FBI: Homicides up over 40% since Ferguson

Murders are dropping since the Racial Reckoning started to peter out, but are still up horrifically in the Black Lives Matter decade.

The FBI is pretty bad at being in charge of collecting crime stats.

In general, cops don’t like dealing with statistics. The current system where the FBI is supposed to gather data from all the local law enforcement agencies in the country is like if the Los Angeles Dodgers had put Shohei, Mookie, and Freddie in charge of harassing all the Dodger farm teams to send in their baseball statistics and then they were supposed to make sense of the numbers rather than work on grooving their swings.

Instead, the Dodgers hire a bunch of MIT grads to deal with the data.

Likewise, the FBI should give the crime stats job to the nerds at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

But the FBI finally got around to releasing its Uniform Crime Reporting statistics for 2023 on Monday.

Take a look at this prize-winning graph of homicides the FBI released on Monday:

Now that’s lucid graph making!

It’s a double axis graph with monthly homicide counts in aquamarine on the left axis and clearances in grey on the left axis. The dark blue dots work with the right axis of the percent of the population covered.

Back in 2014 about 97% of the US was covered, and in 2023 about 92%, but in the important year of 2021, the peak of the Racial Reckoning black on black murder binge, only about 3/4ths of the country was covered for methodological reasons way too boring for conspiracy theorists to grasp. (For decades, local police departments were supposed to switch from the old SRS system they were used to to the upgraded NIBRS system and 2021 was the year they were supposed to finally do it, but cops hate statistical paperwork, so a bunch of big police departments just blew off the FBI that year. Or at least that’s my recollection.)

Clearly, the FBI’s UCR has all sorts of problems, both fundamental and cosmetic. So, in this decade I’ve primarily been relying upon the CDC’s WONDER cause-of-death database for homicide data. It has its own problems, but doctors mostly made their peace with statistical paperwork, like filling out death certificates, a long time ago.

The much reported news is that homicides were down sharply in 2023 vs. 2022, 11.7% in the FBI tally:

The FBI’s 2021 count, highlighted in yellow, is obviously worthless. In the FBI stats, killings were higher in 2023 than in 2021, but that’s clearly wrong. The country has calmed down since The Establishment went nuts over George Floyd’s death in late May 2020 and, in effect, egged on blacks to carry their illegal handguns when they went out to party because they shouldn’t have to fear the police catching them, which led to a huge increase in black-on-black shootings.

In the more reliable CDC count, homicides were down 8.1% in 2023 vs. 2022.

On the other hand, the FBI’s count of the total number of homicides in the U.S. was 41.9% higher in 2023 than in 2014, the year when Ferguson unleashed the catastrophic Black Lives Matter movement, and up 43.8% in the CDC data. (The US population was up around 5% over the same period.)

By the way: I’m doing book tour appearances in Chicago this week to promote my anthology Noticing: dinner on Thursday evening September 26th downtown and a speaking event on Friday night September 27th on Chicago’s north lakefront.

See Passage Press’s website for tickets.

This makes me look like I’m opening at Devonshire Downs in Northridge, CA in 1969 at 8:30 AM for Hendrix, Tull, Cocker, and Ike and Tina Turner.

I have so little musical talent that I could enjoy imagining my downtown Manhattan basement last May as opening for the Ramones in 1975, but Hendrix is too imposing.