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In 2025, how many black people were killed by another black person in a drive-by, only the drive-by
Executive Summary
The specific figure asked — how many Black people were killed by another Black person in a drive‑by in 2025 — is not available in the provided datasets or documents; no source among the materials reviewed supplies a national or city-level count for “drive‑by” homicides in 2025 broken down by victim and offender race [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]. The sources point to existing incident‑level files (the Supplementary Homicide Reports and local crime datasets) that could contain the needed data if 2025 incident narratives and coding for “drive‑by” were released and matched to victim‑offender race, but the available records either stop at 2024, lack the specific incident‑type breakdown, or are municipal datasets without the required cross‑tabulation [7] [6] [2].
1. Claim extracted: The question seeks a precise, narrow count — a drive‑by death total for Black victim/Black offender pairs in 2025 — but that claim lacks supporting data in the reviewed materials.
The user’s request asserts that a definitive numeric answer exists or can be derived from the supplied sources; however, the supplied analyses show that none of the listed documents provide that narrow statistic. Federal trend reports and composite datasets either end before 2025 or do not code incidents by the specific circumstance “drive‑by” alongside both victim and offender race. The Bureau of Justice and other national trend reports cited here are historical or aggregate and explicitly do not contain 2025 drive‑by breakdowns [4] [5]. Municipal files from Chicago and violence‑reduction summaries discuss homicides and victim demographics but do not present the count requested [2] [3].
2. What the datasets do contain and why they fall short for this question.
The Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) historically include detailed incident fields — victim/offender race, weapon type, and circumstance narratives — which in principle could be used to isolate drive‑by shootings and cross‑tabulate victim and offender race. The materials reference SHR structure and concatenated files through 2024, but the concatenated data stop before 2025 and no ready‑made 2025 cross‑tabulation for drive‑bys is provided [6] [7]. City‑level datasets, such as Chicago’s crime dashboards, offer incident and victim demographics for 2025 in aggregated forms, yet the available extracts do not show a precomputed count for “Black victim killed by Black offender in a drive‑by” — meaning the precise figure is absent until incident narratives and coding are available and analyzed [2] [3].
3. How analysts normally answer this question and why it requires incident‑level work.
To produce the requested number, researchers typically use incident‑level SHR or police homicide reports to identify shootings coded as drive‑by or described as vehicle‑based, then filter those incidents by victim race and offender race. The concatenated SHR up to 2024 and methodological guides show that this is feasible when the underlying incident narratives and offender race fields are present and complete, but it requires manual or algorithmic text coding and often local police follow‑up to resolve unknown offender race entries. Because the materials reviewed show either temporal gaps (no 2025 SHR in the concatenation) or omit that specific circumstance coding in accessible summaries, the necessary incident‑level linkage for 2025 does not appear in these sources [7] [6].
4. What the available sources say about limitations and data quality that matter here.
All sources highlight common constraints: SHR and municipal reporting suffer from missingness in offender race, inconsistent circumstance coding, and lags in data release, making fine‑grained counts for special circumstances like drive‑by shootings unreliable until validated [6] [7]. National homicide trend reports cited here do not include 2025 information and do not classify incidents as drive‑bys, so they cannot answer the question [4] [5]. Chicago’s datasets are useful for local analysis but the provided extracts and summaries do not include the cross‑tabulation requested [2] [3].
5. Practical path to a defensible answer and transparency about uncertainties.
A defensible count requires obtaining 2025 incident‑level homicide reports from the SHR once they are released for 2025 or the local police department’s incident narratives, then identifying incidents coded or described as drive‑by and filtering for Black victims with Black offenders. If SHR 2025 data are unavailable or incomplete, researchers must request homicide report narratives from jurisdictions or compile media and police dispatch records, and document cases with unknown offender race separately. The sources reviewed confirm the existence of the required fields in principle but do not provide the 2025, drive‑by, Black‑on‑Black table requested, so any immediate numeric claim would be unsupported by the materials provided [6] [7] [2].