Chicago: the murder capital of America
Chicago has more murders than any other city in the United States, surpassing even New York, which has three times as many inhabitants, figures released by the FBI show.
The figures show that firearms were used in the vast majority of murders, with 69.3 per cent of all homicides involving a gun Photo: Getty Images
By Tom Witherow
12:30PM BST 19 Sep 2013
In a crime report released by the bureau, it was revealed that there were 500 murders in Chicago in 2012, up from 431 in 2011.
New York registered 419, down from 515.
In the UK murder rates as a whole are one per 100,000, down from 1.99 ten years ago. There were 765 murders in the UK in 2011. By comparison the Chicago murder rate figure is about 18.5 per 100,000.
15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who sang at events surrounding President Barack Obama's inauguration ignited debate over violent crime earlier this year when she was gunned down on the streets of Chicago just days after her performance.
And just this week a man was charged in connection with the fatal shooting of his girlfriend's 3-year-old toddler.
The figures show that firearms were used in the vast majority of murders, with 69.3 per cent of all homicides involving a gun.
Murder rates – as opposed to murder totals – were higher elsewhere in the US, the FBI report said. In Flint, Michigan, one in every 1,613 residents was a homicide victim. Detroit, which experienced 386 homicides in 2012 out of a population of 700,000, was almost as unsafe with enough murders to account for one in every 1,832 residents. But Chicago had the largest total number of deaths by location.
Overall violent crime, defined as murder, robbery, rape and aggravated assault, in the US rose by 0.7 per cent to just over 1.2 million crimes. However, this represents a small jump after more than ten years of steady decline, which has seen the incident of violent crime fall by 10.3 per cent.
By region it was the West which saw the greatest rise in violent crime, with increases of 3.2 per cent, but the South has the most overall, recording almost half a million violent crimes, or 40.9 per cent of the total.
There were fifteen cities reported to have more than 100 murders in 2012. Most notably alongside Chicago and New York were Detroit, Philadelphia (331), Los Angeles (299), Baltimore (219), and Houston (217).
There were over 350,000 robberies in 2012, but less than 7,000 of them, or 1.8 per cent, were bank robberies. The most common places for robberies to take place were streets and highways, recording close to half of incidents.
