The front page of the Sunday Seattle Times featured photographs of the 21 official murder victims in the city this year. Of course, the list would not include “justified” killings, such as those committed by the police; Native American woodcarver John T. Williams would not have been on this list, because the officer involved was never charged for the shooting. One must question the Times’ motive for compiling this list; it seems that the random shooting of Justin Ferrari followed only days later by the shooting rampage of Ian Stawicki not only made headlines, but had one thing in common: all the victims were white. The Asian male who was killed in between, Son Hai Le, went unnoticed.
The only “statistic” that three female Times reporters thought was worth mentioning was that five of the victims were women, and 16 were men. Why they chose to mention the lower figure first is something that you have to ask them, but if they are surprised by the numbers, they shouldn’t be—this is the ratio of male-to-female murder victims nationally, according to the FBI. In any case, since I like statistics, I’m going to expand the boundaries a bit here, and comment upon them.
First, the pertinent breakdown:
9 black male victims
6 white male victims
3 white female victims
1 Native American female victim
1 Hispanic female victim
1 Asian male victim
However, since the Stawicki massacre was an anomaly, the rest of the year should reflect the general pattern of what came before it: Out of 16 murder victims, 12 were minorities, 3 were white males, and one was white female. This clearly isn’t the impression you generally receive from the media. The media hungers for white female victimization (largely due to the ability of the white female presence in newsrooms to shape the information the public receives), and when they can’t find them here, the local media picks-up on whatever is shaking in the national media. I suppose the Times should be “commended,” however, for at least exposing the truth, even if this was not the paper’s intention.
I also thought it might be useful to see how the Seattle murder rate compared to the national average. The murder rate for black males nationally is 39 per 100,000; using the 2010 Census data for Seattle, there are roughly 24,000 black males, making the murder victim rate on par with the national average. Of course, the problem is that the year is only half over—meaning the final rate could be considerably higher than the national average, in fact double the rate. On the other end of the scale is the white female murder victim rate, which is the lowest by far nationally. According to the 2010 Census, there are a little over 200,000 non-Hispanic white females in the city. Three murder victims is still slightly below the national victim rate, and if there is only one white female murder victim as before the Stawicki massacre the second half of the year, the city rate will still be roughly the national rate of 1.7 per 100,000.
Other statistics of note: Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans were not only by chance represented in the victims’ list, but they were less likely to be involved in killing than either whites or blacks, at least in Seattle; people may be particularly “surprised” to learn that this is true concerning Hispanics. Another suggestion that I found interesting: If the Pew Foundation’s breakdown of the number of “illegal aliens” by percentage is correct, it means that there are 7,000 illegal aliens who are Hispanic in the city—and over 9,000 who are Asian. Yet who receives all the “attention?” But I’m certain people will continue to “justify” why we should just pretend that illegal immigrants of Asian extraction don’t exist.
So, what have we learned here? One thing we should have learned is that we can’t trust the media to tell us the truth about what is really going on, and that it is only when the victims are white is there any effort to highlight the issue—and even then the media seeks to conceal the significant variables by highlighting the political, but statistically insignificant, variable.
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