After Decades of Decline, the Murder Rate Increased in 2015 and 2016

"After decades of declines in the murder rate, 2016 may have been the second bloody year in a row in America.

According to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice, the US murder rate rose by 7.8 percent in 2016 compared with 2015. It’s the second year in a row in which the murder rate increased.

The outlook was even worse in big cities. In the 30 largest US cities, Brennan estimated that the murder rate increased by 14 percent from 2015 to 2016, following an increase of 13.2 percent in 2015. These increases were heavily concentrated: More than half of 2015’s urban murder increase happened in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, DC. And more than 40 percent of 2016’s rise happened in Chicago alone, which had a particularly bad year.

Still, Brennan cautioned, the murder rate remained nearly half of what it was 25 years before: 'From 1991 to 2016, the murder rate fell by roughly half, from 9.8 killings per 100,000 to 5.3. With violence at historic lows, modest increases in the murder rate may appear large in percentage terms.'”

Documenting and Explaining the 2015 Homicide Rise: Research Directions
"The debate over the size, scope and causes of the homicide increase in 2015 has been largely free of systematic evidence.  This paper documents the scale of the homicide increase for a sample of 56 large U.S. cities.  It then examines three plausible explanations of the homicide rise: an expansion of urban drug markets fueled by the heroin epidemic, reductions in incarceration resulting in a growing number of released prisoners in the nation's cities, and a 'Ferguson effect' resulting from widely publicized incidents of police use of deadly force against minority citizens.  The paper concludes with a call for the more frequent and timely release of crime information to address crime problems as they arise."

Crime in 2015: A Preliminary Analysis (U.S.)

"Major media outlets have reported that murder has surged in some of the nation’s largest cities. These stories have been based on a patchwork of data, typically from a very small sample of cities. Without geographically complete and historically comparable data, it is difficult to discern whether the increases these articles report are purely local anomalies, or are instead part of a larger national trend.

This report provides a preliminary in-depth look at current national crime rates. It provides data on crime and murder for the 30 largest U.S. cities by population in 2015 and compares that to historical data. This analysis relies on data collected from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police departments. The authors were able to obtain preliminary 2015 murder statistics from 25 police departments in the nation’s 30 largest cities and broader crime data from 19 of the 30. The data covers the period from January 1 to October 1, 2015. As this report relies on initial data and projects crime data for the reminder of the year, its findings should be treated as preliminary as they may change when final figures are available."

View the Report