Murders up 10.8% in biggest percentage increase since 1971, FBI data shows

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Murders in the US rose 10.8% last year, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971, according to data released Monday by the FBI.

The rising violence was driven by an increase in the murders of black men, and by an increase in the number of gun murders. At least 900 more black men were killed in 2015 than in 2014, according to FBI data.

There were roughly 1,500 additional firearm murders in 2015. No other type of weapon saw a comparable increase. The number of knife murders dropped slightly.

The percentage of murders committed with guns increased to 71.5%.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/26/rate-murder-fbi-increase

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Lois Beckett and Aliza Aufrichtig
Monday 26 September 2016 14.49 BST

[NobodyHere]

1. Ugh

This can only help Trump

[Eugene]

3. The sub-headline says "experts brace for political 'hysteria'." eom

[flamin lib]

2. Yeah, but an armed society is a polite society. Right?? nt

[ritakyn]

4. Murders up 10.8%

This doesn't have to help Trump. Hillary should talk about letting more terrorists have access to buying guns...and pepper it with "No fly then no Buy."

[scscholar]

5. This. You have no right to due process when buying one of those damn things. (ntxt)

[hack89]

18. No due process while exercising a constitutional right?

you really believe that, don't you? What other rights are not deserving of due process?

[Eleanors38]

23. Ah, the Fifth takes a beating again; this time by a poster's decree.

Have any more "damn things" which sould be excepted from the Fifth Amendment?

[Laurian]

7. Indeed. This needs to be linked to the increased weakening of gun laws

and the increased strength of the NRA. More and more people have access to deadly weapons.

[Eleanors38]

24. "needs to be linked?" I guess you mean politically since data do not suggest what you want.

[LeftInTX]

12. The percentage of murders committed with guns increased to 71.5%.

Hillary can point this out.

[hack89]

17. Talking about terrorists is a deflection

terrorists do not account for an increase in more AA men being killed.

[Crowman1979]

6. Must have been a lot of good guys with guns...gone bad!

WTF!?!?

[Charles Bukowski]

8. Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Despite the uptick, our homicide rate is significantly lower today than at any point since the early 1960s.

Not trying to downplay these numbers, but compared to the Reagan or even Bill Clinton years our inner-cities are significantly safer right now.

[atreides1]

13. Perhaps

But we're not talking about the past, this is the present!

These numbers matter in the here and now, no one in their right mind is going to say it's better then it was under Reagan and Clinton...that would be stupid!!!

[Charles Bukowski]

15. Comparisons are useful

particularly when a certain orange-faced buffoon argues that America is a falling apart crime-ridden hellhole that only he can fix.

[LanternWaste]

22. No one is arguing that point.

"our homicide rate is significantly lower today than at any point since the early 1960s..."

No one is arguing that point, or has said otherwise.

Damned lies, indeed.

[Charles Bukowski]

25. No one is arguing that? You must not know any conservatives.

I envy you for that.

[jtuck004]

9. "At least 900 more black men were killed in 2015" This sure flies in the face of the whole

"Things are getting better" meme I have heard lately.

Or maybe they just mean for the wealthier white people.



http://leftcall.com/4557/u-s-crime-rates-1960-2010-the-facts-might-surprise-you/

[Charles Bukowski]

16. Your ability to read a graph is outstanding.

[jtuck004]

19. As is your ability to write a snarky reply. But the bodies in the street say more than your

trivializing can.

cya.

[Charles Bukowski]

20. If it were up to me the Homicide Rate would be 0.0%

Having said that, I'm not going to make sky-is-falling proclamations over a 1 year increase in crime. Not when the long-term trend clearly shows a huge improvement in that area, even compared to the GWB years.

[NickB79]

34. Wait, are we looking at the same graph?

The one that shows crime rates plunging in the 90's to a level not seen since 1965?

[onehandle]

10. Gun culture strikes again. 78% of Americans don't own guns. We can defeat gun culture. nt

[friendly_iconoclast]

31. "78% of Americans don't own guns."- which means ca. 71 million Americans *do* own guns

http://www.census.gov/popclock/

The United States population on January 1, 2016 was: 322,761,807

How do you propose to 'defeat' them?

[izzybella]

11. I think

If she is very clever, she can bait Trump into using some rhetoric that suggests some sort of gun control is needed.

[branford]

14. Who is committed these new crimes,

and what areas have seem the largest increases? The demographics are essential in formulating policies to combat the problem?

Is the increased crime rate the result of crimes committed by lawful gun owners in areas dominated by conservatives?

The answers to these questions might prove inconvenient for Democratic gun control supporters, particularly if places like urban areas run by Democrats such as Chicago are representative of much of the increasing violent crime. Neither I, nor I imagine most people here, are eager to see more young black men in prison.

When conservatives use these very same studies to justify their "law and order" policies that disproportionately impact people of color, as well as increased liberalization of gun ownership and use standards for self-defense, don't say you weren't warned.

[OnlinePoker]

26. Chicago has already had more murders this year than the previous four

The vast majority are shootings if you "Explore Data". They don't break down the statistics by race, but if you go to the timeline and scroll down, the most of those murdered are black, followed by Hispanic and white.

https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/2016-chicago-murders/timeline?mon=9

[branford]

27. Who's committing the murders?

Are they the same race as the victims? Were they already prohibited from owning firearms due to long-standing prohibitions such as a felony conviction? Did they commit the murders with "assault rifles" or "high capacity magazine?" What policies that could pass constitutional muster would have prevented most the murders, and what's the actual evidence that supports such suppositions?

A list of victims, while tragic, without far more information doesn't really offer much in terms of setting policy, no less a policy appropriate for all parts of the country.

Moreover, even post-Heller, Illinois and Chicago still have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. Why is there murder rate up so dramatically while states with more lax gun laws are not seeing comparable increases in crime?

Crime rates are still about half of what they were in the 1990's, all while guns laws have mostly, and in some cases quite dramatically, liberalized across the nation. If it's acceptable to blame the very recent increase in crime on gun laws, wouldn't it be equally valid to attribute the generally lower crime rates on these same relaxed gun laws over this period?

Simply, people from all sides of the gun debate selectively cite studies, ignore data that's inconvenient, confuse correlation with causation and anecdotes from evidence, ignore the myriad of social, economic and other factors which cause or exacerbate violence and crime that have nothing to do with guns, and have otherwise elevated the debate to such a shrill cultural (and often regional or urban vs. exurban) battle that reasoned debate and comprise are all but impossible.

God help us all because it often seems like virtually everyone involved in the gun debate is far more interested in insulting and demonizing their opponents than actually productively working to help the current and potential future victims of gun crime, a group largely composed of the poor and minorities, people Democrats claim to represent.

[pablo_marmol]

28. Outstanding post. NT

[Igel]

29. Data.

The UCR are necessarily incomplete: They can't report what's not known, such as the race of some anonymous killer at 2:30 a.m. in an alley.

Still, here are data:

Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Victim by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Offender, 2015
[Single victim/single offender]
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2015.xls


https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_3_murder_offenders_by_age_sex_and_race_2015.xls


https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_1_murder_victims_by_race_ethnicity_and_sex_2015.xls

> Blacks are disproportionately represented all over the place. They disproportionately kill whites, each other, and are over-represented in the data unless those "unknown" numbers have a truly freakish skewness: even if all unknowns were white, blacks would still be over-represented.

>Men as killers are vastly over-represented, and women under-represented (especially in the black-on-black cell; whites are apparently a bit less biased, but this probably goes to context and not sexism).

> The data aren't much different from the 2013 data. A few more dead people, but the patterns are essentially the same. We see national paroxysms of rage and guilt over a few dozen excess deaths at the hands of the police and hide behind the parallel stats that the percentage of whites killed by whites is similar to the percentage of blacks killed by blacks. It's not about the dead, it's about the politics and social consequences of things that aren't reflected in the death toll, but that's not nearly as outrage-stoking. If you can't name the problem it's hard to discuss it; if you can't discuss it, it's hard to formulate policies that might stop it.

That said, the murder rate's been low for a while compared to previous decades and the increase is more likely caused by local trends

[branford]

30. Excellent. Geography is also very important.

Where are the gun crimes being committed and where have the rates increased?

Is it an mostly urban phenomena? Are the areas generally controlled by Democrats and subject to generally more progressive social policies? Are the areas disproportionately poor and/or have notably bad schools? Etc.

The information about whether those committing gun crimes are already prohibited from owning guns is even more relevant given that most of the proposals here and among the wider gun control movement generally target lawful gun owners. Are dastardly NRA members with no criminal records from the rural and suburban South and Midwest responsible for gun crime or gangs and other known felons from liberal coastal enclaves and the industrial Midwest?

Whenever many here complain about "gun culture," snidely looking down on wide swaths of their fellow Americans, mostly white and rural, they forget there's another even greater gun culture in our big cities, and these people tend to be poor minorities and an important part of the Democratic constituency. The blatant elitism and failure to recognize and condemn much of this latter "gun culture" lest they be accused of racism, is not lost on a great many voters and helps explain why Democratic electoral prospects are near zero in the South and dying in much of the rural and suburban Mid and Northwest. The cynical populism of people like Trump reverberates among so many for identifiable reasons, and Democratic blindness to our own faults is partly responsible. The gun debate is often a symptom of much larger problems and increasingly irreconcilable differences among Americans are making governing our country near impossible.

[ananda]

21. Thank you NRA and Reep legislatures.

Gun control now!

[NickB79]

32. Half the increased murders came from just seven cities. Wow!

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/08/us/us-murder-rates.html?_r=0

And it appears that, at least in Baltimore, the spike was due to a heroin surge:

Some experts attribute the sudden spike in violence largely to a flood of black-market opiates looted from pharmacies during riots in April 2015. The death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury in police custody, had set off the city’s worst riots since the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

During the riots, nearly 315,000 doses of drugs were stolen from 27 pharmacies and two methadone clinics, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, a number much higher than the 175,000 doses the agency initially estimated.

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 criminologist at the University of Baltimore.

[Skittles]

33. cannot be

we are told by gun humpers that guns keep crime down

[GummyBearz]

35. Need to change the definition of the word murder to make this stat look better

Someone get on it quick