Homicides increase in more than two dozen big U.S. cities

Chicago killings in 2016 up by more than 100 over 2015; experts urge caution in reviewing numbers

Late last month, a man named Matheno El was shot and killed in Washington, D.C. Police said the 25-year-old was shot in the back before being pronounced dead at a local hospital. The week before, authorities in New Jersey said a 45-yearold man named Ronald Gwaltney was fatally shot. Two days earlier, police in Nashville said they arrested a 61-year-old man and accused him of killing Laura L. Jones, his longtime girlfriend, inside his home.

These deaths represented a fraction of the homicides that occurred across this country during the first half of this year, many with relatively little notice. They also occurred in places that have seen homicides increase in the first half of 2016, something authorities say has been the case in a string of cities across the country.

Police in many major cities and metropolitan areas say that homicides and other violent crimes are up midway through 2016 over the same point last year, reports that come as the country’s levels of bloodshed have become a recurring topic in the presidential campaign.

More than two dozen police agencies say killings in their cities were up at the midyear point, in some cases outpacing their 2015 homicide counts by dozens of deaths, according to statistics released Monday. Much of this violence is continuing in the same places that also saw violence also increase last year, as most cities with higher homicide totals for the first half of 2016 also reported more killings for all of 2015.

Experts urged caution in reviewing the numbers, saying that they do not represent a trend and noting that nearly half of the cities that released homicide numbers this week reported fewer killings this year than last year. As was the case earlier this year, cities releasing homicide figures appeared roughly split between those with increases and decreases.

These figures come as the country’s violent crime rates are still far below what they were just a couple of decades ago, yet they have still caused worry in cities across the country. Law enforcement officials, criminologists and other experts have been unable to explain precisely why homicides have continued to increase in some places.

“It’s something that we ought to be concerned about,” said Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the group of law enforcement leaders that collected and released the data. “The increases, even though the numbers aren’t big in most cities, there’s still an increase over what we’ve seen in years past, and there are lots of cities ... seeing some kind of increase in violent crime.”

The biggest overall increase, in terms of sheer homicides, was seen in Chicago, a city that has seen a staggering surge in killings and homicides this year. There were 316 killings in the first half of this year, up from 211 last year, putting Chicago on pace to potentially top 600 homicides in a year for the first time since 2003. The city also reported 1,321 nonfatal shootings by the end of June, eclipsing the 875 shootings last year.

Eddie Johnson, the police superintendent overseeing the embattled Chicago department, said the department was committed to working with residents to help stem the violence, attributing much of the bloodshed to gang members using illegally acquired firearms.

The Chicago police have said that they are working to fight the number of illegal guns on the city’s streets, taking possession of nearly 5,000 guns and arresting more than 1,530 people for gun-related offenses. The police department has also targeted gang members with raids and beefing up community policing.

Violent crime took center stage last week during Donald Trump’s dark and foreboding acceptance speech at the Republican convention, as he delivered remarks laden with questionable assertions about a nation afflicted with “crime and terrorism and lawlessness.”

Trump painted a dire picture of a nation is “a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen,” comments that do not particularly match up with what is happening in America and the realities of a country where worries about crime often outpace actual crime levels.

President Barack Obama, speaking the day after Trump, echoed many criminologists in pointing out that while violence has increased in some places, the crime rate nationwide remained far lower than it was a quarter-century earlier.

“As disturbing as some of the upticks in crime that we’ve seen in some of our cities around the country, including my hometown of Chicago, violent crime is substantially lower today than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 30 years ago,” he said.