Killer Stats 2023
I’ve got some good news and some bad news about murder in 2022.
The good news: Urban homicides appear to have dropped in 2022 around 5 percent versus 2021.
The bad news: That marginal progress only gets us back to the brutal level of 2020, the first year of the ongoing “racial reckoning,” when homicides exploded by a record 30 percent over 2019.
Because I’m too impatient to wait around until the second half of 2023 for 2022’s official federal crime statistics to be released by the FBI and CDC, I just now created a convenience sample of 2022 homicide counts in 47 cities.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when there’s no news other than celebrity obituaries, many local newspapers traditionally have a reporter call up the police department to get the scoop on how many homicides there were within the city limits this year, and to transcribe the police chief’s excuses or boasts for why the number of killings went up or down.
But I’ve been doing this for several years now (for example, here’s my column from Jan. 5, 2022), and it has worked quite well at anticipating the CDC and FBI stats each time.
In the 47 cities, there were 38 percent more homicides in 2022 than in pre–George Floyd 2019. Of the 47 municipalities, 42 had more homicides in 2022. (By the way, murders are a subset of homicides—for example, justifiable self-defense homicides aren’t murders—but the two categories trend closely together and I use the terms as nearly synonyms.)
The w
Article from LewRockwell
