Over the last few days, the Wall Street Journal has run these two extended articles under the label "Murder in America":
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"What Makes Cities More Dangerous: Neighborhoods where killings have gone up share deepening poverty, lots of vacant properties and police pullbacks following officers’ shootings of young black men"
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"What Makes Cities Safer: Killings fell in Los Angeles and Washington when police established closer ties with people living in the most violent neighborhoods; gentrification also played a role in Washington"
Meanwhile, the largest city in the US is making the largest headlines with its smallest body count ever. Via Slate here, "New York City Set to Have Fewer Murders This Year Than Any Year Since the City Began Keeping Track":
Just days from the end of 2017, New York City is set to tally a record low number of murders for the year and serious crime, more generally, will have declined for the 27th straight year. As of Wednesday, 286 murders had been committed in the city, putting New York on pace to dip below its previous homicide low of 333 in 2014. To give some perspective to how far the murder rate has dropped in the city over the past several decades, the New York Times notes this year’s murder rate is on the verge of being “the lowest since reliable records have been kept,” an unthinkable turnaround from 1990 when there were 2,245 killings in New York City.
Other types of major felony crimes — manslaughter, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and car thefts — have fallen since last year and, put together, are also likely to close out the year at historic lows. The nearly 95,000 major felony crimes committed so far this year is on pace to best last year’s record low of 101,716. In 1990, by contrast, there were 527,000 major felony crimes recorded in New York City.
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