly in their social field, added them.
The latest breakdown of the federal criminal crime statistics. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in which the Multi -Year criminal trend reports are published every few years, black criminals were involved in around 15% of the whites between 2017 and 2021. White criminals were involved in more than half of the violence against other whites, as the statistics show.
The report showed similar trends when it came to violent crimes against black victims. White criminals were involved in about 12% of these crimes against black people, while black criminals were involved in 60% of violence against other blacks.
What happened in Charlotte and the rhetoric around them
The murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on August 22nd became a flashpoint in online discussions about victims of crime and races after surveillance video of the attack in Charlotte, North Carolina, largely circulated online.
Zarutska was bricked up to death at the Lynx Blue Line Light Rail of the city. Film material showed that the alleged attacker went through the train and spread the woman’s blood on the floors of the train car.
Decarlos Brown Jr., a black man, was charged with the first degree murder and is charged with a mass traffic system because of the death of a law.
Conservative activists, including the political ally of Trump, Charlie Kirk, quickly stated, which they condemned as a double standard in reporting on such crimes by the mainstream media. Kirk once said in his popular podcast: “Striking blacks go for fun to aim for white people.”
When Kirk said about the Charlotte attack: “If a random white person took out a knife on a subway and a black girl stood up to death senselessly, there would be massive reporting on the media.”
“There would be political changes. We saw this in George Floyd,” said the 31-year-old in his podcast a day before he was killed on a university campus in Utah.
The Republicans of North Carolina also burdened some of what they aroused as the “Politics” of the Democrats, including the deposit of cashless, as a reason as probably threatening people like Zarutska’s alleged attackers to threaten the public.
The chapter North Carolina of the Council for American-Islamic relationships, a civil rights group that mainly begins against anti-Muslim feelings, said: “We also condemn those who use this crime to revive racist conversation topics about the black community.”
“This selective outrage is dangerous, hypocritical and racist, especially in view of the fact that white supremacists about other stitches, mass shootings, hate crimes, financial crimes, rape and various other misconduct shots that were committed by people of all breeds and backgrounds are silent,” said the group in a statement.
Comparison of black and white crime with white-on-black crime
Some criminologists warn against relying on the number of crime number of the raw number, as they refer to the race of victims and criminals because the population size is critical. According to the census estimates, non-Hispanic blacks made up about 13% of the US population in 2024. Non-Hispanic White are the largest group of racial group in the USA estimates 56% of the total population in 2024, “There are only white that could be potential criminals,” said Kubrin.
Black and white and white-on-black violence are both extremely rare, added.
The national survey for criminal victimization carried out by the Ministry of Justice in 2023 collected data on almost 6 million violent incidents reported by the law enforcement authorities. Their results show that over 3.5 million a white victim was affected. White criminals were involved in more than half of these crimes, while only a tenth of black offenders affected.
If a killing or a violent interaction between people of different breeds is the headlines and social media-especially if there is a video-it is tempting to employ this as confirmation of pre-made ideas that Black-on-White crimes or conversely suddenly tips, Kubrin. But in reality they make a petite share of hundreds of thousands of violent crimes that mainly affect people of the same breed, she said.
Brett Tolman, executive director of right on crime, a conservative criminal justice group, believes that people should not concentrate on the breed, but that violent crimes take place the most. Even if data show that crime had a downward trend, this can be little consolation if people feel uncertain, he said.
“Let’s start with communities that want to feel safe,” said Tolman. “I hear from just as many who live in inner cities, regardless of their politics that they want security and security.”
Investigation of black-on-black crime
According to criminologists, black and black crime is a faulty premise, since people of all racial groups experience crime due to their social networks and their proximity to each other.
In discussions about systemic racism in police work and in the criminal justice system, however, it is often argued that black-on-black crime should be the main concern of black communities-more than the brutality of the police or the racial profile, since the murder was a main cause in black men.
Even if the crime rates have fallen dramatically for white and black population groups over time, rhetoric formulated racist stories in the subjects in terms of crime and violence, said Tryma Lee, a journalist for Pulitzer Prize, who recently published a book about weapons: “Thousand options”.
“If you have a nation that is bound to violence like the United States, it is only a matter of time that the binding of snapshots and eyelashes with all of us,” he said, adding that violence “is not the domain of black Americans alone”.
“Even if the politics of the moment suggests differently, this is a strong memory that no American for American violence is not within reach.”
