Safety concerns were top of mind for many Black Americans before Buffalo shooting

Safety concerns were top of mind for many Black Americans well before a White gunman killed 10 people – all of them Black – in a mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, on May 14.

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-April, around a third of Black adults (32%) said they worried every day or almost every day that they might be threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity. Around one-in-five Asian Americans (21%) said the same, as did 14% of Hispanic adults and 4% of White adults.

In the same survey, around three-in-ten Black adults who said being threatened or attacked was ever a concern (28%) said they had made changes to their daily schedule or routine in the past year due to those fears. Around a third of Asian adults (36%) and around one-in-five Hispanic adults (22%) said they had taken such precautions, as did 12% of White adults.

Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be victims of hate crimes, according to data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. More than a third (35%) of the 8,263 criminal incidents identified in the FBI’s hate crimes report for 2020 involved anti-Black or African American bias, even though Black people account for about 12% of the U.S. population. The FBI’s statistics are widely considered to be an undercount because many hate crimes are not reported to police and many police departments do not submit complete data to the FBI for national reporting purposes.