A correction to Baltimore's murder, violent crime rate
Last week, an article about preliminary 2010 crime data released by the FBI contained two errors concerning Baltimore's rankings. Though newspaper corrections are typically terse, I wanted to fully acknowledge and explain my mistakes, which came to light after seeing an article on The Atlantic's web site* about the rankings.
My article said that Baltimore had the fifth-highest murder rate, but it in fact had the fourth, surpassing Detroit by a slim margin. My own calculations showed this, but I failed to notice. Baltimore had a murder rate of 34.85, while Detroit's was 34.46. There's a disclaimer in here, though it doesn't excuse the mistake: The FBI used population figures that are different than the recently-released Census data. The FBI put Detroit's population at 899,447, while the 2010 Census had it much lower at 713,717. Baltimore's population was listed as 639,929, while the 2010 Census had it as 620,921. Using those new population figures, Baltimore goes back to No. 5 with a murder rate of 35.91, and Detroit's jumps to 43.43. But I'm not sure when or if those population differences will be reflected. So as far as this week's data goes, I erred.
I also wrote that Baltimore had the seventh-highest violent crime rate, when it actually had the eighth-highest. There were 233 cities to consider, and I had compiled a list of likely candidates from prior year lists and looked through the data for new additions. I left out Little Rock, Arkansas, which catapulted to the top 10, placing it between Oakland, Calif. and Baltimore. The Census vs. FBI population question doesn't affect Baltimore's place behind Little Rock.
The FBI, of course, cautions against ranking cities, because of a variety of factors that make them difficult to compare. Not among those warnings is weary reporters who misuse the data.
*While we're pointing out corrections, though, the Atlantic article also claims that Baltimore's crime mostly occurs in the "Front Street" neighborhood, "a world away from the new office towers of companies like financial giant T Rowe Price on Pratt Street." There is no Front Street neighborhood, and the street itself spans only a few blocks along The Fallsway between downtown and East Baltimore - hardly the worst area in the city. WBAL in 2009 also referred to the "Front Street neighborhood" - which was inexplicably placed in South Baltimore - when referring to a dubious ranking of most dangerous neighborhoods.
Comments
Despite your corrections most of Maryland's honest, productive people (especially those with families) are probably not going to consider moving to Baltimore anytime soon.
My 95lb. wife is not going to be raped or killed by unsupervised hooligans from broken homes with little education, and no sense of work-ethic, honesty or sense of morality. The spooks have us pretty spooked and I think I speak for a lot of Marylanders.
Posted by: Rick | May 29, 2011 12:51 AM
Don't let a few events to make you write off a whole municipality, and worse: a whole race of people.
Posted by: apdbaltimore | May 30, 2011 12:04 AM
Front Street is one of the oldest streets in Baltimore City, running through the Jones Town neighborhood. Front Streets in New World Cities were often found abutting and parallel the local river or stream, and Baltimore's Front Street was no exception, it ran along side the Jones Falls. It is one of the earliest street to appear on the Baltimore maps. Here is a post where I have 4 historic maps of the harbor area and you can see Front Street along the old Jones Falls before the beautiful rushing river was buried in 1912 by Henry Barton Jacobs.
MsNBC was partially right, Front Street was at one point a hotbed for murder and mayhem, but that was during the 1850s-1880s when an exorbitant number of bodies tended to turn up in that area due to homicide, violent crime and drownings in the Jones Falls. The closest homicide of recent time near Front street would be David Purcell Bishop, 32, who was stabbed in May of 2007 in the 200 block of North Gay, but that's it.
I don't know if that qualifies as partially right!
Posted by: Cham | May 30, 2011 1:56 PM
I am praying I can sell my house so I can move out of Maryland completely! MD is nothing more than a santuary state for criminals and illegals. O'maley loves them all!!
Posted by: Charlie | May 30, 2011 6:15 PM
Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University revived discussion of this claim with their 2001 paper "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime". Donohue and Levitt point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted aborted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.
The authors argue that states that had abortion legalized earlier and more widespread should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. Further, states with a high abortion rate have experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income. Finally, studies in Canada and Australia purport to have established a correlation between legalized abortion and overall crime reduction.
Posted by: Study | June 1, 2011 4:31 PM