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The criminal stereotype of African Americans in the United States is an ethnic stereotype according to which African Americans, and African American males in particular, are dangerous criminals. The origin of this stereotype is that as a demographic, they are proportionally over-represented in the numbers of those that are arrested and convicted for committing crimes: for example, according to official FBI statistics, in 2015, 51.1% of people arrested for homicide were African American, even though African American people account only for 13.4% of the total United States population. The figure of the African-American man as a criminal has appeared frequently in American popular culture, further reinforcing this image in the collective unconscious.
Public defender James Williams and sociologist Becky Pettit, both advocating for decarceration in the United States, have claimed that the treatment of African Americans by law enforcement agencies is "the most pervasive blight on the criminal justice system today" and that African American progress is a myth, as it does not take into consideration the African American men who are incarcerated.