The latest annual report from the Brennan Centre is projecting a mixed outlook for US crime rates this year. While overall crime is expected to inch up only 1.3 per cent, a spike in murders in the city of Chicago is expected to pull the national murder rate up 13.1 per cent year-on-year by the end of 2016. According to the report, almost half of the increase in murders are attributable to Chicago, with 234 of the additional 496 extra cases occuring in the city. The overall rate of violent crime is expected to increase only ‘slightly’ by 5.5 per cent, with Chicago and Los Angeles accounting for the lion’s share of the increase with 16 per cent and 17 per cent growth in violent crime respectively.

Crime wave fears ‘unfounded’

Despite the isolated increases, the Brennan Centre report has emphasised that it has found ‘no evidence of a national murder wave’ in its nation-wide findings. While cities like Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore and Houston alone have accounted for the bulk of the 31.5 per cent increase in murders recorded since the Centre’s 2014 report, it is only Chicago that is continuing to see significant increases. Baltimore’s murder rate is expected to decline by 9.9 per cent this year, while the number of murders in Washington DC is projected to decrease by 10.9 per cent.

Undercutting Trump

The latest findings will likely come as a blow to Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, who has built his campaign on the claim that violent crime is spiraling out of control in the United States. ‘Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by [the Obama Administration’s] rollback of criminal enforcement,’ Mr Trump told the Republican National Convention in July, citing a 17 per cent increase in homicides across the 50 largest US cities. However, the Brennan Centre’s conclusions to the contrary are unambiguous: ‘There is not a nationwide crime wave, or rising violence across American cities,’ the report reads. ‘Warnings of a coming crime wave may be provocative, but they are not supported by evidence.’ 

Sources: Wall Street Journal; Huffington Post; Reason.com; Brennan Centre for Justice