Localizing the Homicide Rate

Just before Christmas, I wrote a post about comparative homicide rates in the 20th century in the U.S. and the UK, which contained a graph.

Recently, the Star Tribune carried a graph of homicide rates in Saint Paul from 1976 to the present, so I thought I would try to overlay it on the other graph to see how it compared.

It's a bit of a mess because, even though they're both at per-100,000 population rates, the visual scales of the graphs are different, so I had to vertically stretch the shorter timeframe of the Star Tribune graph to fit it into the national graph. And then I had to find additional data for the 21st century (at least for the U.S. homicide rate) to have some kind of comparison for the last couple of decades.

Here's what I came up with:

I don't know what Saint Paul's homicide rate was like before 1976, but when the U.S was experiencing part of its peak in the late 1970s up through 1990, Saint Paul was not experiencing that. 

And then, conversely, it exceeded the rate for several of the early years of the 1990s, at the exact time the rate dropped nationally. For the most part, even at our run of lower rates in the 2000s and 2010s, we have been above the U.S. average (though most of those numbers are low for U.S. cities, I believe). 

Starting in 2019 — before Covid, notably — there was an increase, with the highest year in 2022, higher than any year since 1976, at least.

2023 began what we hope was a drop, but that remains to be seen. Police and policy-makers are taking credit for it, of course, and I won't mind that if the decline continues. Though if the rate drops nationwide it will be hard to see it as a local effect.