Bogus rape statistics in the NY Times

From an op-ed by Timothy Egan:

As to the rapists claim, whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual assaults in 2013, even though they are only 63 percent of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Latinos, though 17 percent of the population, committed 9 percent of sex crimes.

I have not been able to find any such statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

National crime data comes from two sources, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) from the FBI.

The BJS released a report Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010, and this is what it says:

Over time, the percentage of sexual violence committed by white offenders declined from 70% in 1994-98 to 57% in 2005-10. The percentage of black offenders increased from 18% in 1994-98 to 27% in 2005-10. White males consistently accounted for more than 82% of the total U.S. population and black males accounted for 11%. The NCVS did not collect information on the ethnicity of the offender. Therefore, Hispanic offenders make up an unknown portion of the white, black, and other race of offender categories.

The FBI reports arrests by the race or the ethnicity of the arrestee, and those statistics for 2013 can be found here.

According to the report, 20.7% of offenders arrested for rape were Hispanic, so Hispanics are overeprestented among those arrested for rape, because as Mr. Egan says, Hispanics are officially only 17% of the population.

I have a theory that Hispanic rape is less likely to be reported to police. This is because in approximately 80% of rapes, the victim knows the offender. And even when the rapist is a stranger, both offender and victim are likely to live in the same neighborhood (because criminals are usually too lazy to travel to another neighborhood to commit crimes). Thus in the overwhelming majority of rapes both the victim and the offender of are of the same race and social class. This means that Hispanic rapists are more likely to rape Hispanic victims who are disproportionately illegal immigrants and thus less likely to report the rape to the police out of fear of being deported.

While I do think that Trump is a bit of a bozo and has exaggerated the extent of Mexican criminality (in fact, blacks are much more likely to be criminal than non-black Hispanics), the FBI arrest statistics do show that for the top four most-serious crimes—murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault—Hispanics are overrepresented.

Will Timothy Egan be fired for reporting bogus data? Probably not.

Also, I may add that in this day of the internet, there is absolutely no excuse for reporting statistics in a news article and not providing a link to the source of those statistics.