Baltimore Murder Charts - Year End 2010 Edition

I haven't been the best at updating my blog recently, but one of the few original things I post regularly are charts covering Baltimore murders. My sources remain Murder Ink from the City Paper and the Baltimore Crime blog.

Murder trends for 2010 were not nearly as exciting as 2009. Murders declined again, but not by a large number. Most of 2010 looked like 2009, the main exception being that there were far fewer deaths classified as homicides due to prior year murders. As I've been doing, any homicides classified due to an act in a prior year are counted in that prior year (by going back and editing data). So using this methodology I get slightly different numbers than the official tally, but I think it's better for tracking trends.

In 2009 there were officially 238 murders in Baltimore, but 14 of them were due to acts of violence from prior years, so I count that as 224 murders. In 2010 there were officially 223 murders in Baltimore, but 4 of them were due to acts of violence in prior years (none of them from 2009 though, so no upward modification). So while the official numbers drop from 238 to 223 (a 6.3% decrease), my count drops from 224 to 219 (a 2.2% decrease).

Still, we've come a long way since 2007. The 2010 total is down 20% from 2007. The improvements are pretty obvious when you look at the homicides by month and the cumulative plot of homicides for the last four years.



In fact, 2007 was such a higher total than 2008-10, it's actually better to remove it to compare the more recent years.


So what do we have? Looks mostly like stability. Sure, from 2008 to 2010 there were about 14 fewer homicides in Baltimore, a total of a 6% decrease. Not terribly impressive, even if murders continue decreasing at this rate we'll have to wait until 2017 to see murders become something that happens only every other day. That's not a terribly cheerful prediction. Hopefully the continued focus on reducing illegal guns in the city will continue to lower shootings and homicide rate will drop faster.

It needs to. Baltimore's per capita murder rate remains one of the worst in the country. At 35 per 100,000 (my math based on 223 official murders and U.S. Census estimated population for 2009). However, if you are African-American in Baltimore the per-capita murder rate is unbelievable. According to Anna Ditkoff of Murder Ink, 90.6% of 2010's murder victims were African-American. Based on Baltimore's demographics, this indicates that African-Americans in Baltimore face a 50 per 100,000 per capita murder rate while residents of other races experience a 9 per 100,000 per capita murder rate. To put that in perspective, residents who are not African-American are safer in Baltimore than the average Albuquerque resident (source: Wikipedia article on crime in US cities).

Finally, my favorite chart that I create for tracking murder trends:


Vertical axis magnified:

Links to previous year's homicide summaries:
2009 Year End Summary
2008 Year End Summary

More Thoughts on Murder - With Graphs!

After my recent post on Baltimore's low (by Baltimore standards) murder total last year, a couple people commented that we should look at per capita murders rather than the annual total.  I think that there is some truth in those comments, but after fooling around with the data a little, I can also see how you would get a misleading story.

First off, a quick word on my data sources; all data for 2000-2007 is from the FBI's annual Crime in the United States (CIUS) publication.  The CIUS summarizes the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program every year.  I'd never really looked at this before, but it's an amazing amount of information that's available to everyone.  I'm jumping the gun a little on 2008, so any numbers for 2008 are unofficial and the per capita numbers are especially suspect because the Census Bureau has not released 2008 population estimates (so I assumed no population change since 2007, which is obviously false for places like Baltimore and Detroit).  Finally, we need to remember that these are population estimates, not full Census data.  Also, I'm no trained demographer, so I'm not necessarily qualified to really analyze any of this - but I do love to make a good chart.

I chose to look as far back as 2000 because 1) that's when I moved to Baltimore and 2) after you look too far back you start wondering if you're really comparing apples to apples.  Anyway, here's a quick plot of where we've been as a city:

So you can look at graph and see that it's not immediately obvious that a reduction in murders from 261 in 2000 to 234 in 2008 might not actually reduce the per capita murder rate in Baltimore.  Before we get to per capita murders, I'd like to think a little bit more about the total murders in Baltimore.

In 2000, Baltimore was home to about 648,000 people.  At the same time East Newark, New Jersey was home to 2,377 people.  From 2000 to 2008, 2,377 people were murdered in Baltimore.  That's right, it took only 9 years for Baltimore's criminals to exterminate a population equivalent to a small New Jersey borough.  Yes, it seems silly that New Jersey have a mayor and six city council members to govern the 0.1 square miles of land and 0.04 square miles of water that comprises the borough of East Newark, but I'm sure Mayor Joseph R. Smith would be very disappointed to have his entire city wiped out. 

I'm making fun of New Jersey, sure, but the numbers really are mind-boggling.  Just trying to wrap your mind around the idea of a couple thousand murders is tough.  Here's another way to look at it: from 2000 to 2007, Baltimore's population is estimated to have declined from 647,955 to 624,237 - a decline of 23,718 residents.  Over that same time period, 2,143 people were murdered in Baltimore (i.e. the entire population of Vernon, AL).  Murders alone account for 9.0% of Baltimore's 2000-2007 population decline!

This ridiculously high murder rate is made even more tragic because of it's disproportionate effect on certain populations of Baltimore.  For example, in 2008 91% of homicide victims are African-American in a city that is only 64% African-American (source: Baltimore Sun).  It's just unbelievable; it works out to a per capita murder rate five times higher for African-Americans than everyone else in 2008!

Speaking of per capita murder rates, without further ado, here's the chart you've all been waiting for:

With the usual warnings about comparing crime statistics, I'm going to launch into what I think I've learned by looking at that chart.  First of all, Baltimore's murder rate has been fairly constant, even when adjusted for a falling population.  Over this time period we've looked a lot like Detroit, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that relationship loosen up over the next couple years.  Detroit looks to be in for a much rougher economic ride than we are (knock on wood).  It is interesting that both Baltimore and Detroit saw a big dip in murders this year (but St. Louis jumped out of trend).  St. Louis's trend line is a little scary because they saw a big one-year dip earlier this decade, but then jumped right back up to a murder rate in the high 30's.  Washington DC does give us a little hope, they managed to reset to a new, lower murder rate in the middle of this decade.

Other things you might want to know (but are not immediately obvious) - the city of St. Louis has about half Baltimore's population, so you'd expect the data to be a bit noisier since the murder rate LSB in St. Louis is twice as large as in Baltimore.  DC is approximately the same size at this point (because Baltimore has lost a lot of population and DC is fairly steady) and Detroit is larger.  However, I'd expect a big upward revision in Detroit's per capita murder rate because they are losing population fast enough that my "re-use the 2007 population estimate" makes the denominator too big.

Finally, it's kind of interesting how rock-steady the national murder rate has been this decade.  It's varied from 5.5 to 5.7 - which is actually way down from the mid-1980's (when it was over 8 for a few years).  When you look at the time-series data from the 1980's to the present you really start to appreciate the drop in violent crime nationwide.  This is probably why your parents worry so much about you living in the city.  Their concept of urban crime was set a generation ago, when it was objectively more dangerous to live anywhere!

As I said in my previous post, 2008 was a good year for Baltimore in terms of murders.  We were 3.28 sigma below the 2000-2007 average for total murders (although, due to the vagaries of population estimates and a falling population we were only 1.62 sigma lower than average for the per capita murder rate).  It'd sure be nice to say that 2008 was statistically significant and that something has really changed in Baltimore - that what the police are doing different is definitely working - but the first nine days of 2009 sure haven't helped (12 murders plus a shooting victim on life support).

The problem here is that for all the good work that the police may have done in 2008, 2-3 very violent months (November to now) could spell real trouble.  Many people have criticized the Baltimore Police for jumping from strategy to strategy.  If murders stay high for another 2 months, even if it's not necessarily out of trend for the last decade, there will be pressure on the police to change tactics yet again.  Those crime rate graphs are powerful tools but as the platitude goes, with great power comes great responsibility.  It is very, very easy to make a graph say whatever you'd like.

Working in a technical field, I see plots of things ALL the time.  Even though your natural instinct is to look a the pretty lines or bars or whatever, you have to train yourself to first look at the axes, at the units, at the title, and then ask whoever made the graph "Where did you get your data?"  Or "How did you calculate x?"  Contrary to popular belief, measured data is not the end-all, be-all of engineering.  Probably about half of all charts of measured data I see have some sort of fatal problem.  That's when you start to see who the really good engineers are.  The good engineers look a plot of data, even measured data, and if it doesn't match up to what their technical intuition says reality ought to look like they'll just say "I don't believe that, I think there's something wrong with the measurement."  So after arguing about it for half an hour, someone will agree to go back and remeasure.  A bad cal on the measurement equipment, a loose connector, operator misunderstood directions, measured from the wrong datum, measured the wrong channel, measured the wrong serial number, forgot to turn on the coolant, error in the test software, error in the spreadsheet math, test equipment not sensitive enough... the list of things that can go wrong in a measurement is endless.

So what does that have to do with anything?  My point is that we're measuring physical properties at my workplace.  I mean, these are things that are governed by physics, things that can't change.  The most important thing to remember in engineering is that those measurements aren't the truth, if you're lucky you get a picture of what the truth probably looks like.  So I figure that maybe half of all graphs of measured physical data are misleading or do not tell the whole truth (eventually you get there, but it takes a few iterations).  Now we're talking about something that is not governed by a physical, or even rational, process.  We're talking about violent crime and murder, so a short-term spike gets noticed.  Even if it were just truly random process, sometimes you get a clump, the human brain tries to see patterns in randomness.  But it's hard to adjust your mind to the idea that "Yeah, even if this were random, we could get 12 murders in 9 days," it's an emotional issue that skips over that logical part of your brain.  People see 12 murders in 9 days and think "Surely this is a trend!  This is a crisis!"  But it doesn't have to be.  It could just be a random coincidence.  Just looking at the graph doesn't tell you the story.

Finally, murders are not caused by a mechanistic, or even rational, process.  So to some extent, saying "We followed X police procedure and saw a Y% reduction in murders" is a worthless statement.  There's a correlation all right, but is there a causal relationship?  Murders are not one of those things that you can afford to have a control in your experiment (not that there are not advanced statistical methods that professionals can use to evaluate procedures that do a better job of controlling for other variables).  My advice would be to take a look at how other forms of crime change, because some crimes are more rational that others.  I may yet do this, but I'm also afraid that any improvements made by the Baltimore PD might be swamped out by the huge effect of the recession and increased unemployment.  

Overall, I sure hope that they give Bealefield a little while longer to apply his strategies before forcing him to change to something new.  I like a lot of the much-reported ideas (closer work with the state's attorney and US district attorney, sending repeat gun offenders away to federal prison for longer sentences, working harder to prevent domestic violence before it turns into assault/murder, focusing on arrest warrants for violent offenders) and would like to see how they turn out.

Ok, time for one last chart even though I've said about graphs and statistics are often misleading (every engineer can tell you about the time they passed some product because 4 out of 10 tested perfect only to find out later that 5 of the other 6 would have failed).  I mean, despite all their drawbacks, a good plot or graph can sure be interesting.

(On the plot above I am counting murderous acts that occur in that year, so if someone dies of injuries sustained in prior year violence they are not counted.  Since I have this all in a file now, if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I will update my 2008 murder count instead of 2009 (this is the opposite of how Baltimore's PD (and I think the UCR) count murders)).

PS - I spent so much time on this post, I made a PDF version of it that is easier to read.

Baltimore - Less Deadly, Still Dangerous

So now that Baltimore has closed out it's least-deadly year in a couple decades, it's time to reflect on what it means.  I'll spare you most of the details, they've been pretty well reported by the The Sun and the AP.  2008 saw only 234 murders in Baltimore City, which is a considerable improvement from 2007 (282) and the lowest tally since the 1980's.  However, in the same breath we should mention that shootings and other violent crime are not down and property crime has slightly increased.  However, it's a new year, why not focus on the bright side?  (Because 2009's murder #1 occurred less than an hour into 2009?)

I think there is also a little further cause to view the 234 number a little optimistically.  In that number there are 6 deaths that occurred in 2008 but were due to wounds that occurred in a previous year.  Yes, that's consistent to how things have been counted in the past, but 6 is a pretty anomaly.  The fact that there were only 228 events that resulted in a death in 2008 makes me a little hopeful.  We're still the third deadliest city in the US (behind St. Louis and Detroit, but not by much), but progress is progress.

Anyway, it certainly sounds like Bealefield (Baltimore City Police Commissioner) is doing a pretty good job.  His programs to curb violent crime started in fall 2007 and if everyone remembers, we were on track for 300 murders in '07 until they started to tail off in the fall.  November and December 2008 were particularly bad, but it sort seems like they might be able to make some progress on this.  Also, you gotta like his style: on New Year's Eve he chased down and apprehended two suspects with sawed-off shotguns!  That's right, he not only goes on patrol, but he was willing to chase a couple guys with guns.

Here's a little chart I've made that shows how murders progressed during the year.  I think I'll probably update it once in awhile when I'm curious as to how we're doing against last year's numbers.

(Source for Data:  Baltimore Crime Blog)

As you can see from that chart, June, November, and December were all really bad months for murders in this city.  I just made this chart in Google Documents (yes, I'm too cheap for Excel at home), but I think that in the future I'll pretty it up a little.  It'd sure be nice to see the 2009 line underneath the 2008 one.

Also, I think a really interesting chart that I want to make is "Trailing Twelve Months Murders" which ought to reflect any changes to the murder rate more effectively.  However, since I only have enough initiative to get data as far back as Jan 1, 2008, that chart will have to wait until later.

You know, another thing that you shouldn't discount:  2008 was a leap year.  At our current murder rate, you'd expect ~1 extra murder in a leap year.

What is a crime worth reporting?

The Baltimore Sun has a pretty good op-ed explanation on when a crime is considered "serious" enough to be reported by the BPD.  The example they use is the "discharge of a firearm" that occurred recently in Canton but won't show up on any of their crime reports because no one was hit with a bullet.

I agree with the columnist, why can't the BPD publish a map that is updated every 24 hours that has a short blurb about each incident that has occurred, even things as small as property crime and firearm discharging.  It's not a huge technological hurdle and everyone knows that they are tracking this data.  Why not make it public information?

Good While it Lasted

Well folks, it was good while it lasted. From September 28th through October 5th, no one was murdered in Baltimore. That's right, for the first time in two years the city went a full week without a homicide. That ended on Friday night, as homicide number 232 was logged on Eutaw Place.

So, based on the latest information, 234 murders (as of 10/7) in 291 days is 0.8 murders/day (or 4 murders every 5 days). But from that point on, there are only 76 days left in the year, which puts us on pace for 293 to 294 murders. Sadly, that's good news, as Baltimore was widely predicted to reach 300 murders this year.

The acting police commissioner and the mayor have been jumping all over the lull in the violence (see video from WJZ story), claiming that their new policies are having an effect. Personally, I'll believe it when I see it. Actually, I lead a very charmed life for Baltimore, so I don't really see it. There's been 1 murder in my neighborhood (researched using this website) in the last two years and that was on the other side of the neighborhood at that. There are blocks in Baltimore with multiple homicides this year!

When you look at that Sun article, the most amazing thing is the list of murder-free streaks for 2006 and 2007. Twice we've gone six days, and 8 times we've gone five days. That's it, in the last 21 months, 630+ days, there have been only 11 periods of five or more days without a murder. I can't imagine what it's like living in the rougher neighborhoods of this city, imagine the stress of knowing that a shooting could take place any minute. How much longer can people live like that? What's the next step?

A Drug Deal

So I just witnessed my first drug deal. You might think it's funny to have lived in Baltimore for nearly 7 years and have never seen a complete drug transaction, but that was me until tonight. It's like living in Hawaii but never seeing the beach...you're surrounded by it, how could you miss it?

You might ask why I'm still awake at nearly 3 AM. Well, I had a few drinks and was reminded of a website I had stumbled upon earlier - tuckermax.com. Being that I'm drunk and the guy has some interesting stories (which I'm willing to believe are at least 50% true, the world is a terrible place), I kept reading stories. They're like car crashes, you can't look away (especially if you're drunk).

Anyway, I was about to get some sleep when I heard some voices out my window (it's hot, I'm cheap, no air conditioning yet). Peering through my blinds I see three men across the street. A skinny white guy, a kind of balding white guy and a black guy with kind of an afro. Every time a car would pass (like every 15 seconds for a bit), they would stop talking and pretend to be doing anything but transacting business (seriously, like inspecting the gutter or admiring a tree). Eventually they transacted their bullshit and all parted ways. It seemed like the drugs must have been hidden under the parked car across the street (as the black guy disappeared behind the car for a few seconds after giving the skinny white guy something).

The thing that brings this all home is that my car is parked across the street too. For all I know those fuckers are hiding drugs under my fender as well.

I love this city a lot of times. I've had some really great times here, I've got some good friends, and it's a nice, relaxed kind of place compared to like DC or NYC. But I can't stand the crime.

Does it make me a horrible person to really hate the corner boys? I mean, not just in the "I wish that they weren't around my neighborhood" kind of way but in the "I would personally be pleased if harm were to befall them." I know that it's wrong to feel that way, but they're actively working to make the world a worse place. I suppose it's some sort of primeval instinct for a man to protect his home, because as I watched that drug deal, I just wanted to beat the shit out of all the participants. All the times I've been worried about walking alone at night, all the times I've had to walk my female friends home or to their cars, for every time I've had a friend get their car broken into, I could finally see an undeniably deserving target for my anger. If only I could take a baseball bat to those assholes for what they do to the neighborhood.

But I won't. Because I don't own a baseball bat or because there are three of them and one of me. Or really because I abide by laws. Because I want to believe that I'm different from them and the only way to do that is to not sink to their level of senseless violence.

Fuck them, they're all assholes, I'm going to sleep.

Degenerate Dirtbags Strike!

So here's another story of Baltimore ruining your best attempts to be an upbeat human:

This morning was starting off well, until I got to my car. I must have left a door unlocked, because someone had gotten into the car without breaking a window. They took many things of value (or seemingly of value), here's a quick rundown:

• XM Satellite Radio Receiver (worthless to them, it has a unique ID and can never be reactivated by anyone but me)
• Bluetooth Hands-Free Set (cost to me, ~$80)
  
• A bunch of CD's (I have all the music on my computer, so I can burn replacements)
• My backpack (annoying, but it's a few years old)
• 3 12-packs of soda, about 18 loose cans of soda, half a box of "Famous Amos" cookies, and a bunch of single serving potato chips
• A kitchen knife that I'd left in my car by accident

Paradoxically, they did not steal my car charger for my phone.

It's not really the kind of thing that actually hurts you financially. It's the kind of thing that pisses you off at humanity, or rather the trash that passes for humanity around here. Just some white trash kids from the neighborhood in a crime of opportunity I suspect.

I really feel like I have contributed something to this city by trying to live here as a professional and make it a better place and this is how its residents repay me. It's this sort of thing that makes me think that really, I don't care about improves this city. Sometimes, I just think that maybe these people deserve to live in the filth they've created for themselves.

Surprise!

Well, just to taunt me for last night, in the news today we learn that Baltimore is the 12th most dangerous city in America.

The police commissioner was on the television news saying that they "Know what the problem is and what's driving these statistics and are working to reduce them." Unfortunately, despite the fact that they know what the problems are, they aren't sharing that knowledge with the general public. This comes despite the fact that the police commissioner also stated that the police "Know what they needed to do." A cynical person might be suspicious of these claims without some sort of evidence to back it up.

Fuck Baltimore

Well, I suppose that it was bound to happen sooner or later. I live in Baltimore. I've lived here for almost six years. Tonight I was held up at gunpoint for the first time. Not in my neighborhood, but near an area where I used to live (West Side of Downtown).

It was just past midnight (Sunday night). My roommates and I were leaving a friend's birthday party. We are just reaching the car (parked in front of 701 W. Pratt St.), one guy is opening it up. I see a guy on a bike riding along on the sidewalk. Right as I am opening the door to the car, he pulls up, leans his bike against the wall and starts to reach into his back waistband. As soon as I saw him reaching into his back waistband I was like "Oh fuck, are you serious?" Yeah, it was a gun. Revolver. Small caliber, possibly even .22 caliber. I had my wallet out in a flash. All he wanted was cash, thankfully. I had about $24. My one roommate had about $40. My other roommate was in the car and didn't at first realize what was going on. The guy actually pointed the gun at him and yelled at him to turn the car off. He only had $6 in cash. The guy was pretty pissed about this, but my roommate in the car threw out the wallet, so the guy could see that he wasn't hiding anything. He patted me down (I offered my change and cell phone) and my other roommate who was outside the car. Then he told us to "roll out" and got back on his bike.

It sucks, I've definitely been in that situation a hundred times before and will probably be in it many times more. It's nighttime, there's an African-American man in dark clothing (in this case a hood) approaching (in this case on bicycle). It flashes through your mind "should I be concerned?" and then you think "no, you're being paranoid and maybe racist." Then, this time, he fucking pulls a gun on you and takes your money.

I think that might actually be the last straw for me. Next summer I'm probably moving. It will be time to reevaluate city living versus the suburbs. I have to be honest, I never want this to happen to me again. I absolutely want to do everything in my power to make sure this never happens to my girlfriend or anyone important to me. If I have to move to the suburbs to make that happen, then I suppose it's a small price to pay.

PS - Baltimore Police were very professional about it. Although they did spend a little time, not quite out of ear shot, trying to decide if they could stick this one on another jurisdiction.