'It's just crazy': 12 major cities hit all-time homicide records - ABC News
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
At least 12 major U.S. cities have broken annual homicide records in 2021 -- and there's still three weeks to go in the year.
Of the dozen cities that have already surpassed the grim milestones for killings, five topped records that were set or tied just last year.
"It's terrible to every morning get up and have to go look at the numbers and then look at the news and see the stories. It's just crazy. It's just crazy and this needs to stop," Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said after his city surpassed its annual homicide record of 500, which stood since 1990.
Philadelphia, a city of roughly 1.5 million people, has had more homicides this year (521 as of Dec. 6) than the nation's two largest cities, New York (443 as of Dec. 5) and Los Angeles (352 as of Nov. 27). That's an increase of 13% from 2020, a year that nearly broke the 1990 record.
Chicago, the nation's third-largest city, leads the nation with 739 homicides as of the end of November, up 3% from 2020, according to Chicago Police Department crime data. Chicago's deadliest year remains 1970 when there were 974 homicides.
Philadelphia's homicide record was broken in the same week that Columbus, Indianapolis and Louisville eclipsed records for slayings.
Experts say there are a number of reasons possibly connected to the jump in homicides, including strained law enforcement staffing, a pronounced decline in arrests and continuing hardships from the pandemic, but that there is no clear answer across the board.
5 cities surpass records set in 2020
Other major cities that have surpassed yearly homicide records are St. Paul, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; Toledo, Ohio; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; Rochester, New York; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, which broke its record back in August.
"The community has to get fed up," Capt. Frank Umbrino, of the Rochester Police Department, said at a news conference after the city of just over 200,000 people broke its 30-year-old record on Nov. 11. "We're extremely frustrated. It has to stop. I mean, it's worse than a war zone around here lately."
Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Toledo and Baton Rouge broke records set in 2020, while St. Paul surpassed a record set in 1992.
Among the major cities on the brink of setting new homicide records are Milwaukee, which has 178 homicides, 12 short of a record set in 2020; and Minneapolis, which has 91 homicides, six shy of a record set in 1995.
According to the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report released in September, the nation saw a 30% increase in murder in 2020, the largest single-year jump since the bureau began recording crime statistics 60 years ago.
'Nobody's getting arrested'
Robert Boyce, retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department and an ABC News contributor, said that while there is no single reason for the jump in slayings, one national crime statistic stands out to him.
"Nobody's getting arrested anymore," Boyce said. "People are getting picked up for gun possession and they're just let out over and over again."
The FBI crime data shows that the number of arrests nationwide plummeted 24% in 2020, from the more than 10 million arrests made in 2019. The number of 2020 arrests -- 7.63 million -- is the lowest in 25 years, according to the data. FBI crime data is not yet available for 2021.
MORE: Homicide record broken in Louisville with 2 slayings, including a teenager killed on Thanksgiving Day
Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor in the Department of Law & Police Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said the decrease in arrests could be attributed to the large number of police officers who retired or resigned in 2020 and 2021.
A workforce survey released in June by the Police Executive Research Forum found the retirement rate in police departments nationwide jumped 45% over 2020 and 2021. And another 18% of officers resigned, the survey found, a development which coincided with nationwide social justice protests and calls to defund law enforcement agencies following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
On average, the survey found that law enforcement agencies are currently filling only 93% of the authorized number of positions available and Herrmann said many departments have been hampered in hiring because of an inability to get large classes into police academies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I think, unfortunately, police departments are just losing a lot of their best and experienced officers and then because of the economic crisis, because of COVID, are having difficulties in hiring or just delays in hirings," Herrmann said.
Herrmann said he suspects that a confluence of other factors has also contributed to the spike in lethal violence over the last two years. He said the COVID-19 pandemic not only prompted a shutdown of courts and reduction in jail population to slow the spread of the virus but also derailed after-school programs and violence disruption programs.
Confluence of factors
"I wish there was one good solid reason that I could give you for the increases, but the reality is there is none," Herrmann, a former crime analyst supervisor for the New York City Police Department, told ABC News.
Herrmann said he was surprised to see the number of homicides going up in major cities across the United States after an overall 30% jump last year.
"I knew 2020 was going to be a bad year because of the (COVID-19) pandemic but I really thought that a lot of these numbers would come down in 2021 just because a lot of society reopened and reopened pretty quickly," Herrmann said. "We don't have the unemployment problem, we don't have a lot of the economic stresses, housing and food insecurities aren't as much of an issue. A lot of those things were leading to the mental health stressors that were plaguing the country."
As part of a recent ABC News series "Rethinking Gun Violence," Dr. Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said 2020 was the "perfect storm" of conditions where "everything bad happened at the same time -- you had the COVID outbreak, huge economic disruption, people were scared."
Webster added, "It's particularly challenging to know with certainty which of these things independently is associated with the increased violence. Rather it was the 'cascade' of events all unfolding in a similar time frame."
Chief LeRonne Armstrong of the Oakland, California, Police Department told ABC News recently that the lack of resources to fight crime is one of the reasons he suspects is why his city is seeing the highest number of homicides in decades. Oakland police have investigated at least 127 homicides in 2021, up from 102 in all of 2020. The Bay Area city's all-time high for homicides is 175 set in 1992.
Armstrong said his department's 676 officers is the smallest staff his agency has had in years, nearly 70 fewer officers than in 2020.
"To have 70, nearly 70 less officers a year later," Armstrong said, "is definitely going to have an impact on our ability to address public safety."
Tags
Who is online
209 visitors
So this is what electing progressive officials, emasculating police departments and erecting monuments to George Floyd produces?
It will be up to the voters in those cities. It is a clear choice: democrats & violence or Republicans and law & order.
We shall see if LBJ was right about how long he'd have 'em voting democrat!
All liberal Democrat controlled cities. Go figure....
What a coincidence.
There was another report on the radio yesterday... The plaintifs that filed a lawsuit against the City of Seattle and Mayor Durkin over the young black man that was killed in the "Chop/Chaz" demonstration that ran for a few months in Seattle... The Federal judge presiding dismissed their case stating that they didn't have any evidence of the most important part of the case.... The needed evidence that the City and Mayor Knew that a killing was highly probable and inevitable by their action of pulling the police out of the east precinct area and allow the rioters to take over ...
They have appealed...
Well, they were announcing that they were provided internal e-mails from mayor Durkan to her staff in her office DIRECTLY stating that a killing was highly probable and inevitable from the actions of pulling the police out ... HER ORDERS/ACTIONS in the PROSECUTION OF HER DUTIES!
Now they have the proof of willful negligence and they KNEW it was potentially negligent and did it anyway....
Justice is such a wonderful thing isn't it... I hope they get millions and millions....
So do I
It was quite a record for Philadelphia. Once the city of "brotherly love" it is now the city of murder & mayhem!
KIRO TV Seattle Oct 13th....
Incomplete data my ass! No one tracks the race of the killers, it would invite the relationship of killers race to killed race... (we would find out that yeah criminals kill criminals)
And would prove the contention that most of the killing is confined to the ethnic groups most associated with liberal politics.... (something that people who track such know already) Thankfully the gentleman quoted above, Dan Satterberg, he of defacto legalization of hard drugs in Seattle fame, will not be the DA very much longer In fact he was so popular that he didn't even make it on the election ballot this election and who the voters replaced with a law & order REPUBLICAN! and the Mayor (former Obama asst attorney general) Durkan came in FOURTH in the primaries...
Yeah those hard leftist liberals are really padding their woke credentials... Proving exactly what the opposition has been saying all along... and getting the recognition they deserve for it by being voted OUT of office... EVEN in Woke Seattle! the progressive capital of the nation!
You bet, quite the record of accomplishment there...
Agreed and Portland is the HQ for antifa.
Other cities flirting with their previous records include Shreveport, La.; Baltimore; Minneapolis; Rochester, N.Y.; and Tulsa, Okla. St. Louis didn’t surpass its highest tally in 2020, but owing to population decline it did set a new record homicide rate. Chicago, Seattle and Fort Worth, Texas, would all have to go back 25 years to see homicide tallies comparable to what they’re seeing now.
And we still have a month to go in 2021.
Lightfoot Blames Chicago Business Owners for Looting, Says Stores ‘Not Doing Enough’
Typical leftist liberal politician. Blame everybody else but themselves and their crony leftist lib politician buds!
Murder rates are one of the most misused and misinterpreted statistics out there.
According to this site, St Louis is the murder capital of America in 2021 in terms of murder rate
St. Louis, MO
NeighborhoodScout’s Murder Capitals of America – 2021 - NeighborhoodScout
The FBI lists murder rates based on per 100,000 people. The murder rate in St Louis would then be 65. 65 per 100,000 population.
No doubt this is a relatively high figure, but 99,935 people per 100,000 population were NOT murdered in 2021. Is St Louis a "war zone" in terms of murders? Of course not.
The political right would have us think that if you walk down a street in St Louis you have to constantly duck bullets. Were that actually the case the murder rate would be much higher.
We hear that murders are at "all time highs" in 12 major cities.
Conceivably this could mean a great deal but it probably doesnt.
This was the number of murders in Philadelphia in 2020
499
These were the number of murders in Philadelphia from 1988 through 1992, all years when there was a Republican president.
Really no significant difference from today.
And today guns, the means by which most murders are done, are more readily available today.
The right would have us believe there is utter anarchy in the streets and it is the Democrats fault, but this is more politics than a definable reality.
The national murder rate was significantly higher in the 1980s and early ’90s. But the left wing talking point ignores two important realities:
1) The national homicide rate unfortunately, doesn’t provide most Americans with a sense of the real dangers they face. A handful of extremely safe Illinois suburbs may counterbalance Chicago’s contribution to the national murder rate, but that’s little consolation to those who live in the South Side war zones. You know, the very people the left panders to.
2) The false claim that crime isn’t as bad as it was in the 1990s is no longer true for a long list of American cities, such as these deadly dozen, many of which have either surpassed or are currently flirting with that decade’s homicide tallies.
How many cities have just shattered their all time murder rate?
The right would have us believe there is utter anarchy in the streets and it is the Democrats fault, but this is more politics than a definable reality.
Obviously the left owns every bit of it. As I said, they emasculated police departments and installed criminal coddling DA's.
The murder rates for the city and the suburbs are two different things.
These numbers just dont mean as much as you think they do. Philadelphia has 500 murders this year. OK, very unfortunate. But they have had similar number of murders many times in the past. In a city of 1.5 or 2 million people there simply is no great difference between 400 and 500 murders per year. If Philadelphia had 2000 or 3000 murders this year then you might have a fair argument that something disastrous was taking place. The 500 figure is just not far enough off historical figures to warrant hysteria.
We have a fair argument because the left changed policing & justice policies.
"The right would have us believe there is utter anarchy in the streets and it is the Democrats fault,....". Guess what John, there is anarchy in the streets in those cities and it is the Democrat's fault!
We'll spotted. I do love a good statistic.
Remember this one the next time somebody tries to tell you how dangerous unvaccinated people are to vaccinated ones.
Back to this conversation, there is an interesting comparison to be made here between high murder rates and rapidly increasing murder rates and the causes of both.
Funny how these murder towns all have the same leadership.