All are de facto legal gun-free zones.
Via WACH:
A new study of crime statistics from major cities across the country reveals a rising number of murders in 2015, with violence in three cities fueling half of that increase.
Crime data for the 30 largest cities in the U.S. released by the Brennan Center for Justice indicates a 13.3 percent rise in murders in 2015, but analysts say it is too soon to determine whether this reflects a broader trend. They also note that the murder rate is still slightly lower than it was in 2012.
However, Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former Baltimore police officer, said the double-digit increase is significant. The last time the murder rate rose by more than 10 percent was 1971.
“It’s a historic increase,” he said. “Might it be a one year blip? Yeah, maybe, but the magnitude is just too large to assume it’s a random fluctuation.”
About half of the increase in murders is attributed to Baltimore (up 63 percent), Chicago (13 percent), and Washington, DC (51 percent). Violent crime reports in general ticked up 3.1 percent in 2015, largely due to substantial increases in Los Angeles (up 25 percent), Baltimore (19 percent), and Charlotte (16 percent).
While crime rates mostly remain considerably lower than 10 or 20 years ago, the murder rates in Chicago and Washington have reverted to the levels they were at in 2012 and 2007, respectively. Baltimore’s murder rate is now as high as it was in the early 1990s.
In Chicago, at least, the numbers have gotten even worse in 2016. For the first three months of the year, murders increased 72 percent compared to the same period in 2015, and shootings were up 88 percent, according to police department statistics.
Brennan Center analysts could not draw definitive conclusions about why those cities produced more murders in 2015, but they all have falling populations, higher poverty rates, and higher unemployment than the national average. That “economic deterioration” may be a factor.
“While this suggests cause for concern in some cities, murder rates vary widely from year to year, and there is little evidence of a national coming wave in violent crime,” the authors wrote. “These serious increases seem to be localized, rather than part of a national pandemic.”