"Overall homicides in Allegheny County decreasing, but not for Blacks"

“Overall homicides in Allegheny County decreasing, but not for Blacks …Percentage of African Americans killed rose to 82 percent in 2019”

Rob Taylor Jr. - Courier Staff Writer

January 20, 2020

While there was a noted decrease from 2018 to 2019 in the number of overall homicides in Allegheny County (110 to 95) and the City of Pittsburgh (52 to 37), no one’s doing backflips.

The percentage of African Americans who were killed in Allegheny County actually rose from 2018 to 2019 (66 percent to 82 percent), according to statistics provided by Allegheny County’s public information office.

In 2018, 73 African Americans were killed in the county out of 110 overall homicides—in 2019, five additional African Americans were killed (78), even though the overall number of homicides in the county dropped by 15.

“We cannot be happy that the number of Black deaths has increased,” Tim Stevens, president and CEO of the Black Political Empowerment Project, told the New Pittsburgh Courier in an exclusive interview, Jan. 9. Stevens called the percentage of Black deaths rising as something that “cannot be acceptable. We have to be concerned about the county as a whole, and many of our city residents go between different communities. We are happy that the numbers of deaths in Pittsburgh have gone down, but we cannot be happy about the total number of Black deaths going up.”

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Read the full article at the Pittsburgh Courier.