Homicides Explode in the US: Orlando Has Largest Percentage Increase

Homicides Explode in the US

Orlando, FL has the largest percentage increase in homicides from 2014-2015 for the 56 cities studied

Author’s note: My abbreviated notes from a new study funded by the US Department of Justice are below. They document the significant rise in homicides in the United States during 2015.

Crime in America.Net correctly predicted that violent crime would increase in 2015.

We predict it will go up in 2016 as well.

We sadly note that Orlando, FL has the largest percentage increase in homicides from 2014-2015 for the 56 cities studied. We continue to pray for the victims of the senseless nightclub massacre in that city, taking the lives of 50 people in the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history.

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Introduction:

The study 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.

Results-Homicides Increase:

The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented.

The homicide rate in the sample rose by 16.8 percent over the previous year.

The 2015 six-month preliminary crime figures for smaller cities also reveal sizable increases over the previous year. For example, homicides in cities with populations between 50,000 and 99,000 went up by 8.9 percent.

The skewed distribution of the homicide changes indicates that a relatively small number of cities accounted for most of the increase.

In fact, just 10 cities accounted for two-thirds of the total homicide increase between 2014 and 2015.

Together, the increases in these cities constituted 66.7 percent of the total increase in the 56-city sample.

Had homicides not risen in these cities, it is likely that the homicide increase of 2015 would have generated far less attention and controversy.

The percentage increases in the top ten ranged from 90.5 percent in Cleveland to 12.9 percent in Philadelphia.

The average homicide increase over 2014 in the top ten was 33.3 percent, compared with a 16.8-percent rise for the sample as a whole.

One-year increases of this magnitude in the nation’s large cities, although not unknown, are very rare.

In summary, the homicide rise in 2015 in the nation’s large cities was real and, while not unprecedented, comparatively large.

Whether the increase extended beyond the largest cities remains unknown, although preliminary crime data for the first six months of 2015 reveal sizable increases in smaller cities as well.

Homicides in the 56-city sample used in this study increased by 16.8 percent over 2014.

Ten cities accounted for two-thirds of this increase, and together they experienced a 33.3-percent jump in homicide.

These cities have considerably larger black populations and smaller Hispanic populations than the other cities in the sample.

Source: Documenting and Explaining the 2015 Homicide Rise: Research Directions

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249895.pdf