Drunk drivers killed more Americans than inner-city drug violence did

Evidence

Even the statistics suggesting that more violent crime—especially on innocent victims—was occurring in urban Black neighborhoods were based on a racist statistical method rather than reality. Drunk drivers, who routinely kill more people than violent urban Blacks, were not regarded as violent criminals in such studies, and 78 percent of arrested drunk drivers were White males in 1990. In 1986, 1,092 people succumbed to “cocaine-related” deaths, and there were another 20,610 homicides. That adds up to 21,702, still lower than the 23,990 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year (not to mention the number of serious injuries caused by drunk drivers that do not result in death). Drug dealers and gangsters primarily kill each other in inner cities, whereas the victims of drunk drivers are often innocent bystanders. Therefore, it was actually an open question in 1986 and thereafter whether an American was truly safer from lethal harm on the inner city’s streets or on the suburban highways. Still, White Americans were far more likely to fear those distant Black mugshots behind their television screens than their neighborhoods’ White drunk drivers, who were killing them at a greater rate. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1094

Categorization

• XREF: A sharp concrete instance of how racist framing selects which deaths count as ‘crime’ — feeding the reader’s test of whether ideas precede or follow policy.
• CANDY: An easily quotable, counterintuitive comparison: in 1986 drunk driving killed more people than drug-related deaths plus all homicides combined.