All of the presumed criminals but one were black or Hispanic. All of those who said they were afraid were white, and most were women. To portray as a typical criminal a black male who was an accessory to a felony murder, assaulted a white male, and raped a white female is inaccurate. Blacks run a greater risk of forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault than whites. Low-income individuals are the most likely victims of violent crime.
Men are more likely than women to be the victims of violence.
FBI statistics confirm that, unlike robbery, rape and murder in the United States are primarily intraracial, not interracial, phenomena. In 1988, for example, only 11.3 percent of the reported rapes involved a black rapist and a white victim. I do not intend to minimize Thomas and Mary Edsall's claims that a higher percent of the crime committed by blacks is interracial and that in the categories of assault and robbery more than half of the robberies committed by blacks have white victims. Rather, my point is that raising the fear of whites that they are likely to be murdered or raped by blacks is unjustified. Identifying William Horton's actions as somehow typical, as George Bush did in his speeches, is racist.