As I write this, on Day 2 of 2009, three people have been shot and killed and two more were seriously wounded. By the time you read this, there will no doubt be more violence. This picture is from the latest of the killings on Orleans Street in East Baltimore. The good news is that the city recorded 234 slayings in 2008, compared with 282 the year before. 

I'm not going to try and figure this out in this posting, but I will tell you what police are telling us about 2008. But first, some background:

Thirteen years ago, Baltimore had a problem. Shootings were going down but homicides were remaining steady. Nobody could figure out why. In 1996, 16.7 percent of the gunshot victims died, up from 11 percent in 1993, when a record 353 people were killed.

A study dismissed medical care and ambulance rides and concluded that more victims than before were shot in the head at close range with larger guns. The good news was that fewer bystanders were being hit. "Drive-bys are out, executions are in," then Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier explained.

The numbers were startling: 17.5 percent of shooting victims in 1996 had head wounds, up from 13.3 percent in 1994, and 20 percent of the victims died at the scene, compared with 9 percent the previous year.

I thought of these numbers as I looked over the latest year-end homicide analysis from the Baltimore Police Department. It's got all sorts of interesting data; I'm not sure what it tells us about our murderous past or what we can anticipate this year, but the statistics are sobering:

"Wound locations for all Homicides -- Head: 126; Limb: 61; Torso: 145." That's up from 2006, when 93 homicide victims were shot in the head, 28 in a limb and 96 in the torso.

The report offers no conclusion or analysis (despite the name) and I'll offer none here. The issues are far too complex for simple explations and thoughts, and the data doesn't include a myraid of other factors that have to be considered when examining violence and death.

One word about motive. Police list as unknown the motive in 187 of last year's slayings. Most are related to drugs or gangs, but determining why someone was killed is difficult. A man may be found dead with drugs in his pocket, but the killing could've been done during a robbery, or in a dispute over something else, or during an argument over a girl. Maybe the shooter got into an argument over drug territory but shot him weeks or months after the initial run-in. Is that an argument or a drug-related killing? That's why most are listed this way.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the 2008 report: