Free Republic

Homicides are falling across the U.S. And that shift could impact the role crime — often a top voter concern — plays as an issue in November’s election. But it is a phenomenon for which experts don’t have a clear explanation. Some say homicide peaks come and go in cycles, some say policing improved after the COVID-19 pandemic, and some attribute it to the evolving national conversation about how to handle crime. A data analysis released last week shows that the number of homicides in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, are dropping. While many major cities, especially...

In the wake of today’s Texas school shooting, Chris Matthews, on his MSNBC show this evening, suggested that South Africans look down on the US, wondering “what’s with America?” Matthews might have wanted to check his stats before Blaming America First. Intentional homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants: United States: 4.88, South Africa: 34.27. That’s right: the homicide rate in South Africa is more than seven times that in the US.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

The above chart was created from UNODC data. Many comparisons have been made between the homicide rates of the the United States and various European countries.  They have been made between members of the G-8, or among "developed" or "advanced" countries, or "economically developed" countries, though all of these comparisons suffer from various unstated assumptions, typically that "economic" development is the prime predictor of homicide rates., which clearly is not correct. Here is a comparison of homicide rates among new world countries where the official language is English.   This creates an interesting set of common characteristics.   All of these...

You can see from the above that Russia has about twice as many homicides per hundred thousand as the United States, even though Russia has very restrictive laws on possession and carrying of firearms. The above chart was created from UNODC data. If you look at the chart below created by ABC, the United States seems to be an outlier.  No data is given for Russia, and the Y axis mentions that it is only for gun related homicides.   The large header leaves out the word "Gun".  These are serious clues that the chart is designed to mislead. Only...

The FBI released its [1] preliminary crime figures for 2007 last week, and as is sometimes the case there was both good and bad news to be found in the report. Violent crime in the U.S. fell by 1.4 percent last year, a modest decline to be sure but a decline nonetheless after increases of 1.9 percent in 2006 and 2.3 percent in 2005. This nationwide trend is largely attributable to the even more dramatic drop in crime seen in AmericaÂ’s largest cities: there was a 9.8 percent drop in murders in cities with populations of greater than one million....