Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Homicides spike in some cities
National and regional rates nowhere near record-setting levels of 1980s and 1990s.
They are falsehoods President-elect Donald Trump has repeated over and over again: “Inner-city crime is reaching record levels.”
“The murder rate in the United States, it’s the worst, the highest it’s been in 45 years.”
“You won’t hear this from the media: We have the highest murder rate in this country in 45 years.”
That it isn’t true. But that’s also not the whole story. Though mostly far below their record levels in the 1980s and 1990s, homicides have jumped dramatically in some U.S. cities over the last two years, breaking from America’s decadeslong decline in violent crime as Trump prepares to take control of federal law enforcement agencies.
Although the FBI won’t release 2016’s national homicide totals for a while, in some cities the numbers are hard to ignore.
Chicago saw at least 762 victims, its most since 1996. Memphis, Tenn., saw a record 228 deaths. Las Vegas had its highest homicide total in at least 20 years, and so did San Antonio.
Baltimore just had its second-deadliest year per capita, after 2015, when fatal and nonfatal shootings soared by more than 75 percent. Baltimore’s 2016 death toll was 318 victims, a dip from at least 344 a year earlier.
Milwaukee’s 142 homicides nearly kept pace with its bloodshed of 2015, the city’s deadliest year since 1993. The situation was similarly unchanged in 2016 for St. Louis, whose 2015 was its deadliest in 20 years.
Yet if you keep looking around, the picture gets more complicated.
Homicides in Washington, D.C., dropped by 17 percent compared with 2015. New York City saw a small decline of homicides in 2016 and almost beat its record low.
“Can we explain either the general direction, or more importantly, the pattern of change?” said Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied crime rates. “The answer is: not really.”
Sixty years ago, in 1957, America’s homicide rate was 4.0 killings for every 100,000 people. It hasn’t been that low since.
Homicides began to seriously jump in the U.S. in the late 1960s, a time when deep social upheaval roiled the nation. By the 1980s, America was almost twice as deadly on average as the 1950s. President Reagan called for a tougher approach after taking office.
There was a moment in the early 1980s when homicides began to drop. “It dropped so much in between ’80 and ’85 that we were having conferences called ‘Crime is down — Why? What happens next?’ ” Zimring said. “What happened next is it went back up.”
Depending on which way you count, America’s worst year for homicides in the modern era was either 1980 — when the homicide rate hit its peak at 10.2 killings for every 100,000 people, with 23,040 homicides — or in 1991 — when a record 24,703 people were killed. The homicide rate for 1991 was 9.8 deaths per 100,000 people, according to FBI statistics.
Carnage began to subside in the 1990s and continued to drop for the next two decades.
By 2014, homicides had dropped to levels not seen since the early 1960s: 4.5 killings for every 100,000 people, or 13,280 deaths, according to the FBI.
Then homicides began to jump in some cities in 2015, leading to a new generation of theories.
On Monday, Trump addressed his concerns about Chicago, tweeting incorrectly that Chicago’s murder rate was “record setting.” (Chicago’s highest death toll was in 1974, and its deadliest year per capita was in 1994.) He also appeared to offer his assistance to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “If Mayor can’t do it he must ask for Federal help!” Trump tweeted.