http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/fbi-detroit-has-n...
For comparison's sake, Chicago's homicide rate in 2016 is 27.8:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-homicide-spikes-c...
It's true that Detroit's homicide/violent crime number is at historic lows, but that tracks with the rest of the country.
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/MI8...
While Chicago has notably huge upticks from 2014 through 2016, they're also still at relative historic lows compared to past decades. And even with the dramatic upticks in 2015 and 2016 (crime rates appear to drop in 2017), Chicago is still well below Detroit's rates:
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/ILC...
I'm sure poverty and demographics, nor the police force and policy, aren't the only factors when comparing NYC and Chicago, although they are easier to quantify.
I really wish crime statistics would be broken down by apparent motive (if known). That might actually tell us something.
One of the reasons racial ghettos have such an effect on crime is that violence can be driven by young people who can see opportunity near them, and who believe they don’t have access to those opportunities.
Understandable don’t you think? And it doesn’t require a culture of criminality. Just visibility into a differential of access.
As a side note, I hear this “culture of criminality” idea a lot, but I haven’t seen any science around it. Can you point me in the right direction?
"Detroit has the second highest murder rate in the United States"
violent crime is down everywhere in the US, so it is still useful to see the relative ranking to other cities
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
is the point.
Via the FBI's UCR tool which has data from 1985-2014: https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/Local/RunCrimeJuris...
Unfortunately I can't deeplink to pages so here are screenshots:
- Detroit having ~300 homicides is very good compared to the ~400 homicides it had in 2000. However, that doesn't quite match up to its population decline. The homicide rate in 2000 was ~41.6 per 100K, compared to 43+ in 2014 (and 2015 and 2016 I think).
- Meanwhile, Chicago's 2014 homicide rate was 15.2. In 2015, it was 17.5. And in 2016, it jumped to 27.8 [0]
That jump is a huge jump compared to historic trends. But still a relative low for Chicago when considering 1990-forward. According to the Tribune's homicide tracker, the number of homicides in 2016 was 792 [1]. In 2017, it's tracking to be 664 homicides, which would be a rate of ~23/100K. Still not great but seems too early to say that Chicago is on an unchanging course of increasing crime. And it doesn't make much sense to argue but what about Detroit? when comparing Chicago to NYC.
[0] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-homicide-spikes-c...
So how does that explain Detroit, which has more poverty than Chicago, but also has a NYC-like downswing in homicides?
In metro Detroit, 49% of African Americans who are poor are living in census tracts where at least 40% of the residents are poor, the highest rate among the Top 25 metro areas