How many drive-by homicides occurred in the United States in 2025 by race of victim?
Executive summary
No reliable, published count of "drive-by homicides in the United States in 2025 by race of victim" can be produced from the available reporting because federal and public data releases either do not disaggregate homicides by the specific circumstance "drive-by" for 2025 or have not yet published comprehensive 2025 homicide data by race; available sources instead provide broader homicide counts and racial breakdowns for earlier years or note limits in data elements [1] [2] [3].
1. What the question asks and why it matters
The query requests a granular statistic—drive-by homicides in 2025 broken down by victims’ race—which would require both (a) timely, incident-level coding that flags a homicide as a "drive-by" and (b) race recorded for each victim in the same release; neither condition is clearly met in the public reporting cited, and analysts warn that comprehensive 2025 homicide-by-race numbers were not yet available from official federal sources at the time of the referenced material [1] [2].
2. What the provided reporting actually contains about homicide and race
The assembled sources document consistent racial disparities in homicide victimization—Black Americans experiencing much higher homicide victimization rates than White Americans in recent years and large absolute counts of homicide victims in prior years (for example, CDC and advocacy summaries reported 12,276 Black homicide victims in 2023) —but these reports address overall homicide, not the subset labeled "drive-by" [4] [5] [6].
3. Why “drive-by” is not retrievable from the cited datasets
Federal publications and major compilations described in the sources focus on homicide counts, rates by race, and demographic patterns, and note the structure and limits of data elements—race is a recorded element while specific circumstance labels (like "drive-by") are often not standardized or are inconsistently reported across jurisdictions—so the national agencies’ routine products do not present a ready 2025 national table of drive-by homicides by victim race [2] [3] [7].
4. What authoritative sources would need to provide to answer the question
To answer the question definitively requires an incident-level national dataset (for example, FBI/Uniform Crime Reporting or CDC mortality records with standardized circumstance codes) that includes both the manner/circumstance of the homicide flagged as "drive-by" and the victim’s race for calendar year 2025; the materials at hand show that published federal products through the cited reports either stop short of that granular circumstance for 2025 or have not released the year’s full breakdown [1] [3].
5. Alternative approaches, limits, and why estimates would be unreliable
One could attempt a piecemeal estimate by sampling municipal data, news reports, or law‑enforcement press releases and aggregating incidents labeled "drive‑by," but the sources caution about uneven reporting, missing race fields, and the intraracial nature of many homicides—factors that would make any 2025 national estimate by race highly uncertain without central, validated compilation [3] [8] [9].
6. Conclusion and next steps for researchers
The available reporting does not permit producing a credible count of drive-by homicides in 2025 by race of victim; researchers seeking such a breakdown should request incident-level NIBRS/UCR data from the FBI or mortality circumstance files from the National Vital Statistics System once 2025 records and circumstance coding are released, and should be prepared to document and adjust for incomplete jurisdictional reporting and nonstandardized circumstance labels [2] [3] [7].