QuoteThe term "murder capital" deserves more than side-eye: It begs to be discarded for good. Simply chalking up the number of homicides, as the public does every fall when the FBI releases its Uniform Crime Reporting figures, leads to an explosion in meaningless conclusions about crime. Here's one: Chicago has reported the highest number of murders over the last few years, leading many to dub it the U.S. murder capital. Yet the per capita murder rate in Flint, Michigan, and about 20 other cities, ranks much higher.
Any comparison of so-called "murder capitals" deserves an asterisk given the notoriously unreliable and unevenly reported nature of homicide statistics. Earlier this year, Chicago magazine ran a two-part investigation that looked at how murders disappear from the books in Chicago. One example happened just last week: Chicago police won't count the July 9 slaying of Jasmine Curry toward its 2014 homicides tally because she was shot and killed on a state highway.
Crowning a "murder capital" puts eyeball-grabbing numbers before more meaningful statistics. It also elides the complex demographic factors shared by cities with high homicide rates, like Detroit and Baltimore but also St. Louis and Birmingham. One such factor: These cities tend to have shrinking populations.
Consider the six U.S. cities that have earned the dubious distinction of official "murder capital" over the last 30 years. (Specifically, these are the cities with the highest per capita homicide rates since 1985.) Of these cities—Flint, Detroit, New Orleans, Birmingham, Richmond, and Washington, D.C.—four were undergoing severe depopulation. One is holding steady. Only the population of D.C. has truly grown.
full article and graphics: http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/07/the-link-between-so-called-murder-capitals-and-population-decline/374484/
I haven't had a chance to read the article yet, but it would be interesting to see if the population decline starts after the city is linked to a perceived(or real) crime problem or if there are other factors that might start a decline which causes the murder rate to go up because the population is decreasing. Hopefully the article touches on that.
The good takeaways for cities are tolerance, desegregation, immigration, diversity: all of these lead to acceptance and understanding of various ways of life, leading to a lower rate of aggression and violence. The more diverse the mix, the less the crime.