Murder rate as bad as coke era

Memphis 2016 numbers are worst since 1993

One of the final deaths in a murderous year in Memphis in 2016 came two days before New Year’s with the strange case of Joshua Pugh, 23, shot and killed as he walked his dog in Highland Heights. Police finally arrested a suspect after three weeks of grief and uncertainty for his family.

“It’s like the O.K. Corral out there,” says Royal Chatman, an anti-violence advocate who fears deaths like Pugh’s may continue in an accelerated pattern despite encouraging data showing the number of murders fell in the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 2016.

“I just had three students shot last week: One one Monday. One on Wednesday. One on Thursday,” said Chatman, who mentors at-risk youth. At least one of those young men died, he said. “We need to turn this around.”

Though Memphis’s sharp uptick in homicides in 2016 has received wide attention, the impact is only now coming into focus: Still incomplete data indicates Memphis’ murder rate last year was the worst in 23 years, reaching a level not seen since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1990s.

Though Memphis suffered a widely reported 228 homicides – a record high – not all those killings count as murders under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting rules, which aim to measure intentional killings only. Among those that don’t count are as many as 19 justifiable homicides, essentially the taking of a life in self defense. Neither do two deaths ruled as negligent homicides, the deaths of four fetuses who died along with their murdered mothers and eight other murders discovered in 2016 but which were committed in previous years, said criminologist Richard Janikowski, a consultant for the Memphis Police Department.

By Janikowski’s count, the city suffered 195 murders. One homicide still has not been ruled on, he said.

With 195 murders, the rate for 2016 stands at 29.7 deaths per 100,000 resi-