City Murder Rates

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ that could be part of it, but there can be all kinds of reasons why some cities have more gun violence than others.

For instance, in Chicago's case, the high homicide rate stems from the city having the largest and most stubbornly engrained street gang problem in the nation, with an estimated 100,000 gang members who shoot guns at each other as routinely as regular people might go to the grocery store or do some other such mundane task.

Since I've never known Seattle to have a notorious street gang culture, it really is quite surprising to see it have a relatively high homicide rate. I would've guessed Seattle would be more in Boston or New York range.

I dont think its a street gang issue in Seattle, its just a criminal issue there. I could be wrong though. I assumed Seattle was like Boston too (Ive been to Boston) but it didnt feel that way.

Pioneer Square/Intl district/third ave reminded me of Oakland or tough parts of downtown LA. My friend in Seattle has a job in the financial district but chooses to work from home because of safety issues. Surprising.

That said, I like Seattle in general and it is a top 7 downtown in the country. Just tough in some parts.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by FromSD

I wonder if there is a correlation between boom towns and higher murder rates. The influx of people leads to instability and a loosening of community ties. Not all the people moving in have a firm plan on how to make a living and things go amiss when they don't. Los Angeles in the '80s may serve as an example of this. The murder rate was rising along with the population as people moved into the area. In-migration slowed down in the '90s as the number of murders declined. This probably had more to do with demographic changes, better gang outreach, a subsiding of the crack cocaine epidemic and improved policing, but I wonder if LA no longer being a major destination for domestic migration might also have had an effect. From the comments above, perhaps booming Austin is also following the same pattern, though one rash of shootings doesn't make a long term trend.

LA had those gang injunctions in the early 2000s and never looked back. Ive been here 10 years now and I dont see any gangs. Im sure its there , but locals Ive told me its nothing like it was. Ive heard the youth cares more about video games, skateboarding, social media than that gang stuff in the 80s-90s. So its also a sign of the times.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by homebucket

Thanks for putting this together. How about Vancouver?

Looks Iike it's around 1.9.

Though Vancouver is like Boston with a relatively small percentage of the population in the city proper. About two thirds or three quarters of the murders are in suburban municipalities.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Looks Iike it's around 1.9.

Though Vancouver is like Boston with a relatively small percentage of the population in the city proper. About two thirds or three quarters of the murders are in suburban municipalities.

As in much of Canada, the most violent places today are in the suburbs (though there are also very safe suburbs that balance things out). Not sure what the 2023 numbers are like, but in 2022 the highest murder rates were in the suburban municipalities of Langley and Coquitlam, with rates of 5.4/100,000 and 5.3/100,000 respectively. Abbotsford and Chilliwack also each had rates of around 5.0. IIRC, Metro Vancouver's overall murder rate was about on par with the city proper though, or around ~2/100,000.

[AviationGuy]

Originally Posted by FromSD

I wonder if there is a correlation between boom towns and higher murder rates. The influx of people leads to instability and a loosening of community ties. Not all the people moving in have a firm plan on how to make a living and things go amiss when they don't. Los Angeles in the '80s may serve as an example of this. The murder rate was rising along with the population as people moved into the area. In-migration slowed down in the '90s as the number of murders declined. This probably had more to do with demographic changes, better gang outreach, a subsiding of the crack cocaine epidemic and improved policing, but I wonder if LA no longer being a major destination for domestic migration might also have had an effect. From the comments above, perhaps booming Austin is also following the same pattern, though one rash of shootings doesn't make a long term trend.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been just one rash of shootings. But yes it probably hasn't been going on long enough to know if it's an established trend.

[ilcapo]

The gang wars in Sweden fortunately calmed down and i Believe Metro Stockholm is around 45-47. The City Proper perhaps 21. Whole country 108-112. Hard to tell right now.

Would give a current rate of atleast 1,9 for the Metro and 2.1 for the city. So similar to the canadian cities.

Gothenburg has a rate around 1.6.

[Steely Dan]

Chicago's year end homicide totals per the Sun-Times.

The pandemic spike is finally tapering off.

Down 27.5% from the recent peak in 2021.

Still outrageously high overall, of course.


2023: 575
2022: 691
2021: 793
2020: 778
2019: 502
2018: 547

Source: https://graphics.suntimes.com/homicides/

[Crawford]

Overall U.S. crime index and violent crime index is now below the pre-pandemic numbers. It's now safer than 2019.

This is something you'll never hear on many of our most viewed "news outlets", with the hysterical nonstop "crime wave" narrative.

[Gresto]

Toronto ended the year with 71, one more than 2022.

[lextown]

Indianapolis IN is already at 3 after 10 shooting over night.

Dallas TX is at 3.

Houston TX is at 1.

San Angelo TX is at 1.

Orange TX is at 3.

Saginaw MI is at 2.

Kalamazoo MI is at 1.

Louisville KY is at 2.

Cleveland OH is at 2.
Cleveland heights OH is at 1.

Perry township OH is at 1.

Cincinnati OH is at 1
MT Healthy OH is at 1

ST Paul MN is at 1.

Minneapolis MN is at 1

Fayetteville NC is at 1.

North Wilkesboro NC is at 2.

Enfield NC is at 1.

Suffolk VA is at 1

Little Rock AR is at 1.

Jacksonville FL is at 1.

West Palm Beach FL is at 2

Memphis TN is at 1.

Tulsa OK is at 1.

Lawton OK is at 1.

New Orleans LA is at 1.

Lafayette LA is at 1.

Nashville TN is at 1.

Baltimore MD is at 1.
Baltimore County MD is at 1.

Prince George County MD is at 1.

Charleston MO is at 1.

Dellwood MO is at 1.

Philadelphia PA is at 1.

Washington D.C. is at 1.

Pueblo CO is at 1.

Commerce City CO is at 1.

Westminster CO is at 1.

Alton IL is at 1.

Evansville IN is at 1.

Boston MA is at 1.

Albany NY is at 1.

New York City NY is at 1.

Buffalo NY is at 2.

North plains OR is at 1.

Burton SC is at 1.

Oxnard CA is at 1.

Looks like a rougher start in the US than last year. Pretty much every US city already has at least 1 I was going to put them all up but so many have happened and also a very bad start for young people. Multiple homicides have been under 18 to start the year.

[benp]

After bad COVID years, Buffalo has seen a substantial drop, down 47% from peak. Lowest since 2011, but still higher than it should be.

2023: 37 (preliminary)
2022: 70
2021: 67
2020: 65
2019: 47
2018: 57

Source: https://data.buffalony.gov/Public-Sa...d/data_preview

[Nite]

Nevermind

[JuelzJones]

Originally Posted by Gresto

Toronto ended the year with 71, one more than 2022.

73 actually

[muertecaza]

Phoenix ended 2023 with 169 murders and/or non-negligent manslaughters (174 if you include negligent manslaughter). This is the lowest since 2019, and a big drop from the 217 in 2022.

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by JuelzJones

73 actually

Ah yes, 73, two more than the previous year.

[Velvet_Highground]

Detroit has 252 homicides recorded for the year 2023 the lowest number since 1966. Certainly a 18% drop is worth celebrating but the rate per 100k at 39.4 there’s still a lot of work to be done. Comparatively the 1960 census put Detroits population at 1.67 million and in 1966 the homicide rate was at 12.8% putting the year 2023 just over triple the rate of ‘66.

Nationally Detroit has done well comparatively well with a 13% average drop in homicides in the top 30 cities though looking at micro and macro trends in the short, medium and long terms helps frame the situation better as will the trends of the coming year. The city received state help clearing up a backlog of gun cases which had become a major problem with the pandemic shutting down the courts. While Detroit didn’t see a large spike during ‘21 & ‘22 it did see an increase losing ground from the relatively stable levels from 2017-2020.

The society pressures of the greatest recession in US history certainly played a role in pushing violent crime up. At the very least the typical socioeconomic problems we’ve been dealing with for generations were exacerbated by putting a strain on people’s mental health. Losing family members and an economic shutdown during the pandemic that saw national GDP passing the post WW2 demobilization recession certainly led to increasing desperation the closer one was to the margins of society.

There’s been an overall long term national trend of violent crime falling over the past 10 or so years, Detroit for example had slightly more homicides in 2017 which was the first time the city saw the lowest rate since ‘66. However I digress there’s been a lot of back and forth on this topic especially with a new city every few years getting the murder city treatment by the media so there’s no need to rehash old arguments without new data.

What I can add to the topic with local input is that Detroit has struggled with shootings downtown in ‘21 & ‘22 a relatively new phenomenon as crowd management was completely easy in Detroit with sports events, concerts / annual events making it easier to focus resources during busy times.

As downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods have become more vibrant with downtown returning to its traditional position as a regional and local commons for entertainment and nightlife it’s possible police weren’t predicting how large some events would turn out to be or used to crowds would fan out with so many new locations available.

After a series of high profile shootings the police received more funding to cover the unlimited overtime needed to keep downtown safe without taking officers out of the neighborhoods all while bringing down crime in what’s now called the red zone centered around 7 and Schoenherr.

There’s an article from September I posted about all this if anyone has the interest to dig into this more. However larcenies are up over all in the city and it was led by downtown in the first quarter of the year while the level however as the year went on the ends results are still an 8% increase touching back on the topic of downtown the city is having to readjust to new old problems how it reacts will show if this is just the same old Detroit or not. The 33% drop to the lowest level since 1991 when The Detroit News and ABC coined the phrase carjacking is another positive note.

Other Michigan cities were noted in the article Flint saw a 11.8% drop in homicides and Grand Rapids saw a year over year drop from 22 to 21. Other large cities recording drops in homicides in 2023 include Atlanta (22%), Baltimore (22%), Chicago (12.5%), Houston (20%), Los Angeles (15%), New York (11%) and Philadelphia (24%). Several cities that saw drops in 2023, however, had seen homicides spike to record levels during the previous three years.

The Detroit News I think seemed to have the best article on this subject the Free Press was doing a bit of cheerleading and the numbers got lost in the feel good story. Officer.com from the free header took the News article and ran with it that’s where I’m sourcing my data from.

https://www.officer.com/command-hq/n...des-since-1966

*Sad news to start the year on January 2nd a gunman barricaded himself with his girlfriend and children in a home on Oakman Blvd. The children were released but when police entered they found the couple dead of an apparent murder suicide.

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/2792839

*Correction 2017 & 2018 both saw lowest homicides numerically since 1966.
2017 - 267
2018 - 261
2019 - 272
2020 - 327
2021 - 308
2022 - 309
2023 - 252

[AviationGuy]

I saw in today's Austin paper that Houston's murder rate was way down in 2023. Still way too high, though. The new mayor who just took office, John Whitmire, campaigned on getting tough on crime. The problem has gone on way too long and Houstonians are tired of it.
Edit: I see that the above post mentioned a 20 percent decrease for Houston.

[summersm343]

Philadelphia ended 2023 with 410 homicides. Down significantly from the previous 3 years, but still higher than it should be and higher than the pre-COVID years. The city seems to be heading back in a positive direction.

2023 - 410
2022 - 514
2021 - 562
2020 - 499
2019 - 353
2018 - 353

https://www.phillypolice.com/crimestats/

[PhillyRising]

Originally Posted by summersm343

Philadelphia ended 2023 with 410 homicides. Down significantly from the previous 3 years, but still higher than it should be and higher than the pre-COVID years. The city seems to be heading back in a positive direction.

2023 - 410
2022 - 514
2021 - 562
2020 - 499
2019 - 353
2018 - 353

https://www.phillypolice.com/crimestats/

I'm hoping Cherelle Parker can deliver on getting the crime under control.

[Velvet_Highground]

Here’s a couple important takeaways from what’s looking to be the biggest year over year drop in homicides occurring from 2022 to 2023. This is certainly good news but the takeaway impressions people and especially decision makers glean is likely to have a major impact going forward.

While the trend isn’t universal with cities like Dallas, Washington DC & Memphis struggling perception is something that takes time to form and time to change. I hope that decision makers will make the right calls as one of the biggest takeaways happens to be tougher gun laws and federal assistance has played a key role.

For profit “government solution” companies offer unproven technologies as a quick fix that doesn’t involve a costly (in political capital & monetarily) battle with the gun lobby.


There have been some horror stories about people spending months in jail only to have the case dismissed which leads to class action lawsuits. The disturbing practice of phone companies skirting privacy laws by selling data from cell phone pings via a 3rd party and then running the data through a system that allows police to track individuals who travel through high crime areas is rather dystopian.

Fog Data Reveal - https://www.comparitech.com/blog/inf...-data-science/

Shotspotter aka the focus group approved Soundthinking - https://www.themarshallproject.org/2...ce-shotspotter


ABC News takeaways

- The homicide rate in the United States is expected to plummet nearly 13% compared to 2022, meaning more than 2,000 fewer people were the victims of homicide this year, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.

- The drop in homicides comes as more than three-quarters of Americans say there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago and more than half of Americans say the same about crime in their local area, according to a Gallup poll released last month. Adding to that perception is the annual National Crime Victimization Survey published this month by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics that found the number of violent crime victims nationwide climbed from 16.5 per 1,000 people in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 in 2022.

Cities say the 2023 drop in homicides and other violent crimes can be attributed to expanded efforts to prevent crime, including working with community volunteers, targeting gun possession in high-crime areas and placing officers on foot and bike patrols.

"It is historic. It's the largest one-year decline," said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department. "It's cities of every size, it's the suburbs, it's rural counties, tiny cities, it's large cities. It's really a national decline."

- He said before this year, the largest year-over-year drop in homicides occurred in 1996 when murders fell by 9%.

- The challenge faced by local law enforcement to bring down the country's homicide numbers for the second consecutive year following a record jump in 2020 and a sizable increase in 2021, was achieved this year with a major assist from the U.S. Justice Department and bipartisan gun-control legislation passed by Congress, officials said.

"We're seeing double-digit declines in homicide across nearly 70 of America's largest cities," U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in an exclusive interview with ABC News chief justice correspondent Pierre Thomas, citing information from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Monaco said the federal government has played the role of "force multiplier" in helping local law enforcement drive down the nation's murder rate by identifying and removing the most prolific shooters and violent offenders from the streets.

"Something that we are doing is using new authorities from the most significant gun safety law that has passed in 30 years ... the bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last year. And with that tool, we've charged more than 300 defendants with new gun trafficking and illegal trafficking," Monaco told ABC News. "We're using tools like crime-gun intelligence, the ability to trace the gun and the spent shell casing from a crime scene to identify who's that shooter, how many violent crimes have they been involved with."

- The sizable fall in homicides comes after a record high in murders was set in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when courts were mostly closed and jail populations were being drastically reduced in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus.

"Certainly, after it hit, we saw backlogs of cases and delayed trials and things like that," White said. "There was no real accountability for bad acts."

- San Antonio, Texas, the nation's seventh biggest city, has experienced a nearly 12% decline in homicides this year, after seeing murders rise by 43% in 2022 compared to 2021.
….
"If you're looking at including those numbers, we're looking at about a 32% decrease. But if you extract those numbers, we're looking at a 12% decrease year-to-date," McManus said. "But we're not complaining about 12% though."

One of the multiple crimefighting strategies McManus attributed to his city's falling homicide numbers was first suggested by a team of criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"Actually, it was a very simple strategy that, quite frankly, I was somewhat skeptical of at first," McManus said.

He said by examining calls to the city's computer-aided dispatch system (CAD), the police department identified 28 areas of the city with the highest numbers of violent crime calls and even pinpointed certain days and times when the volume of calls is the highest.

"We will sit there at that location with our emergency lights on for 10 to 15 minutes. That's about as proactive as it gets," McManus said. "We're not getting out stopping people or knocking on doors or anything like that. It's simply a high visibility, hot-spot policing effort."

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/homici...y?id=105556400