The CDC mortality data isn’t perfect and it’s got some errors when it comes to classifying people according to their race and Hispanic origin. Blacks are much more likely to be homicide victims than whites and you can also compare with police data. My most likely guess as to the source of the error is that someone made a mistake when entering the death certificate race codes into the CDC database.
Beginning in late 2007 and ending in sometime in early 2009 Harris County (which contains the city of Houston) mistakenly classified Blacks as Whites, Whites as Hispanic, and Hispanics as Blacks.
Ideally, I would show you the corrected data as a monthly time series, but since the CDC tool doesn’t show rows with suppressed deaths (those with less than 10 deaths) I can only correct the data for the year of 2008. The classification errors also extended to late 2007 and early 2009, that’s why there were more White homicides than Hispanic in 2007.
