Baltimore Homicide Rate Update

Update (7/25/09): The data in this post is now fairly out of date. I think the discussion in this post is still relevant and worth reading, so I do recommend that you keep reading. If you're looking for the most recent data, check out here.

----

As any resident of Baltimore City knows, there are a lot of murders in this town. I remember when I first discovered Murder Ink in the City Paper years ago and first tried to comprehend the tremendous number of murders in this city. Hundreds per year! And for every murder there are how many attempted murders / shootings each year? It's just plain madness.

I was excited as anyone as 2008 progressed and it started to look like Baltimore was having an out-of-trend year for murders. Despite a few very violent months (March, June, November and December were particularly bad last year), Baltimore ended 2008 with the lowest murder tally in two decades. Baltimore's per capita murder rate is still shockingly high as there are far fewer city residents today than 20 years ago, but last year was a marked departure from the rest of the decade (as I detailed in a post in January). In that post I noted that we shouldn't necessarily lose hope just because November and December had been pretty violent and January opened with 14 murders in 9 days.

Three months later I am happy to have been proven more or less correct. One of those 14 murders was determined to be justified as self-defense and the finally 22 days of January saw only 8 murders (not awesome, but not bad either). Since January I've been keeping track of murderous events and plotting them on some charts. A couple weeks ago I figured out how to make some nice Flash graphs of the data and put them up on a static website. In this post I publish some data as of 3/27/09, but the charts on my 2009 Baltimore Murder Charts site are updated approximately weekly.

According to my records, 228 murderous acts occurred in 2008. The official homicide tally was 234, but there were 6 people who died of injuries sustained in prior-year incidents. Since I'm interested in how deadly the city is right now, I don't track those numbers (although the FBI and others do). I have the opportunity to go back and edit my data, so if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I'm going to back and count that on the date the incident occurred instead of the when the death occurred.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to track murders this year was to be able to produce a "Trailing 12 Months Murders" chart. I think it's pretty informative and gives a good feel for whether or not murder rates have increased or not. For example, based on a very violent January, there is a perception that Baltimore is not going to be able to maintain last year's reduced murder rate. What I think has been under reported is that February 2009 had only 15 murders, the same number as February 2008.


As you can see from the Trailing 12 Months (TTM) Murders chart above, we're really not seeing any leap in violence this year. In fact, if you use a 30-day moving window to smooth out data a little, it's varied between 233.4 and 236.5. Above the 2008 total, but it certainly shows no sign of reverting to the bad old pre-2008 days of 250+ murders/year.

I think that it's important to consider some of these other graphs, just this week I heard a story on WYPR called "Murders Spike in Baltimore's Northeast District". They state that "Baltimore's homicide rate is nearly 25 percent higher then at this time last year." At the time of the story there were 47 murders in the city. Based on my records, at that time last year there were 40 or 41 murders (depending on exactly when the story was produced). By my count, that's (at most) 7/40 = 17.5% increase. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I wouldn't exactly round 17.5% to 25%. I think I'd round it to either "nearly 20 percent" or "just over 15%". I guess the point of the story is that there have been more murders in the Northeastern District than normal. Still, I don't see why WYPR would want to talk up the homicide rate in Baltimore. They do note in the story that "Like other districts, the Northeast has seen a decline in robberies, burglaries and assaults from the same time last year."

So basically what the numbers show is that crime is down in Baltimore, except for some isolated, noisy statistics like murders in a certain district. Why not just be happy that murders are pretty much within the noise of last year's number - which was the lowest in two decades?? I guess I just don't understand WYPR's angle. 2009 is just not that much worse than 2008, especially if you take a look at these charts:

I look at the data I've got on murders this year and here's what I see:

• After a bump in early January, the murder rate has been lower than last year for 2.5 months. (We were +10 on 1/9/09 compared to +5 on 3/27/09)
• If you look at how many murders occurred in the 4th quarter of 2008 the 1st quarter of 2009 looks great.
• I think we'll briefly be even with last year on cumulative murders in the first couple days in April, but probably run above 2008 until at least June.
• I see no reason to believe we won't finish the year at more or less the same total as last year -> I think we may have seen Baltimore's homicide rate reset from the 250-270 range to something in the 220-240 range.

You know, it might be just about time to end completely doom and gloom picture of Baltimore's crime rate that has become true by definition. It's bad, it's a serious problem that requires enormous improvement, and it disproportionately affects the African-American community. But it has improved in recent years. We may have to start giving the Baltimore Police Department a little credit and the fact that the city is working better with Federal law enforcement probably helps. There are also a lot of community-based organizations that have contributed to the progress that has been made. We're clearly not there yet, but I don't think that we should continue to view crime in Baltimore as inevitable and uncontrollable.

I think we have to hope that economy does bottom out in 2009 and that unemployment peaks in early 2010 (as I've heard predicted) and does not take too long to recover. Baltimore's made a lot of progress in this decade, I'm looking forward to that continuing once we get to the other side of this recession. I feel that's still the one wild card in all of this; how quickly can investment and economic activity in Baltimore recover? Can we maintain momentum and making Baltimore a nicer, safer, and more inclusive city? If that doesn't happen, if community programs start going bankrupt and can't find support, things could definitely take a turn for the worse.

Update on 2009 Murder Charts

So my project for the day has to be teach myself how to create a chart that I can update frequently and lives on a static webpage. I just can't figure out how to make Blogger work with the cool Flash-based chart that I've worked out, so I've had to sign up for another website*.

I'll post more about this later, but for now I'm just going to publish the post and update later:
You want murder charts? I've got your murder charts!

*FYI - That web hosting service is so full of advertisements, I can barely stand it. I'll have to find a better solution eventually.

Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning

So my friends were all like "We're doing this pub run on Saturday morning, you should join us!"  I was thinking "Wait, when does it start?"  Turns out it started at 8 AM.  I'm like "Do I look like I went to a school with a Division I football program?  I never gotten up early just so I could start drinking!"

But I signed up for the Baltimore Running St. Patrick's Day Pub Run (not to be confused with any 5k events) and it was a great decision.  First of all, it's a "variable distance race."  That is, there are some bars you're supposed to visit, but there's no course and there's no specific order that you're supposed to visit the bars.  They get everyone lined up at the start and say "Go!"  Then a mass of people (like a >100 people) just start running through Fells Point (we started at Slainte).  Everyone's running down different streets, wearing green shirts, wearing Guinness beads... it's unlike any race you've considered running.

So you run to some bars, but they're not actually open.  Instead, they have a table set up like a water station at a real race with beer cups on it.  The stations had Natty Boh mostly, but also some Guinness.  My personal favorite was the fact that they had water bottles full of Irish whiskey.  So you squirt a shot of Jamison in your mouth, chase it with a beer, and then start jogging again.  You do it with your friends, so you're not running too fast.  Plus there's a bunch of other people running around the city doing this too.

I generally had at least a beer at each stop and usually a little whiskey.  A couple stops had Bailey's in water bottles too (my friend made himself a small Irish car bomb at one stop).  We generally know our way around Baltimore, so even if we didn't know the bar, we could figure out a good way to get there based on the address.  So we were pretty efficient, our race was 5.86 miles long, but it took us 66:14 (11:18 pace) to run because we hit all the stops to drink and we jogged nice and slow.

Seriously, it was so much fun.  I actually refused to believe that we'd gone 5 miles, it just seemed to fly by (especially because we ran to the furthest bar and worked our way back).  At the end, they gave us a free Guinness at the bar (which, if you're willing to pay a little money, can easily become an Irish car bomb).  If you live in Baltimore, you should absolutely run this "race" next year!

Guess Who's Going to the Gym This Weekend?

I've been meaning to use those stationary bikes that overlook the basketball courts...