Editing Serial killer (section)

===Ethnicity and demographics in the United States===
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[[File:Samuel Little.webp|thumb|150px|[[Samuel Little]] confirmed his involvement in at least 60 murders, the [[List of serial killers in the United States|largest number of confirmed victims]] for any serial killer in American history.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Lowery |first1=Wesley |last2=Knowles |first2=Hannah |last3=Berman |first3=Mark |date=November 30, 2020 |title=How America's deadliest serial killer went undetected for four decades |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/samuel-little-serial-killer/part-one/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201203025501/https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/samuel-little-serial-killer/part-one/ |archive-date=December 3, 2020 |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]]}} Indifferent Justice Part 1: The Perfect Victim</ref> ]]
There is a myth that most serial killers are white males.<ref name="fbi.gov"/> However, according to the FBI, based on percentages of the U.S. population, white males are not more likely than other races to be serial killers.<ref name="fbi.gov"/> White males are actually greatly under-represented among serial killers in proportion to their overall numbers in the United States.<ref name="y076">{{cite book | last1=Walsh | first1=A. | last2=Jorgensen | first2=C. | title=Criminology: The Essentials | publisher=Sage Publications | year=2019 | isbn=978-1-5443-7539-7 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=W-LFDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT291 | access-date=2024-05-21 | page=291}} "The reality is that white males are very much underrepresented among serial killers in proportion to their numbers in the population. Hickey (2006) claims that about 44% of serial killers operating from 1995 to 2004 have been African American, which is about 3.4 times greater than expected by the proportion of African Americans in the population. More recently, the Radford University's Serial Killer Information Center (Aamodt, 2016) found that since 2000 African Americans have been 59.8% of serial killers in the United States, whites 30.8%, Hispanics 6.7%, and Asian Americans 0.1%."</ref> According to a 2016 study, since the year 2000, African Americans accounted for roughly 60% of all serial killers in the United States.<ref name="y076" />

Anthony Walsh found that the prevalence of non-white serial killers has typically been drastically underestimated in both professional research literature and the mass media. Black males were over-represented among serial killers by a factor of 2.<ref name="t623">{{cite journal | last=Walsh | first=Anthony | title=African Americans and Serial Killing in the Media: The Myth and the Reality | journal=Homicide Studies | date=2011-11-28 | url=https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/crimjust_facpubs/113/ | access-date=2024-05-21}} "There were many expressions of shock and surprise voiced in the media in 2002 when the “D.C. Sniper” turned out to be two Black males. Two of the stereotypes surrounding serial killers are that they are almost always White males and that African American males are barely represented in their ranks. In a sample of 413 serial killers operating in the United States from 1945 to mid-2004, it was found that 90 were African American. Relative to the African American proportion of the population across that time period, African Americans were overrepresented in the ranks of serial killers by a factor of about 2...The myth that serial killers are rarely African-Americans has had two detrimental effects. First, Whites tend to argue that Blacks are not sufficiently psychologically complex or intelligent to commit a series of murders without being caught. Second, police tend to neglect the protection of potential victims of serial killers in African-American communities. 1 table, 4 notes, and 64 references"</ref>{{sfn|Walsh|2005|pp=271–291}} Walsh argues that the popular media ignores black serial killers because of a fear of allegations of racism, and that this may enable black serial killers to operate more effectively, as their crimes do not get the same media attention as the crimes of non-black serial killers.<ref name="t623" />