Murder rates up in quarter of urban cities

Murder rates rose significantly in 25 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, including Houston, driving the uptick in urban homicides, according to an analysis of new data compiled from individual police departments.

The findings confirm a trend that was tracked recently in a study published by the National Institute of Justice.

“The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” wrote the study’s author, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who explored homicide data in 56 large U.S. cities.

Half of the increase came from just seven cities — Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Nashville, Tenn., and Washington.

Chicago had the most homicides — 488 in 2015 — far more than the 352 in New York City, which has three times as many people. Baltimore had the largest increase — 133 more than 2014 — and the second-highest rate in 2015, after St. Louis, which had 59 homicides per 100,000 residents.

The number of cities where rates rose significantly was the largest since the height of violent crime in the early 1990s. The Ferguson effect

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has said that crime is “out of control” and that decades of progress are now being reversed.

But the analysis shows that the rise in homicides is much more nuanced; while violence is up in a number of cities, it’s not soaring across the nation.

Nationally, homicide rates are still much lower than they were in the 1990s, even among the seven cities that drove last year’s increase.

For the analysis, we collected 30 years of homicide data from the FBI through 2014, then gathered 2015 data from local police departments in the 100 cities.

(The FBI will not release the full 2015 data until later this month.)

Since crime rates fluctuate from year to year, the Times used a statistical technique to determine places where rates were definitely rising.

At least three of these cities have also been embroiled in protests after police-involved deaths of black males, like Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

In his study, Rosenfeld said that rising crime might be linked to less aggressive policing that resulted from protests of high-profile police killings of African-Americans.

But he said this hypothesis, a version of the so-called Ferguson effect, which has spurred heated debate among lawmakers and criminologists, must be further evaluated.

There is no consensus on what caused the recent spike, and each city appears to have unique circumstances.

Many crime experts warn against reading too much into recent statistics. In fact, murder rates remained largely unchanged in 70 cities, and decreased significantly in five.

“Even if the uptick continues in some cities, I doubt the pattern will become universal,” said Robert Sampson, a Harvard University professor who is an expert on crime trends. Chicago’s plight

In Chicago, homicides were concentrated in highly segregated pockets that are predominantly black. A fifth of the killings took place in just two police districts on the city’s West and South Sides, which are also among the city’s poorest.

“Flare-ups and spikes in violence are occurring in predictable places,” Sampson said.

Alarming levels of violence have become the norm in some of these neighborhoods. While mur-der rates have continued to decline in the nation’s two largest cities — New York and Los Angeles — Chicago’s has stalled in the last decade and the landscape appears to be worsening, with killings up more than 45 percent so far this year.

In August, Chicago had its deadliest month in about 20 years with at least 90 murders — and more homicides so far this year than New York and Los Angeles combined.