After a Ukrainian woman who fled war in her home country was stabbed to death on a commuter train in North Carolina, the alarming act of violence ignited bitter racial and political rhetoric about crime victims and perpetrators in America.

The fatal attack last month, in which the alleged perpetrator was identified as a Black man, evoked such visceral reactions partly because it was caught on surveillance video that went viral online. On Tuesday, North Carolina’s Legislature passed a criminal justice package named after the victim to limit defendants’ eligibility for bail and to encourage them to undergo mental health evaluations.

Rhetoric about the attack, including claims about “Black-on-white-crime,” has spread from social media and broadcast airwaves to the halls of Congress and the White House. Some of it leverages cherry-picked cases and ill-framed crime statistics to reproduce age-old harmful narratives about Black criminality and threats to white populations.

It comes at a time when Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have been hyping the rhetoric as part of a focus on urban cities with reputations of violence. But despite the rhetoric, the data shows that in most U.S. communities, victims of violence and offenders are usually the same race or ethnicity.

Violent incidents where the offenders and the victims are of different races “is extremely uncommon,” said Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at the University of California Irvine. It is “the exception rather than the rule.”

People are more likely to be victimized by people they know and interact with regularly in their social sphere, she added.

The most recent breakdown of federal crime statistics bears that out. Black offenders were involved in about 15% of violent victimizations of white people between 2017 and 2021, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which publishes multiyear crime trend reports every few years. White offenders were involved in over half of violence against other white people, the statistics show.

The report showed similar trends when it came to violent crimes committed against Black victims. White offenders were involved in about 12% those crimes against Black people, while Black offenders were involved in 60% of violence against other Black people.

What happened in Charlotte and the rhetoric around it

The Aug. 22 killing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska became a flashpoint in online discussions about crime victims and race after surveillance video of the attack in Charlotte, North Carolina, circulated widely online.

Zarutska was knifed to death on the city’s Lynx Blue Line light rail. Footage showed the alleged attacker pacing through the train and spreading the woman’s blood on the floors of the train car.

Decarlos Brown Jr., a Black man, has been charged with first-degree murder and faces federal charges of committing an act causing death on a mass transportation system.

Conservative activists, including Trump political ally Charlie Kirk, were quick to call out what they decried as a double-standard in reporting on such crimes by the mainstream media. Kirk once said on his popular podcast, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people.”

Speaking about the Charlotte attack, Kirk said: “If a random white person on a subway took out a knife and stabbed a Black girl senselessly to death, there would be massive media coverage.”

“There would be policy changes. … We saw this in George Floyd,” the 31-year-old said on his podcast a day before he was killed on a Utah university campus.

North Carolina Republicans also weighed in, some blaming what they called Democrats’ “woke policies” on crime, including cashless bail, as the reason presumably dangerous people like Zarutska’s alleged attacker were roaming free to pose threats to the public.

The North Carolina chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group that primarily advocates against anti-Muslim sentiments, said: “We also condemn those using this crime to resurrect racist talking points about the Black community.”

“This selective outrage is dangerous, hypocritical, and racially motivated, especially given that white supremacists fall silent about other stabbings, mass shootings, hate crimes, financial crimes, rapes and various other misconduct committed by people of all races and backgrounds,” the group said in a statement.

Comparing Black-on-white crime to white-on-Black crime

Some criminologists caution against relying on raw count crime numbers as it relates to the race of victims and offenders because population size matters. Non-Hispanic Black people made up roughly 13% of the U.S. population in 2024, according census estimates. Non-Hispanic White people make up the largest racial group in the U.S. — an estimated 56% of the total population in 2024 — so “there are just more white people that could be potential offenders,” Kubrin said.

Black-on-white and white-on-Black violence are both extremely rare, she added.

The National Criminal Victimization Survey conducted in 2023 by the Justice Department gathered data on nearly 6 million violent incidents reported by law enforcement. Their findings show over 3.5 million involved a white victim; white offenders were involved in more than half of those crimes, while only one-tenth involved Black offenders.

When a killing or violent interaction between people of different races grabs the headlines and social media — especially if there is video — it is tempting to use that as confirmation of preconceived notions that Black-on-white crime or vice-versa are suddenly spiking, Kubrin said. But in reality, they make up a small share of hundreds of thousands of violent crimes mostly involving people of the same race, she said.

Brett Tolman, executive director of Right on Crime, a conservative criminal justice group, thinks people should not focus on race but rather where violent crimes are happening the most. Even if data shows crime has been on a downward trend, that can be of little comfort if people constantly feel unsafe, he said.

“Let’s start making it about communities that want to feel safe,” Tolman said. “I hear from just as many that are living in inner cities, regardless of their politics, that they want safety and security.”

Examining Black-on-Black crime

Black-on-Black crime is a flawed premise, according to criminologists, because people of all racial groups experience crime due to their social networks and proximity to each other.

But in discussions about systemic racism in policing and the criminal justice system, it’s frequently argued that Black-on-Black crime should be the chief concern of Black communities — more than police brutality or racial profiling — because homicide has been a leading cause of death among Black men.

Even as crime rates have fallen dramatically for white and Black populations over time, misinformed rhetoric around crime and violence perpetuates racialized narratives on the issues, said Trymaine Lee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who recently published a book about gun violence, “A Thousand Ways to Die.”

“When you have a nation so bound by violence as the United States, it’s only a matter of time that that binding snaps and lashes at us all,” he said, adding that violence “isn’t the domain of Black Americans alone.”

“Even though the politics of the moment might suggest differently, this is a stark reminder that no American is out of reach of American violence.”