Urban areas hit hardest by rise in violent crime

David Pomerantz

Boston’s increase in violent crime over the past two years reflects a growing trend in large U.S. cities, according to a report released this week by a national law enforcement think tank.

Both homicides and aggravated assaults with a firearm increased by roughly 10 percent in the 56 U.S. metropolitan areas measured during a 24-month period from 2004 to 2006.

Boston’s jump in homicides during that period was nearly double the national average, an increase that ranked 19th among the 56 metropolitan areas surveyed in the report released by the Police Executive Research Forum.

Boston experienced a 32 percent rise in aggravated assault with a firearm, an increase which ranked 12th on the list. The city’s robbery rate also rose 10 percent.

“We are seeing a nationwide cultural phenomenon where gun violence is becoming an acceptable form of conflict resolution,” Boston Police Department spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll said. “What clearly needs to happen here is additional federal partnerships. These are not just local issues. The federal government should be assisting cities and towns experiencing an increase in violent crime.”

While the report shows that Boston’s homicide rate was over double the national average, a closer look at the data paints a more nuanced picture.

The national study is intended to measure the last two years, but Boston’s crime numbers remained stable from 2005 to 2006. The city’s greatest increase actually occurred from 2003 to 2005, when the murder count nearly doubled from 39 to 73. The pace stabilized in 2006, when there were 75 killings.

As it stands now, there have been 11 killings in Boston in 2007, just ahead of the pace set in 2006, when nine people had been murdered by March 15.

Boston’s rising murder rate has not affected the city’s neighborhoods equally, as Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester have absorbed the brunt of the increase.

In 2003, the three police districts representing those areas accounted for only 54 percent of Boston’s murders. Over the next two years, the three districts accounted for 85 percent of the citywide increase in murders, according to police crime reports from those years.

Four of the 11 murders that have taken place in 2007 have occurred in the police district representing Roxbury.

Dr. James Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, warned against placing too much stock in a city-by-city evaluation of the national report, especially in the case of a city as small as Boston.

“You’ve got to take the numbers with not just a grain of salt, but the entire saltshaker … you can’t get caught up in the ups and downs.” Fox said.

“I would recommend that we take these numbers and use them to motivate us to restore police resources and also to reinvest in prevention programs,” Fox added. “I would not use these numbers to base any knee-jerk reaction to try to do something in a state of hysteria. The problem is not out of control, we just have to get back to work and restore some funding goals.”

On a national level, however, Fox said that the increase represents more than a mere anomaly.

“The overall picture is that violence, particularly youth gun violence, is up across the country.”

Fox said that the trend is at least in part due to shifting law enforcement resources.

“To some extent, it has to do with police resources,” Fox explained. “A lot of high crime neighborhoods have seen resources shift away to deal with homeland security. It’s a situation of robbing from Peter — and maybe raping and murdering Peter — to pay for Paul.”

But Fox also said that a false sense of success may have taken hold in cities after the relative lull in violent crime that occurred in many cities at the beginning of the decade.

“Part of it is that we got complacent. People don’t want to throw money at something they don’t see as a problem.”