Thirty-One Dead in Saint Paul, 2019

It looks like I haven't mentioned that Saint Paul just experienced its highest number of homicides ever, by a significant margin.

Homicides in Saint Paul, 2012–2019


(Graph by DN3 based on data from St. Paul Police Department and the Star Tribune... that's our city's population shown at bottom, below the 2012 and 2018 year marks.)

I can't lay my hands on stats from earlier than 2012, but generally, even at the crime peak in the mid-1990s, I've read that the number of homicides was around these types of lower numbers, and the rate (relative to our population, which was significantly lower then) may also have been lower than it is now. Our 2019 rate is around 10 per 100,000 (with 31 deaths and about 310,000 people). Compare that rate to the 2018 rates per 100,000 in other U.S. cities here.

It was hard not to be reminded of this today when I opened the Star Tribune to this page in the Metro section:


It pictures each person killed and gives a brief synopsis of their cause of death. From it, I have compiled these summaries of our lost people of 2019*:

• 1 Black woman
• 3 Black boys (two preschoolers, one 17-year-old)
• 3 Latino men
• 2 or 3 white men
• 21 or 22 Black men (note: there is one man whose photo makes it hard to determine whether he is Black or white)

Of the 31 deaths, 28 of the people were shot with a gun. So I think it's pretty clear that if guns were less available, we would have less death in Saint Paul. Yes, young men were beefing with each other, or fighting over territory or drugs or honor something... but if they didn't have guns, they most likely wouldn't be dead.

The circumstances or places of their deaths were as follows:

• 3 from domestic violence (one child, one woman, one man... one of those with a gun)
• 1 manslaughter (parent left a child in a car that was too hot)
• 1 shot by a cop in disputed circumstances (involving mental illness, most likely)
• 2 when someone was "playing" with a loaded gun at a house or party
• 5 shot in a house (some of which were during parties)
• 6 shot while on a street or in an alley
• 1 shot at a park
• 1 shot outside a bar
• 1 shot as he left a business where he worked
• 2 shot at a gas station
• 8 shot while they were inside a car, van, or SUV

Of all of the charged killers at this point, I recall from other stories I have read that just two were women, though there could be more since that is not totally clear from the information given on the page. Eight cases have no charges filed at this point, making for a 74.2% clearance rate, which I guess is higher than the national average, but seems unacceptably low. Low clearance rates feed a vicious cycle, undermining public willingness to cooperate with investigations.

* All gender and race/ethnicity assessments are my guesses based on a black and white photo on newsprint. I apologize for errors and welcome corrections. Ages were provided with the photos.

__

Here's a 2016 post about homicides in the east metro area (three counties), when there were 37 homicides total, half in Saint Paul, with some similar analysis.