California attorney general Rob Bonta has released a report on homicides in the Golden State in 2020. After rising during the first BLM Era from later 2014 to 2016, they fell 4 or 5% per year during the first three years of the Trump Administration.

Then in 2020, homicides exploded 31.1%.

We don’t have national figures yet for 2020 from the FBI, but I’d guess that California was about average.

Black murder victims were up 40.3% in California, Hispanics 33.9%, Other 33.3%, and whites only 8.5%.

The Biden Administration has been repeatedly implying that all those white people queuing up in orderly lines to legally buy a guns last year were the cause of the record surge in murders, but it sure doesn’t look like whites, much less white legal gun buyers, contributed to the murder tsunami. You’d have to believe that whites were buying guns in Burbank and then driving down to South-Central to murder blacks and Latinos. Maybe poor old Joe would believe that, but I doubt if even Kamala would, much less Merrick Garland.

The white share of murder victims was down to 16.8% vs. 36.5% of the population, the lowest white share of victims over the last decade. The black share was up to 30.7% of victims vs. 6.5% of the population, tied for the highest black share of the last decade. Heckuva job, Black Lives Matter!

Blacks were 10.5 times as likely as whites to be homicide victims, Hispanics 2.6 times, and Other (mostly Asians) 0.9 times as likely.

California homicide victims
	2019	2020	Chg	Share 2020	Census	Victims vs. population	ratio vs whites
Total	1679	2202	31.1%	100.0%	100.0%	100%	2.2
White	331	359	8.5%	16.3%	36.5%	45%	1.0
Hispanic	740	991	33.9%	45.0%	39.4%	114%	2.6
Black	479	672	40.3%	30.5%	6.5%	470%	10.5
Other	123	164	33.3%	7.4%	17.6%	42%	0.9
Unknown	6	16	166.7%	0.7%

Will we see calls for equity in murder victimization? Why aren’t whites stepping forward to get themselves murdered more during the Racial Reckoning like everybody else? What kind of allies are they if they aren’t taking a bullet proportionately?

 

Murders were up 49% in Alameda County (i.e., Oakland), which I’m guessing is the blackest county in California, compared to down 18% in Contra Costa County just to the north.

Murders were up 33% in huge L.A. County and 71% in Fresno County (Fresno County is 54% Hispanic and 6% black), but down 17% in idyllic Ventura County.

Robbery murders went up 43.7% statewide, which is not good.

The clearance rate for murders fell from 64.6% to 58.9%, thus arrests for homicides were up only 18.1% compared to the 31.1% increase in homicide victims. The white share of homicide arrests (frequently domestics) fell from 19.1% to 17.5%, and Other fell from 7.7% to 6.4%, while blacks increased from 28.2% to 28.9%, and Hispanics from 45.0% to 47.2%.

The ratio of black to white homicide arrests was 9.3 times as great for blacks as for whites, 2.5 times as much for Hispanics, and 0.8 times as much for Other. Note, however, that L.A. Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside (which I suspect was originally named Ghettocide) reports that a very large fraction of black on black murders are not cleared due to a culture of “snitches get stitches.” In contrast, a large fraction of white on white killings are easy-to-clear domestics (the boyfriend/husband did it), including the extremely easy to clear domestic murder-suicides (the guy with a bullet hole in the side of his head holding the gun probably did it).

Among those killed by cops in 2020, 20% were black, 22% white, and 49% Hispanic.

Family/domestic homicides went up 3.8% but fell from 16.4% of all homicides in 2019 to 14.4% in 2020.

It wasn’t unreasonable to speculate, as many did, that domestic murders would soar in 2020 due to people having to stay home and thus getting on each other’s nerves, but the big increase was in stranger murders (+28.3%) and friend/acquaintance murders (+21.3%).

In other words, the pandemic wasn’t the direct cause of the murder surge, the racial reckoning was.

Here’s an interesting table of arrests by felony vs. misdemeanor:

Not surprisingly, in California, white criminals are the wimpiest: when they get arrested, 27.8% of the time it’s for felonies compared to 72.2% of the time for misdemeanors. But the single most O.G. ethnic group in California are not blacks (41.2% of arrests are for felonies) but the small but dangerous Cambodians (45.8% felonies). Also, the Chinese don’t commit a lot of crimes, but when they do, they aren’t messing around: 41.9% felonies.