USA TODAY: Homicides Down 1% to 2% in 2017—Late Obama Age Collapse Slowing
02/20/2018
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In my January 10, 2018 Taki’s Magazine column “President Trump’s Murder Report Card,” I did a quick and dirty estimate that the number of homicides in America’s 51 biggest cities fell 2.2% from 2016 to 2017. (Most newspapers publish year-end local homicide trend articles, so it’s mostly just a matter of aggregating the reports.)

USA Today has now repeated my analysis and found much the same:

Baltimore is the nation’s most dangerous city

Aamer Madhani, USA TODAY Published 6:00 a.m. ET Feb. 19, 2018 |

The collective homicide toll for America’s 50 biggest cities dipped slightly in 2017, a USA TODAY analysis of crime data found.

The FBI won’t publish its annual comprehensive crime report until later this year, but an early review of police department crime data shows that killings decreased by at least 1% in large jurisdictions compared with 2016.

The modest decrease in killings comes after FBI data showed back-to-back years in which homicides rose sharply in large cities. (Homicides in cities with 250,000 or more residents rose by about 15.2% from 2014 to 2015, and 8.2% from 2015 to 2016.)

There were 5,738 homicides in the nation’s 50 biggest cities in 2017 compared with 5,863 homicides in 2016, a roughly 2.3% reduction.

Las Vegas Police reported 141 homicides for 2017 in its official tally but did not include the Oct. 1 mass shooting at an outdoor country music concert that left 58 dead. If those deaths were included in the department’s tally, the national big city homicide toll fell by 1.1%, the USA TODAY review found.

I went on to the biggest 51 cities rather than stopping at 50 because #51 Cleveland’s data was easily discoverable.

So Trump and Sessions deserve some credit for the stopping the Late Obama Age Collapse from getting even worse, but murders remain much higher than they were Before Ferguson.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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