Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
I don't doubt that the "bad old days" were definitely much badder than today in many respects.
The number of annual homicides has plateaued around 500 since 2004. Before that, they were much higher since the late 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_...totals_by_year
The "crime wave" supposedly sweeping Chicago right now is in part a creation of the media, and in part a consequence of the fact that other major cities have successfully reduced crime levels to 100-year lows, while some unique factors in Chicago make that much more difficult.
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I do a lot of mining for data like this, so I'm very familiar with it. There's no doubt that crime is up since last year in most community areas (at least YTD) but even compared to 10-15 years ago, the numbers are down. The 90s were immensely worse. Everyone wants to talk about shootings too, which IMO are still bad but compared to the 90s? Not even CLOSE. Just look at the number from this July 1992 article from the Tribune. 7285 shootings thru the first SIX MONTHS of 1992. There's a lot of shootings now, but there weren't even that many shootings in the last 3 years combined in town. However, if you run the rates, it actually means that even with all the better technology of today versus 1992, that you are more likely to die in Chicago of a gunshot today than 1992. Either that, or there were tons of unreported homicides in the 90s.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1...nter-shootings
I was collecting data the other day for homicides by community area in 2016 thru around end of June versus the same dates for 2015. There's 100 more homicides in 2016 in the same time period versus 2015. However - Austin, Englewood, New City, Humboldt Park, West Englewood, Greater Grand Crossing, Auburn Gresham, and Gage Park combined have an increase of 85 homicides versus last year. Austin alone is +20, Englewood +13, and New City +12. Anyway, together, their populations as of 2010 were 386,612 which is only 14.3% of the city's population.