Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities
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MILWAUKEE — Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.
More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/murder-rates-rising-sharply-in-many-us-cities.html
Just for context, Baltimore's population is a pimple on the ass of a city the size of New York or even Chicago.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/scare-headlines-exaggerated-the-u-s-crime-wave/
The general idea is this: Assume the 2014 homicide rate is the true rate and then calculate how much of a statistical outlier this year’s rate is. If the 2015 rate would have arisen by chance alone less than 5 percent of the time, we deem it statistically meaningful.3 In 16 of the 59 cities, there was a significant increase; we’d expect about three cities to show an increase that big by chance alone. In two cities — Boston and Arlington — there was a significant decrease.
That means that most cities have not shown a significant increase in homicides over the last year. But the overall increase of the cities is highly statistically significant. It’s the same principle that governs the interpretation of a national presidential poll: The sample of respondents in any one state could be so small that there isn’t enough data to say where the race stands there, even if together the states give one candidate a big nationwide lead.
Nonetheless, there are some big reasons not to assume that crime is on a long-term increase. While a 16 percent increase in U.S. major-city homicides is statistically significant, it comes after decades of declines — the murder rate fell by more than half nationally from its peak in 1980 to 2012.