Of all the rankings that get awarded by Forbes or Daily Beast or Axe body spray, this is one where you don't want to land in the upper tier.
The Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., gun-control advocacy group, released its annual report
yesterday on African-American homicides, and Missouri finished No. 1 in the rankings ... again.
Our brothers and sisters at the Riverfront Times already covered this ground, so we'll let them recap:
The study -- which used the latest availableAs Kevin Masters, deputy chief with the Kansas City Police Department, told The Kansas City Star: "The question I ask is, how as a police officer can I keep two people who know each other from arguing? When 81 percent of the violence is based on an argument, and 75 percent know each other, I don't know that there's a lot I can do."FBI crime statistics from 2008 -- found that Missouri had 287 black
homicide that year, for a victimization rate of 39.90 per 100,000 black
residents. The other states rounding out the top 5 deadliest places for
African-Americans were Pennsylvania, where 31 out of 100,000 blacks were
murdered in 2008, followed by Indiana (28 per 100,000), Michigan (24.5
per 100,000) and Tennessee (22.59 per 100,000.)
The AssociatedPress notes that Missouri has been among the top 5 states for
black homicides in four of the past five years and was No. 1 in 2008 and
No. 2 in 2009.
According to the statistics, 86 percent of blackhomicides in Missouri occurred in either Kansas City or St. Louis. The
average age of the victim was 31 and 10 percent of all victims were
under the age of 18. Not surprisingly, male victims accounted for more
than 85 percent of black murders in Missouri in 2008, and 87 percent of
those people were killed with guns. Moreover, 78 percent were murdered
by people they knew when an argument or feud escalated to violence.
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