Crime: Don’t Look Now, But. . .

Official federal crime statistics for 2016 from the Dept. of Justice won’t be available for several more months yet, but The Economist has done some data collecting on its own from big cities in the U.S. The findings about rising murder rates are not good:

The Economist has gathered murder statistics for 2016 for the 50 cities with the most murders. These places contain 15% of the country’s population and around 36% of murder victims. Our numbers show that, in 2016, murders increased in 34 of the cities we tracked. Three cities experienced a spike in deaths sharper than the 58% suffered by Chicago. Since cities tend to reflect the country as a whole, this suggests that the murder rate is rising at its fastest pace since the early 1970s.

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