A Ukrainian woman who escaped war in her home country was stabbed to death on a North Carolina commuter train. Political rhetoric About American crime victims and perpetrators.
Last month, the fatal attack, which was identified as a black man, triggered such an internal response as he was caught in viral surveillance video online. Tuesday, the North Carolina State Legislature He handed out a criminal justice package named after the victim Limits defendants’ eligibility for bail and encourages them to receive a mental health assessment.
Rhetoric about the attack, including allegations about “black-on-white crime,” spreads from social media, broadcasting radio waves to Congressional halls and the White House. Some of them utilize Sakura’s chosen cases and unfortunate crime statistics to recreate the old, harmful stories of black crime and threats to white groups.
Comes when Republicans, including President Donald Trump, are promoting rhetoric Parts focusing on cities with a reputation for violence. However, despite rhetoric, the data shows that in most U.S. communities, victims of violence and offenders are usually of the same race or ethnicity.
Chalis Cubelin, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, said violent cases in which criminals and victims have different races are “very rare.” It’s an exception, not a rule.
People are likely to be victimized by people they know and engage in regular dialogue in their social fields, she added.
That’s the latest breakdown of federal crime statistics. Black offenders were involved in roughly 15% of white violent casualties between 2017 and 2021, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which publishes multi-year crime trend reports every few years. Statistics show that white offenders were involved in more than half of the violence against other white people.
The report showed a similar trend regarding violent crimes committed against black victims. White offenders were involved in about 12% of crimes against black people, while black offenders were involved in 60% of violence against other black people.
What happened with Charlotte and the rhetoric around him?
The murder of a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee has been a flashpoint in an online discussion on crime victims and race, where surveillance video of the attack in Charlotte, North Carolina, is widely circulating online.
Zaltoska was killed by the city’s Lynx Blue Line Light Rail. The footage shows the attacker passing through the train and taking the pace, spreading the female blood on the train floor.
That’s what Black DeCarlos Brown Jr. He was charged with first-degree murder And they face federal accusations of committing death-causing behavior in a mass transit system.
Conservative activists, including Trump’s political ally Charlie Kirk, quickly called for what they condemned as a double standard when reporting such crimes by mainstream media. Kirk once said on his popular podcast that he “circulates for fun to target white people.”
Speaking about Charlotte’s attack, Kirk said: “There’s a massive media coverage when a random white man on the subway takes out a knife and stabs a black girl pointlessly to death.”
“There’s going to be a policy change. …I saw this in George Floyd,” the 31-year-old said on his podcast the day before. He was killed on the University of Utah campus.
North Carolina Republicans were also holding heavy weightothers blame what they called the Democrats’ “awakening policy,” including cashless bail, as dangerous people like Zaltoska attackers were roaming freely to pose a threat to the public.
The North Carolina chapter of the Council of Islamic Relations, a civil rights group that opposes primarily anti-Muslim sentiment, said it would “revive the racist talk points about the black community by denounce those using this crime.”
“This selective anger is dangerous, hypocritical and racially motivated, especially considering white supremacists are silent about other stabbing, massive shootings, hate crimes, financial crimes, rape and various other misconduct committed by people of all races and backgrounds,” the group said in a statement.
Comparing black-on-white crime with white black crime
Some criminologists warn against the importance of population size and relying on raw counts of crimes as they are related to the race of victims and offenders. Census estimates show that non-Hispanic blacks accounted for around 13% of the US population in 2024. As non-Hispanic whites make up the largest racial group in the United States, with an estimated 56% of the total population in 2024, “there are white people who can become potential offenders,” Cubelin said.
Both black-white and black-white violence are extremely rare, she added.
The National Crime Victim Survey conducted by the Department of Justice in 2023 collected data on nearly 6 million cases of violence reported by law enforcement. Their findings show that over 3.5 million people are involved in white victims. White offenders were involved in more than half of these crimes, but only a tenth of them were involved in black offenders.
It is fascinating to use it as a confirmation of preconceived notion that murder or violent interactions between people of different races, especially when grabbing headlines or social media, that is black-on-white crime or, conversely, suddenly surges. But in reality, she said they constitute a small share of hundreds of thousands of violent crimes that primarily involve people of the same race.
Brett Tolman, executive director of Right On Crime, a conservative criminal justice group, believes that people should focus not on race, but on where violent crime is most happening. Even if the data shows crime is on a downward trend, if people constantly feel unsafe, it’s hardly comfortable, he said.
“Let’s start with the community you want to feel safe,” Tolman said. “I hear they want safety and security regardless of politics, regardless of their politics.”
Black on Black Crime Investigation
According to criminologists, black-on-black crime is a flawed premise. Because people from all racial groups experience crime in close proximity to each other with social networks.
However, debates about systemic racism in the police and criminal justice systems frequently argue that black crime should be a major concern for the Black community over police brutality and racial profiling, as murder is the main cause of death for black men.
Even as crime rates drop dramatically over time due to the white and black population, false information rhetoric about crime and violence perpetuates racialized narratives on issues, Pulitzer award-winning journalist Torimaine Lee has published a book on gun violence on “A Thousand Ways to Die.”
“When you as a US, you have a country bound by violence, it’s only a matter of time before that binding force snaps and assaults us all,” he said, adding that violence “is not the realm of black Americans.”
“The politics of the moment may be suggested differently, but this reminds us that Americans are not out of reach of American violence.”
