La., Miss., lead nation in rate of homicides
CDC study: New England, upper Midwest are safer.
Federal data released this month shows that the risk of being killed by another person is lowest in New England and the upper Midwest, and highest in the deep South, particularly Mississippi and Louisiana.
Among the states, Louisiana’s age-adjusted homicide rate of 11.67 per 100,000 people is the highest in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data. (Age-adjusted rates take into account that younger people die of different causes than older ones, correcting for some of the variation that naturally occurs due to some states having larger young populations than others.) Mississippi is a close second, at 11.41. No other state comes close to those two when it comes to killing — the rate in the third-highest state, Alabama, is 8.07 per 100,000.
To put the states’ numbers in perspective, a person in Louisiana is about twice as likely to be killed in a homicide as someone inWest Virginia, four times as likely as a Connecticut resident, and nearly six times as likely as someone in Maine. The homicide rate in Louisiana is a whopping nine times higher than the rate in New Hampshire, the state with the lowest homicide rate.
Homicide rates at the state level mask considerable variation within the state’s borders. The CDC doesn’t provide a lot of county-level data because the numbers are generally so small. But in Maryland, for instance, the homicide rate in Baltimore city was 27.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2014. Half an hour away inMontgomery County, the homicide rate was 2.8 deaths per 100,000.
Overall, homicides are down over time. According to the CDC’s latest data, the raw number of people killed in homicides in 2014 (15,809) is the lowest in at least 15 years. Since the population has grown over that period, the national age-adjusted homicide rate has fallen from about 6 deaths per 100,000 in 1999 to 5 deaths per 100,000 in 2014.