5 Feet of Fury

Jim Goad: Affirmative Action for Black Serial Killers

Jim Goad writes:

Studying the time frame of 1945-2004, criminologist Anthony Walsh found that out of 413 confirmed American serial killers, 90 of them were black—a quotient of 22% and nearly double their percentage of the population. An almost identical quotient is claimed by Eric W. Hickey in his book Serial Murderers and Their Victims. A massive database at Radford University tracking over 4,000 serial killers from 1900 to 2010 found that a whopping 40.6% of the killers were black. In his book Rise of the Black Serial Killer, Justin Cottrell says he’s confirmed 1,837 cases of American serial killers since the year 1860, with 53% of the killers being black. Cottrell also says that only 6% of white serial killers murder “outside their race,” whereas 57% of black serial killers are more racially ecumenical in choosing their victims. (…)

As with most things, blacks fall victim to racial profiling. In the cases of the Atlanta Child Murderer and the Beltway Snipers, police followed the FBI model that the typical serial killer is a white male, so they wasted time searching for white suspects. In the more recent case of Derrick Todd Lee, AKA The Baton Rouge Serial Killer, police allegedly took DNA samples from hundreds of white suspects before a break in the case led them to the black perp. And one of the initial suspects in LA’s Grim Sleeper case was white.