Murder rates rose significantly in 25 of the nation’s 100 largest cities last year, according to a study by The New York Times of data compiled from police departments around the country.
This analysis confirms another study of homicide data in 56 large American cities published by the National Institute of Justice. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” wrote the study’s author, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
The Times study consisted of 30 years of homicide data from the F.B.I. through 2014, and 2015 data from local police departments in the 100 cities. It noted that half of the increase came from just seven cities — Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Milwaukee, Nashville and Washington:
Chicago had the most homicides — 488 in 2015 — far more than the 352 in New York City, which has three times as many people. Baltimore had the largest increase — 133 more than 2014 — and the second-highest rate in 2015, after St. Louis, which had 59 homicides per 100,000 residents.
The number of cities where rates rose significantly was the largest since the height of violent crime in the early 1990s.
Nationwide, nearly 6,700 homicides were reported in the 100 largest cities in 2015, about 950 more than the year before. About half of the rise — 480 of the 950 — occurred in seven cities. The poverty rate in these cities is higher than the national average. There is no consensus on what caused the recent spike.
Robert Sampson, a Harvard professor who is an expert on crime trends, said “There is tremendous variation across the largest cities in basic features such as demographic composition, the concentration of poverty, and segregation that relate to city-level differences in rates of violence.”
In Chicago, homicides were concentrated in highly segregated pockets that are predominantly black. Alarming levels of violence have become the norm in some of these neighborhoods. While murder rates have continued to decline in the nation’s two largest cities — New York and Los Angeles — Chicago’s has stalled in the last decade. At its peak in the 1990s, New York’s homicide rate was more than seven times as high as it is now.
In Chicago, however, killings are up more than 45 percent so far this year. August was Chicago's deadliest month in about 20 years with at least 90 murders — and more homicides so far this year than New York and Los Angeles combined.
In 2015, Baltimore’s murder rate not only increased the most among the 100 top cities, it also reached a historic high of 55 homicides per 100,000 residents. Its previous record high was in 1993, when the rate was 48. Most of the homicides in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade, and what happened in 2015 was a result of more people “getting into the game of selling drugs,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a University of Baltimore criminologist.
Despite the spikes in these cities, the Times study asserts that homicide rates across the nation are still much lower than they were in the 1990s. Murder rates remained largely unchanged in 70 cities, and decreased significantly in five.
