How many murders are commited in big cities (say New YorK) on a weekly average? How many of these murders are solved?
My buddy asked me after watching an episode of “The Sopranos” and commented on how everybody was “getting away with murder” all the time.
I assumed it happened all the time in big cities. I remember hearing a stat when the DC area snipers were clipping people last fall there were 90+ other unrealted murders in the same time frame in the same area!
MtM
Ugh. Such a cavalier expression to refer to murder. Your approach to the issue is a disincentive to help you find your information.
A good start for researching this sort of thing is the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Things like violent crime rates vary a lot between cities. Over the past two decades, homicide rates in the US have gone down considerably, including in large cities.
According to Homicide Victimization Rates per 100,000 Population for Cities over 100,000 by Population Group, in 2000, the homicide rate per 100,000 people was pretty constant accross city sizes at about 14 per 100,000 in cities ranging from 250,000 to 1,000,000+ people. Smaller than that, and the rate drops to about 9 in 100,000.
That’s for all such cities in the US.
You can also take a look at regional breakdown of homicide data.
Sorry to offend you and others CC, I was still in “Soprano” speak mode.
MtM
Don’t forget to include missing person reports. Because if no one finds the body, that’s what the victim is.
According to this fbi page, the national clearance rate (percentage of investigations ending in arrest) for murder in 1999 was 69%, higher than for any other crime (burglary had a clearance rate of only 14%).
McDeath_the_Mad writes:
> I remember hearing a stat when the DC area snipers were
> clipping people last fall there were 90+ other unrealted
> murders in the same time frame in the same area!
In what area? In what time frame? The name “The DC-Area Snipers” is rather deceptive in the first place. Only one of the murders happened in D.C. itself, and that was only because the snipers shot a bunch of people in Montgomery Country (Maryland) in one day and barely crossed over into D.C. (and that murder was in a well-off neighborhood of D.C., not at all the “bad neighborhood” where you probably picture murders as happening). The murders were spread over a huge area and not a single one happened in the middle of a city. One of them was in Virginia 90 miles from D.C. (And, furthermore, the snipers were from the West Coast and had driven across the country, killing a couple of people before even getting to the D.C. area.)
If you were to include everything within a circle centered on Washington, D.C. with a 90-mile radius, that area would be something like 15 million people. That’s about 5% of the population of the U.S. I forget for how long the murders went on. One month? Two months? So that’s about 10% of the year for about 5% of the U.S. population. During the percent of the year for that percentage of the U.S. population, you would expect about .05 times .10 times about 20,000 murders, which is about 100 murders. (There are about 20,000 murders every year in the U.S., only a small proportion of which are serial/mass/spree killings.) So it’s not surprising if there were more than 90 other murders in the area at the time. In general, the murders that get into the national news are not typical murders.