Homicide Rate

Steady, but...

• Six months into the year, homicides in the city are holding even with last year, but the number of shootings decreased sharply.

  Homicides are at 211 this year, compared with 212 last year, but officials say the number of shootings has dropped from 834 at this time last year to 694 this year.

  Chicago Police Supt. Phil Cline credits this to the department's strategic approach over the last several years of analyzing crime daily and immediately deploying resources to trouble spots.

Homicide rate steady, but shootings down almost 150 incidents. We aren't math wizards, but we figure this means one of two things:

• either the hospitals aren't saving as many as they used to, or
• shooters are getting more accurate.

Whatever the correlation, it would appear that we have reached the point of diminishing returns - that is to say that the Department (and the political administration) has reached the point where they've cut manpower as far as they can on the front lines and are able to maintain a steady homicide rate over the course of three years (2005 and 2006 were within 2 homicides of each other and this year we are within 1 of last year's rate.) At some point, the City is going to have to accept that 3 million people cannot live in close proximity with one another without 450 or so homicides occurring during any given year.

How about this for a tin foil hat conspiracy theory - someday, the Chicago Machine will be able to manipulate the homicide rate up or down depending if they want to instill unease in the populace or show the voters how tough they can actually be on crime.

UPDATE: Someone in the comments section is calling our statements ignorant:

• What a ignorant statement. Check out all the cities around the world with more than 3 million people and you find that all of them, including shitholes in South America and Mexico, CAN support more thatn 3 million people WITHOUT having anywhere near 450 murders a year. Tokyo has over 12 million people. The number of murders that occured there last year: 64.
  
  It the stupid gun laws in this country that enables thugs to quickly, easily and cheaply kill people.

Ok, maybe our statement was overly broad. Perhaps we should have refined it slightly - "3 million people cannot live in close proximity with one another under current conditions without 450 or so homicides occurring during any given year." But if you want to see a prime example of cherry-picking facts to fit an anti-gun argument, look no further than our critic. For example:

• Johannesburg - Population 3 million - 1000 homicides per year
• Moscow - Population 12 million - 1015 homicides in 2006
  
• Rio de Janeiro - Population 6 million - between 29,000 and 35,000 every year this century

We can cherry pick statistics too. Do we really need to go on? Some of these cities have the army or the equivalent of our national guard patrolling the streets.