U.S. cities experienced another big rise in murder in 2016

Murder almost certainly increased substantially in the U.S. in 2016, one year after it rose at its fastest pace in a quarter century.

The government won’t release official 2016 crime statistics for another nine months. But data from individual police departments indicates that murder rose in most of the country’s biggest cities in 2016, in some cases dramatically. Because a large share of murders take place in big cities, a substantial increase there means that the country’s overall murder total almost certainly rose as well.

Big cities tend to correlate strongly with but also overestimate national murder trends. In 2015, for example, murder rose nearly 15 percent in cities of 250,000 or more, versus 10.8 percent nationally.

Using a combination of official police data and local media reports, I was able to collect murder counts through at least November 2016 for 73 of the 83 U.S. cities with populations above 250,000, and partial data for all but one of the rest.

I was able to collect data through at least August for 78 of the 83 cities. St. Paul, Minnesota, is the only big city for which no 2016 data was available. In all cases, increases in murder totals compare the latest data available from 2016 to the same period in 2015. The counts are preliminary and could be subject to change before they are submitted to the FBI for inclusion in the Uniform Crime Report that will be published in September.