Title: What’s the Homicide Capital of America? Murder Rates in U.S. Cities, Ranked.
Headings: What’s the Homicide Capital of America? Murder Rates in U.S. Cities, Ranked.
What’s the Homicide Capital of America? Murder Rates in U.S. Cities, Ranked.
Long-term murder rates are down, despite recent increases
How U.S. cities stack up
The effects of city geography
An ignored crime metric: murder inequality
See how your city stacks up
Murder Rates of Major U.S. Cities

Content: An ignored crime metric: murder inequality
If some scholars of crime had their way, discussions of murder rates would focus not on cities, but on the few urban neighborhoods battling vastly disparate murder levels: Travel a few city blocks, and rates of violence can fluctuate dramatically. The phenomenon is captured by the term “murder inequality,” a coinage of the young urbanologist Daniel Kay Hertz. Writing for The Trace, Hertz stressed that looking at smaller geographical areas paints a more accurate picture of the relative threat of violence that individual Americans face and can make prevention strategies more effective. In 2016, five police districts overseeing only 8 percent of Chicago’s population recorded around 32 percent of its murders. Two Chicago neighborhoods, Burnside and Fuller Park, counted a rate of more than 100 killings per 100,000 people. People living in them were nine times more likely to be shot in their neighborhood than in the city’s safest quarters. “Just like income, education and other metrics of social advantage, violent gun crime varies even more within American cities than between them,” Hertz wrote. The problem of murder inequality is not unique to Chicago.