Miami, once a murder capital, sees drop in gunfire deaths

Is Miami, once labeled “Paradise Lost” by Time magazine because of a searing homicide rate fueled by a crippling drug trade, now one of the safest major cities in the U.S. when it comes to gunfire deaths?

Of the 26 homicides over the first six months of this year in Miami, only 16 were due to gunfire, records obtained from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner and the city’s police department show.

Both numbers represent historic lows for a city that often racked up close to 300 homicides during the 1980s and which has seen those numbers drop by about 75 percent or more the past three years.

The city of Orlando has had 15 homicides in the first six months of this year, down from 21 in the first six months of last year — a number that does not include the 49 people killed in the Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016. All of Orange County, including incorporated and unincorporated areas, had 47 homicides in the first half of this year, down from 67 homicides in the first six months of 2016, not including the Pulse shooting.

The recent homicide numbers in Miami, a metropolitan center with a population of 450,000 that routinely doubles during the workweek and swells even more during peak tourist season, matches up well with other cities of comparable populations.

In the first six months of this year, Baltimore, with a slightly larger population than Miami, has seen more than 170 homicides. Kansas City had 98. Milwaukee had 60 and Atlanta, 57.

Yet, “that stigma continues. We still have a bad rap,” said Miami Police Assistant Chief Jorge Colina. “We’re not Paradise Lost anymore. We’re just paradise. It was madness before.”

Despite the significant drop in homicides during the first half of this year, crime science experts warn to be careful when it comes to small sample sizes. Homicides have steadily decreased in Miami the past decade. Last year, the city recorded 60 homicides. In 2015 there were 75 and in 2014 Miami had 81 homicides.

Jerry Ratcliffe, who teaches criminal justice at Temple University and directs the school’s Center for Security and Crime Science, urged caution when compiling crime statistics over a six-month period. In a recent blog he cited Philadelphia, where a spike in the first quarter of 2014 saw homicides rise by almost 40 percent. Media outlets jumped at the report, Ratcliffe said. Yet by the end of the year the city had the same number of homicides as the previous year.

“To use calendar year-to-date comparisons with any confidence, we have to wait until the end of October before we can be more than 50 percent confident that the yearto-date is indicative of how we will enter the New Year,” Ratcliffe wrote.

There are signs that Miami’s recent homicide numbers are spreading to jurisdictions outside the city.

Over the four-day July 4 weekend, Chicago, which has roughly the same population as Miami-Dade County’s 2.6 million, was plagued by more than 100 shootings and 14 homicides.

Number of shooting deaths in Miami-Dade over the same weekend: Zero.

Homicides in unincorporated Miami-Dade, the county’s central core that includes several of the highest-crime neighborhoods, compare reasonably well with other regions with similar populations. With a population of 1.2 million, unincorporated Miami-Dade had 54 homicides during the first six months of this year, county police records show.