Looking Beyond The Numbers At The Homicide Epidemic
After the Baltimore City authorities celebrated a relatively calm January, February came in roaring like a lion. There were a total of 24 reported homicides in February in Baltimore, up from 14 in January. Nineteen of February’s 29 days saw at least one homicide, with February 21st being the deadliest with 3 homicides that day. As always, you can check the charts and graphs page for visualizations of these data. Continue reading “February Summary: It Was Rough”
The annual list of most violent cities in the world has been released, and Baltimore is again in it. While St. Louis took the top spot for American cities, and 15th overall, Baltimore was not far behind in 19th place.
The report was published by a Mexican violence “observatory,” an office within a violence prevention organization. The “Citizen Council for Public Safety and Penal Justice” operates out of Mexico City and uses very sound methodology to make a determination of the ranking of these cities. They use published media reports, independent tracking of cases, and official estimates to come up with the list.
Other notable bullet points from the report:
You can read the whole report by 2016_01_25_seguridad_justicia_y_paz-50_most_violent_cities_2015. (Some parts are in Spanish.)
You would think that there would be little to no homicides occurring within a certain distance from a police camera. You would be wrong. Cameras are specifically put in dangerous places, so dangerous things are going to happen whether the camera is there or not.
Below is a map a friend of mine created from data available from Baltimore City. It doesn’t contain all homicides in 2015. (It will be updated as soon as all the cases are added to the public database.) It contains homicides up to December 12, 2015. It also contains the locations (black diamonds) of Baltimore Police Department crime cameras. Finally, the police district names were overlaid on the map as well.
It’s easy to think that there is some sort of correlation between the location of cameras and the location of homicides. Some believe that the two data points overlap, so the cameras do not work. Other believe that there is enough of a difference between the location of the cameras and the location of the homicides, so the cameras work (somewhat). Continue reading “2015 Homicides and Police Cameras”
