Peter Kirsanow writes for National Review Online about an important new report on American crime.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report … on racial disparities in crime victimization. The report’s publication is the culmination of a multi-year struggle between conservative commissioners on the one hand and progressive commissioners and many of the commission’s career staffers on the other. …

… The common thread throughout the report is an obvious desperation to avoid any connection between the Black Lives Matter protests and accompanying riots and increasing crime rates. There’s a similar desperation to remove responsibility for crime from the criminals (particularly black criminals) — instead placing responsibility for crime on society at large.

My conservative colleagues and I had a simple motivation for proposing this study: Black Americans are victims of crime, particularly violent crime (and especially homicide), at rates far disproportionate to their share of the population. Yet Democrats — and progressives generally — refuse to honestly address the phenomenon, to the grave detriment of Democrats’ most loyal voters.

The results are devastating. As the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual testified at the commission hearing:

*The 2020 spike in homicides resulted in an additional eight deaths per 100,000 black residents in the U.S., while the white homicide rate resulted in an additional 0.5 deaths per 100,000 residents;

*The share of the nation’s homicide victims constituted by whites declined by 2.4 percentage points in 2020, while the share constituted by blacks and Latinos increased by 2.2 percentage points;

*This pushed the black homicide victimization rate in the U.S. up to 25.3 per 100,000 in 2020 from 19.5 per 100,000 in 2019, making the black homicide victimization rate nearly ten times higher than that of whites.

*Between 2017 and 2021, the rate at which black victims were robbed was 75 percent higher than it was for whites, and blacks’ violent crime victimization rate was 25 percent higher than the white rate.

A 2022 study published in Preventive Medicine Reports found that black men were persistently overrepresented among victims of violent offenses.