Earlier: Good News: Murder Is Down, Bad News—Still Well Above Any Year In This Century Before George Floyd’s Death
Back on January 4, 2023 I wrote in Taki’s Magazine:
I’ve got some good news and some bad news about murder in 2022.
The good news: Urban homicides appear to have dropped in 2022 around 5 percent versus 2021.
The bad news: That marginal progress only gets us back to the brutal level of 2020, the first year of the ongoing “racial reckoning,” when homicides exploded by a record 30 percent over 2019.
Because I’m too impatient to wait around until the second half of 2023 for 2022’s official federal crime statistics to be released by the FBI and CDC, I just now created a convenience sample of 2022 homicide counts in 47 cities.
The CDC’s WONDER database of causes of all the deaths in America puts a six month embargo on reporting statistics for certain types of death, such as homicides and motor vehicle accidents, to allow for investigations. For example, did the pedestrian killed in a parking lot die in a random accident or did the driver intentionally run him over?
I appreciate the CDC’s caution in not rushing to a conclusion about individual fatal incidents like these, but a six month lag on reporting the kinds of deaths that ought to be most important to policymakers is a big problem. So in recent years I’ve been going through local newspaper articles that traditionally come out between December 26 and January 4 in which a reporter calls up the cops to find out how many homicides there were in the city in the year just ending.
It’s quick and dirty and focused on bigger cities, but it works pretty well at predicting national trends. Thus, today, more than six months after my Taki’s column, the CDC finally released homicide death data from December 2022. And it turns out that my five percent decline estimate was really good: total national homicide deaths in 2022 were down 5.3% versus 2022.
UCD – ICD-10 113 Cause List: #Assault (homicide) (*U01-*U02,X85-Y09,Y87.1)
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| 2018 | 18,715 | 327,167,434 | 5.7 | ||||||||||||||
| 2019 | 19,074 | 328,239,523 | 5.8 | ||||||||||||||
| 2020 | 24,916 | 329,484,123 | 7.6 | ||||||||||||||
| 2021 | 25,979 | 331,893,745 | 7.8 | ||||||||||||||
| 2022 (provisional) | 24,620 | 331,893,745 | 7.4 | ||||||||||||||
| 2023 (provisional and partial) | 0 | 331,893,745 | Unreliable | ||||||||||||||
| Total | 113,304 | 1,980,572,315 | 5.7 |
While there was less carnage in 2022 than in 2021, homicide deaths remain 29% more numerous in 2022 than back in the Good Old Days of 2019 before the George Floyd Racial Reckoning.
