City Murder Rates

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Definitely Canadianesque or Europeanesque.

Lincoln Square is one of the least violent neighborhoods in chicago.

my guess is that there are hundreds of neighborhoods in european cities that don't ever see a single homicide for years and years on end.

but it is kinda strange just how wildly the rates can vary in a city like Chicago when you dive into the smaller Community Area geographic units.


Lincoln Square: 1.9 per 100K

and then just 6 miles south of us:

Garfield Park: ~190 per 100K



that's a difference of TWO orders of magnitude!

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Lincoln Square is one of the least violent neighborhoods in chicago.

my guess is that there are hundreds of neighborhoods in european cities that don't ever see a single homicide for years and years on end.

but it is kind strange how wildly the rates can vary in a city like Chicago when you dive into smaller Community Area geographic units.


Lincoln Square: 1.9 per 100K

and then just 6 miles south of us:

Garfield Park: ~190 per 100K



that's a difference of TWO orders of magnitude!

Two different countries doesn't quite describe it. More like two different worlds.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by The North One

The only big cities in the US that have a significantly higher homicide rate than Chicago are much less than one half or one fourth the size of Chicago city proper. The rate is really not comparable, especially when Chicago's land area is utterly massive which helps a lot in bringing it down.

ok, how about this comparison then?


The City of Philadelphia: 134 sq. miles | 2020 pop: 1,603,797 | 2020 homicides: 499 | rate: 31.1 per 100K

The Southside of Chicago: 118 sq. miles | 2020 pop: 1,033,062 | 2020 homicides: 437 | rate: 42.3 per 100K

The City of Detroit: 139 sq. miles | 2020 pop: 639,111 | 2020 homicides: 327 | rate: 51.6 per 100K


so even when we take away the "safe" northside, chicago is still not some massive violence outlier within the US like you seem to think it is.

it just posts very big aggregate numbers because, unlike most of america's other very violent cities, chicago is freaking huge with some 2.75M people.

[KevinFromTexas]

2006 was an unusual year even for Austin. We had just 20 murders that year and we had 4 separate months that year without a single murder. Here lately, though, we've had up to 2 or 3 a day sometimes. That would have been unheard of a few years ago even as the number of murders every year has been climbing. I don't think population growth can be directly blamed since Austin's population has increased every year since its founding, and our population tends to double every 20 years.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by Chisouthside

LA county with a population of about the same as the Chicago metro is around 700 as well, cant find the exact numbers yet. The city of LA numbers are much lower than Chicago though. Probably the closest to Chicago and Im sure in some years their total is higher

Originally Posted by badrunner

You could probably gerrymander some high crime districts in LA county and get populations and crime rates that match St. Louis or Baltimore, but not Chicago.

For historical context the record for LA county is 2589 murders in 1992. Also in that decade the city of LA had multiple years with 1000+ murders, making it the most violent city in America. It was wild.

According to the LA Times' homicide tracker, 796 people have been killed in Los Angeles County (2020 population 10,014,009) in the last 12 months. It is unclear how many of those were in calendar year 2021.

And then there's the MSA issue--it's easy finding and adding Orange County's population (3,186,989 in 2020) to the mix, but I can't find a murder tracker for OC. It is very likely lower than LA County's, though, and thus most likely significantly lowers the LA MSA's overall murder rate.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by badrunner

You could probably gerrymander some high crime districts in LA county and get populations and crime rates that match St. Louis or Baltimore, but not Chicago.

For historical context the record for LA county is 2589 murders in 1992. Also in that decade the city of LA had multiple years with 1000+ murders, making it the most violent city in America. It was wild.

New York and environs probably had more that year. Nyc alone was at 2300-2500 murders a year back then. Then you had places like Newark, Patterson, Jersey city etc.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by craigs

According to the LA Times' homicide tracker, 796 people have been killed in Los Angeles County (2020 population 10,014,009) in the last 12 months. It is unclear how many of those were in calendar year 2021.

And then there's the MSA issue--it's easy finding and adding Orange County's population (3,186,989 in 2020) to the mix, but I can't find a murder tracker for OC. It is very likely lower than LA County's, though, and thus most likely significantly lowers the LA MSA's overall murder rate.

I think oc is in the 70s.

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by Qubert

Anarchy as a political and social philosophy in the end always has this contridiction to it: If I can "stop" you from doing something *or* "make" you do something is it really anarchy? What defines a "state", since pre-modern societies most certainly had codes of conduct, hierarchies, and notions of group responsiblity. Even during the hunter-gatherer period tribes most certainly made sure whoever was responsible for pitching the tent, hunting, rearing the children, etc got that done. Period. The groups survival depended on it.

Originally Posted by Acajack

Yup. And of course even in more primitive times there were defended "borders" of a sort that delimited a certain group's hunting territory, for example.

Any time one has any kind of societal organization (even the most rudimentary ones) you'll inevitably get borders or limits.

And this is all related to my point about how the currently popular view that somehow borders are unnatural, artificial and unjust modern constructs is debunked by the history of humans and how we've always organized ourselves to live together in groups.

Interesting discussion of hunter-gatherer political life and its implications for contemporary anarchist politics! Unfortunately, I think you both make some bad assumptions about hunter-gatherers. To begin with, you both assume one can broadly generalize about "the hunter-gatherer period" (that is, some 2 million years!) or "how we've always organized ourselves to live together in groups." If you ever took an anthropology course you'd realize there are a gazillion ways humans can and do organize ourselves to live together. Some hierarchical, some not. Some based on rules (with consequences for breaking them), others not. Some based on defending borders, others not.

A great many hunter-gatherer societies known to Western observers in modern times, such as the Iroquois, the Huron and some Plains Indians in North America, in fact operated on the principle that every adult (and child, to some degree) is always free to do exactly as he or she pleases. There was simply no means of violent coercion available to chieftains, elders, husbands or to anybody else. This is what most shocked early European observers. Other groups, like the Cheyenne, lived under the rule of law during only part of the year (the buffalo hunt) and enjoyed complete freedom and autonomy during the rest.

A correlate of this freedom is the extraordinary mobility of hunter-gatherers. Far from jealously defending "their" territory, they often roam over vast distances, treat outsiders with generosity and leave their own band to join another as often as they wish. Any accurate map (e.g. this one) will show plenty of overlap between the "territories" of different groups; in practice, this meant bands tended to be diverse and cosmopolitan. So cosmopolitan, in fact, that pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer North America had to develop a lingua franca, Plains Indian Sign Language, shared by speakers of dozens of languages spread over at least a million square miles (shaded crimson on the map below).



Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador, gave a proof of the mobility inherent in native hunter-gatherer societies. After being shipwrecked on Galveston Island in 1528, he adopted local customs, became a healer, attracted a band of native followers and led them on a meandering journey through the plains and deserts of Texas, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Durango, then down the Pacific Coast, eventually reaching Mexico City after eight years. Needless to say, he did not meet any borders to bar his way; on the contrary, he and his followers survived for eight years on the hospitality of the hunter-gatherer tribes they encountered.

Some folks in the "history of humans" have been trapped by borders, fettered by serfdom, prevented by laws or superstitions or inertia from ever travelling far from home. Others throughout history have enjoyed the privilege to roam the world as they pleased. Even in medieval Europe, people commonly set off on long pilgrimages, followed the fairs, wandered as vagrants or troubadours, abandoned their farms and feudal obligations to settle in towns or went into the wilderness to become hermits, just as they fancied. The history of humans is vast.

[Acajack]

Toronto 75
Montréal 31

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Encolpius

Interesting discussion of hunter-gatherer political life and its implications for contemporary anarchist politics! Unfortunately, I think you both make some bad assumptions about hunter-gatherers. To begin with, you both assume one can broadly generalize about "the hunter-gatherer period" (that is, some 2 million years!) or "how we've always organized ourselves to live together in groups." If you ever took an anthropology course you'd realize there are a gazillion ways humans can and do organize ourselves to live together. Some hierarchical, some not. Some based on rules (with consequences for breaking them), others not. Some based on defending borders, others not.

A great many hunter-gatherer societies known to Western observers in modern times, such as the Iroquois, the Huron and some Plains Indians in North America, in fact operated on the principle that every adult (and child, to some degree) is always free to do exactly as he or she pleases. There was simply no means of violent coercion available to chieftains, elders, husbands or to anybody else. This is what most shocked early European observers. Other groups, like the Cheyenne, lived under the rule of law during only part of the year (the buffalo hunt) and enjoyed complete freedom and autonomy during the rest.

A correlate of this freedom is the extraordinary mobility of hunter-gatherers. Far from jealously defending "their" territory, they often roam over vast distances, treat outsiders with generosity and leave their own band to join another as often as they wish. Any accurate map (e.g. this one) will show plenty of overlap between the "territories" of different groups; in practice, this meant bands tended to be diverse and cosmopolitan. So cosmopolitan, in fact, that pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer North America had to develop a lingua franca, Plains Indian Sign Language, shared by speakers of dozens of languages spread over at least a million square miles (shaded crimson on the map below).



Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador, gave a proof of the mobility inherent in native hunter-gatherer societies. After being shipwrecked on Galveston Island in 1528, he adopted local customs, became a healer, attracted a band of native followers and led them on a meandering journey through the plains and deserts of Texas, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Durango, then down the Pacific Coast, eventually reaching Mexico City after eight years. Needless to say, he did not meet any borders to bar his way; on the contrary, he and his followers survived for eight years on the hospitality of the hunter-gatherer tribes they encountered.

Some folks in the "history of humans" have been trapped by borders, fettered by serfdom, prevented by laws or superstitions or inertia from ever travelling far from home. Others throughout history have enjoyed the privilege to roam the world as they pleased. Even in medieval Europe, people commonly set off on long pilgrimages, followed the fairs, wandered as vagrants or troubadours, abandoned their farms and feudal obligations to settle in towns or went into the wilderness to become hermits, just as they fancied. The history of humans is vast.

This is was a very interesting post.

That said, I hope you are not arguing that borders are basically a feature of modern states.

As you say, history is vast. There has always been an "us vs. them" mindset in humanity, and likely always will be.

There have been more benign, open practices in history and others that have been more rigidly insular (often horribly so). These have often co-existed simultaneously in the same era and even in the same geographic areas.

Also, while again as you say there are no hard and fast rules in human history I do think that in general the openness is more a feature of places with certain conditions such as an abundance of resources relative to population, and often a low population in general (positive effect on resource use and also on the ability to effectively control territory).

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Acajack

This is was a very interesting post.

That said, I hope you are not arguing that borders are basically a feature of modern states.

As you say, history is vast. There has always been an "us vs. them" mindset in humanity, and likely always will be.

There have been more benign, open practices in history and others that have been more rigidly insular (often horribly so). These have often co-existed simultaneously in the same era and even in the same geographic areas.

Also, while again as you say there are no hard and fast rules in human history I do think that in general the openness is more a feature of places with certain conditions such as an abundance of resources relative to population, and often a low population in general (positive effect on resource use and also on the ability to effectively control territory).

Been a while since my college anthro classes, but I think the rules based societies came about as human groups formed civilizations -- aka stationary settlements that originally developed around farming as a means of food production (instead of hunting and gathering). As people became stationary, it became necessary to create ideas of personal property and ownership, and thus rules.

[ilcapo]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Toronto 75
Montréal 31

As Montreal tend to have relative low rates, i guess these are numbers for the Metro? 31 seems high for the City Proper.

[mrnyc]

nyc
thru nov 7, 2021

murder
2021 = 407
2020 = 417
change = -2.4%

as for other crimes --

burglary is way down, transit crime is down and shooting vics are slightly down
everything else is up
none-rape other sex crimes and hate crimes are way up

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I hope you are not arguing that borders are basically a feature of modern states.

As you say, history is vast. There has always been an "us vs. them" mindset in humanity, and likely always will be.

No, I'm not arguing that. Not all societies stake out and defend territory (some have no concept of territory; no word for it in their language); but there almost certainly were some prehistoric groups who did. Even in modern times, some hunter-gather societies are territorial and others aren't.

You may be right that some sort of 'us vs them' mindset is primal at a conceptual level (we define ourselves in contrast to them). But this hardly means that xenophobia is universal.

Originally Posted by Acajack

Also, while again as you say there are no hard and fast rules in human history I do think that in general the openness is more a feature of places with certain conditions such as an abundance of resources relative to population, and often a low population in general (positive effect on resource use and also on the ability to effectively control territory).

I'm not sure I agree -- after all, surviving hunter-gatherers in the modern era tend to inhabit very marginal, resource-poor lands (deserts, mountains, jungle) and a great many of them practice such openness. And within considerable limits, low population isn't necessarily positive for resource use. Historically, the economic problem that preoccupied most hunter-gathers (to the extent that they worried about economic problems at all) perhaps wasn't scarcity of resources but scarcity of labor -- fish, for example, are seasonally abundant along rivers but must be laboriously cleaned, dried and smoked or they quickly go bad. Acorns are abundant but must be laboriously processed to remove toxins and make them edible. Therefore 'resources relative to population' isn't always a meaningful metric. And as you say, radically different societies often coexist in the same geographical areas (same resource conditions).

If openness is correlated with access to resources, though, what else would one then expect of developed societies, which have access to the greatest abundance of such resources ever known? Given that most resources are no longer territorially fixed, but rather flow globally and asymmetrically in the direction of the metropole, why shouldn't human migration follow the flow of resources just as hunter-gatherers followed the migrations of the herd?

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by Chisouthside

The suntimes database is at 706 for the year and includes expressway shootings. And while 706 is still awful I wonder where the discrepancy lies.

That number also includes killings that don't include shootings. Local media only focus on shootings (for good reason).

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by ilcapo

As Montreal tend to have relative low rates, i guess these are numbers for the Metro? 31 seems high for the City Proper.

This is for the island which is the city proper plus a few suburban municipalities but is all covered by the SPVM, the city proper's police. The island has 2 million people approx. This is just under half of the entire metro.

This would yield a rate of 1.5 per 100,000. It will likely go up a bit before Dec. 31 but anything under 2 is quite average for Montreal in recent years.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Encolpius

I'm not sure I agree -- after all, surviving hunter-gatherers in the modern era tend to inhabit very marginal, resource-poor lands (deserts, mountains, jungle) and a great many of them practice such openness. And within considerable limits, low population isn't necessarily positive for resource use. Historically, the economic problem that preoccupied most hunter-gathers (to the extent that they worried about economic problems at all) perhaps wasn't scarcity of resources but scarcity of labor -- fish, for example, are seasonally abundant along rivers but must be laboriously cleaned, dried and smoked or they quickly go bad. Acorns are abundant but must be laboriously processed to remove toxins and make them edible. Therefore 'resources relative to population' isn't always a meaningful metric. And as you say, radically different societies often coexist in the same geographical areas (same resource conditions).

If openness is correlated with access to resources, though, what else would one then expect of developed societies, which have access to the greatest abundance of such resources ever known? Given that most resources are no longer territorially fixed, but rather flow globally and asymmetrically in the direction of the metropole, why shouldn't human migration follow the flow of resources just as hunter-gatherers followed the migrations of the herd?

I can see this logic to a point, but what is the end-game? Is it that we work towards all of humanity attaining a "western" level standard of living, or is it that everyone gets adjusted either downwards or upwards to what the global average level of human development is? Which would put us all in the range of, say, Guatemala, Morocco or Guyana today.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Encolpius

No, I'm not arguing that. Not all societies stake out and defend territory (some have no concept of territory; no word for it in their language); but there almost certainly were some prehistoric groups who did. Even in modern times, some hunter-gather societies are territorial and others aren't.

You may be right that some sort of 'us vs them' mindset is primal at a conceptual level (we define ourselves in contrast to them). But this hardly means that xenophobia is universal.

You seem to be arguing that borders = xenophobia. (And that therefore borders should be open, I suppose.)

My argument is more than xenophobia (using the widest definition possible) is basically human nature.

Human identities, down one's own individuality as a person, are all defined based on an "other".

Then a whole bunch of concentric circles (that sometimes may even overlap) radiate outwards from one's own self: immediate family, extended family, circle of friends, community, groups based on interest, beliefs, ethnicity, nationality, etc.

We're hard-wired to band together for certain things and to divide up for others.

An interesting book about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_of_the_Self

[mrnyc]

it's getting hot out there:



cleveland
as of sept 16

In August, 3News looked into crime statistics and found that homicides were up 24 percent from 2020.

The latest numbers, released by the Cleveland Division of Police less than a week ago, do not include the newest 8 shooting victims.

So far in 2021, there have been 110 firearm homicides in Cleveland, up overall 13 percent compared to this time last year.


https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/cr...b-0022b838db76



usa and ohio
sept 30th

The Federal Bureau of Investigation this week released new crime data showing that homicides in America increased from 5.1 murders per 100,000 people in 2019 to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2020.

It was the biggest one-year increase on record, The New York Times reports.

But in Ohio, the story is a little worse. Homicides rose over the last year from five to seven incidents per 100,000, as reported by 610 of Ohio's 858 law-enforcement agencies.


https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and...ng-to-fbi-data

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by Acajack

You seem to be arguing that borders = xenophobia. (And that therefore borders should be open, I suppose.)

My argument is more than xenophobia (using the widest definition possible) is basically human nature.

Human identities, down one's own individuality as a person, are all defined based on an "other".

Then a whole bunch of concentric circles (that sometimes may even overlap) radiate outwards from one's own self: immediate family, extended family, circle of friends, community, groups based on interest, beliefs, ethnicity, nationality, etc.

We're hard-wired to band together for certain things and to divide up for others.

An interesting book about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_of_the_Self

Cool, I got pretty far into that book this summer... been meaning to pick it up again. Guess we have some common interests! Anyway, with the caveat that I haven't finished it yet, I'm afraid I don't quite see how Taylor supports your claim that xenophobia is human nature. Rather, doesn't Sources of the Self begin from the premise that identity doesn't radiate outwards from a self defined primarily in opposition to others, but is rather based on participation in a community oriented around shared notions of the good?

Such a shared ethos may, of course, be formed and articulated by way of contrast with some other community. But that doesn't mean the ethos has to be xenophobic. Just think of Pericles' famous line from the Funeral Oration, defining the Athenians by contrast to the Spartans:

"We differ from our enemies in this: we throw our city open to the world."
διαφέρομεν δὲ καὶ... τῶν ἐναντίων τοῖσδε. τήν τε γὰρ πόλιν κοινὴν παρέχομεν.