Who has the highest rate of violent crimes in terms of race and gender

1. Arrest counts versus per-capita rates: two different answers

The FBI’s arrest tables report that in recent years the largest absolute number of people arrested for violent crimes were White, because White people make up the largest share of the population and of arrests overall—white individuals accounted for roughly 59.1% of violent-crime arrests in the 2019 summary tables ^{[1] [2]}. That same FBI reporting shows, however, that for specific severe offenses like murder Black adults made up a majority of adults arrested in some years—51.3% of adults arrested for murder in 2019, for instance—despite being a smaller share of the population, which indicates overrepresentation on that measure ^{[2] [1]}.

2. Gender: the decisive factor in violent-offender rates

Gender is the strongest single predictor in every source: males constitute the overwhelming majority of offenders where gender is recorded (the FBI notes about 88.2% of offenders with known gender were male) and male homicide rates outstrip female rates across racial groups, a pattern confirmed by national homicide surveillance and cross‑sectional studies ^{[3] [4]}. Put simply, the highest rates of violent offending occur among males; race modifies that baseline risk but does not erase the dominant effect of gender ^{[4] [3]}.

3. Per‑person risk and population-adjusted comparisons

When crime is measured as a rate per population rather than raw counts, differences emerge: public summaries and aggregated studies show higher homicide and robbery rates for Black populations in many jurisdictions and higher per‑person risks for Black males in particular, while other violent categories (for example, simple assault) may show higher rates for White victims or offenders in some datasets (BJS victimization data and homicide trend analyses demonstrate these mixed patterns) ^{[5] [4]}. National syntheses that compute “risk of being a victim” or “risk of offending” by race and gender have produced figures suggesting substantially higher lifetime or period risk for Black males versus white males and for males versus females overall (reported risk comparisons have cited figures such as 1 in 21 for Black males versus 1 in 131 for white males in some sources) ^[3].

4. Methodological caveats and alternative explanations

Official arrest data and victimization surveys have limits: UCR arrest counts reflect police activity and reporting practices and do not capture undetected crime, and victimization surveys have sampling and reporting constraints (the FBI and BJS both acknowledge coverage and definitional issues) ^{[1] [5]}. Researchers caution that differential policing, socioeconomic concentration, neighborhood context, and legal processing can inflate group differences in official statistics; some longitudinal delinquency research finds no significant racial differences in prior-year arrest rates within controlled samples, underscoring the role of selection and structural factors ^{[6] [4]}.

5. What a straightforward answer looks like, given the evidence

Answering “who has the highest rate of violent crimes in terms of race and gender” depends on the metric: by raw national arrest counts, White people constitute the largest share of violent-crime arrestees ^[1]; by per-capita and offense‑specific rates—especially for homicide and robbery—Black males show the highest risks in multiple datasets and analyses ^{[2] [4] [3]}. Across every source, males have substantially higher rates than females, making young Black males the demographic group most often identified as having the highest violent‑offending rates when population-adjusted offense rates are used ^{[3] [4]}.