I ran across this on Quora while taking a break at work, I am still running heavy in the overtime so blogging will still be hit or miss. The information presented was very informative and thorough. I figured any bloggers could use the information especially those still living in the blue cities.
It’s very likely that approximately 80–85% of homicides (and especially firearm homicides) in the United States are gang-related:
Fair warning: This is going to be a very long one, so if you’d prefer to skip the dry statistics backing up this answer, feel free to just quickly scroll through the maps and you’ll see, visually, just how heavily concentrated the majority of murders are within known gang territories in the United States.
All graphics are clickable to zoom, and are best viewed on desktop for fine detail.
Gun control advocates will sometimes point to this survey:
…which claims that:
The total number of gang homicides reported by respondents in the NYGS sample averaged nearly 2,000 annually from 2007 to 2012. During roughly the same time period (2007 to 2011), the FBI estimated, on average, more than 15,500 homicides across the United States (www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1). These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually.
The problem is that that number only reflects the fraction of homicides that local law enforcement was certain involved gang activity. Most are classified as “unknown.” Furthermore, many surveys estimating gang statistics relied on self-reporting by prison inmates, turning the survey into a very scholarly version of “so, what are you in for?” Surely, no methodological errors there!
So how can we arrive at more reliable figures?
This article (hosted by GunFacts.info, the brainchild of Guy Smith) is a great place to start, but I’d like to expand upon the statistics to visually to get a sense of who it is that’s getting killed and where these homicides are occurring.
So, let’s start here:
This is the age bracket of the bodies that end up on the floor, for both all homicides and specifically firearm homicides.
This is the skin color of the bodies that end up on the floor due to firearm homicide.
The 2019 figures are even worse:
Put both of these data points together, and it’s clear that a disproportionate amount of firearm homicide victims (and offenders!) are black males in their teens to late twenties.
Why is this the case? Well, it’s not quite within the purview of this answer, but here you go:
And where are these homicides occurring?
Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural
This is the the data I’d like to dive into in much greater visual detail.
Let’s examine the Top 25 cities in the United States for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter:
I’ll be using Wikipedia’s reported statistics for calculation purposes (the right column is per 100,000):
And the FBI’s UCR data on Expanded Homicide, to arrive at a total figure of 13,927 murder/MS victims in 2019.
I will be making use of two major tools on a city-by-city basis:
The first tool is a website devoted to street culture, and more specifically for our purposes, established gang territories. I’ve opted to drop their color code key showing which gangs are which for the sake of simplicity, but if you’re interested, you can load up the city of your choice and probably learn more about that city’s gangs than you wanted to know.
The second tool is an interactive map showing where shootings have occurred within the United States down to the street level. Red dots are firearm fatalities, yellow dots are nonfatal injuries. The Atlas allows you to filter one or the other out, but I’ve opted to show the full data set for two main reasons: including the yellow nonfatal dots highlights those areas of gang activity in stark contrast, which in turn makes it much easier to quickly compare the smaller thumbnail graphics instead of forcing you to look at the fullscreen version for each map.
Nevertheless, the Atlas is freely available if you’d like to see just the fatal shootings for just 2019 for each city, since that’s the actual figures I’ll be working with at the end.
This is a map of all the fatal shootings GVA has on record for 2019. I’ve circled the top 25 cities (by rate) we’ll be looking at in greater detail.
The goal is showing, visually, just how much overlap there is with known gang neighborhoods.
All maps can be enlarged to show detail.
So with no further ado, let’s get started.
#1 on the list in 2019 was St. Louis, MO. In any given year the Top 5 shuffle around a bit, but St. Louis is always near the top.
#2 was Baltimore, MD, also a perennial contender for most murderous city in the US:
#3 was Detroit, MI. What I find particularly interesting is the obvious cutoff right at 8 Mile Road. Kulture Vulturez also does not list Inkster, Pontiac, Ypsilanti, or Boynton (River Rouge) as gang territories, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the clusters there. I’ve never been to Detroit, so maybe somebody with more experience than me can enlighten us all in the comments; it’d be a great confirmation of the theory if those are in fact gang territories that simply weren’t listed.
#4 was New Orleans, LA.
#5 was Baton Rouge, LA.
#6 was Kansas City, MO.
#7 was Cleveland, OH.
#8 was Memphis, TN.
#9 was Newark, NJ.
#10 was Cincinnatti, OH.
#11 was Mobile, AL.
#12 was Philadelphia, PA.
#13 was Milwaukee, WI.
#14 was Chicago, IL. Chicago leads the nation in absolute number of murders, in large part because it was a city of 2.75 million in 2019. It’s also enough of a challenge to
present graphically that I’ll do 2 sets of maps; one zoomed out to encompass the suburbs, and one zoomed in to see the density of the inner city.
#15 was Pittsburg, PA. The gang areas for McKeesport and Clairton (bottom center) and Aliquippa (top left) are small and easy to miss, but they’re there. I’d be interested to know if New Kensington (top right) has gangs that aren’t listed since it’s also a minor hotspot.
#16 was Indianapolis, IN.
#17 was Stockton, CA. Unfortunately, Kulture Vulturez did not have a premade map showing the gang areas of Stockton. The red pin is Stockton’s City Hall, indicating its “downtown” area where gang activity usually clusters.
#18 was Tulsa, OK.
#19 was Washington DC.
#20 was Atlanta, GA.
#21 was Nashville, TN.
#22 was Columbus, OH.
#23 was Oakland, CA. Kulture Vulturez has a page devoted to “Bay Area Hoods,” so again I’ll show the zoomed-out area map, then the zoomed-in Oakland map.
#24 was Louisville (Metro), KY
#25 was Greensboro, NC. Kulture Vulturez did not have an entry for this city either, so as before I pinned the government center to indicate “inner city Greensboro.”
Are your eyes crossing yet? Yeah, mine too. But not to worry!
So far we’ve only looked at 2 of the 10 “million plus” cities in the US (Chicago and Philadelphia), 2 below the 250,000 mark (Mobile and Baton Rouge), and the other 21 are all somewhere in between.
These Top 25 cities by rate only contained 4.72% of the population in 2019, but accounted for 28.3% of the nation’s murders!
Well, that wasn’t too bad.
How about we pick up the other 8 “million plus” cities for their absolute numbers and see where that puts us statistically?
#1: New York, NY (Pop. 8.8 million in 2019)
#2: Los Angeles, CA (Pop. 3.9 million) A city with so much gang activity, it has not one but two pages on Kulture Vulturez.
There’s almost no point in posting the gangland maps. East LA, South Central, Compton, Hollywood… The entire L.A. area is effectively all gang territory until you start moving into outlying cities like Torrence, Glendale, or Arcadia.
#3 was Chicago, IL (Pop. 2.74 million). Already covered at #14 by crime rate.
#4: Houston, TX (Pop. 2.3 million)
#5: Phoenix, AZ (Pop. 1.6 million)
#6 was Philadelphia, PA (Pop. 1.6 million). Already covered at #12 by rate.
#7: San Antonio, TX (Pop. 1.4 million) Kulture Vulturez mentions its gang activity, but does not include a map.
#8: San Diego, CA (Pop. 1.4 million)
#9: Dallas, TX (Pop. 1.3 million). The map also includes Fort Worth (Pop. 873k), at #17 by size. I won’t be including Fort Worth in the math for this answer, but it does help show the strong correlation between gang hotspots and where the bodies turn up.
#10: San Jose, CA (Pop. 1 million). It was actually at the south end of the overview “Bay Area Hoods” map for #23, but let’s get a closeup of San Jose specifically.
If we add in the figures for the other 8 megacities, we’re looking at a total of 11.4% of the country’s population but 38.2% of all murders for the entire country!
And keep in mind, that’s not counting all the (2019) red dots you’ve seen, that’s just the ones that fell within city limits of the places listed!
The other places (like Fort Worth in #9 of the “million plus” cities list) were part of the other 3,060 cities in the US with a population of 10,000 people or more, making up the other 61.8% of murders in 2019. 52% of counties in the country had zero murders.
So now that you’ve seen the maps, you tell me; what percentage of dots fall within those established gang territories?
And like everyone else, gangbangers don’t just stay at home; they travel to other parts of the city. A substantial number of dots outside the defined boxes are also gang-related murders, as they encounter each other at the local Shake Shack or whatever.
So to answer the original question, you’re probably very safe from being murdered as long as you stay out of the inner city areas that tend to be gang violence breeding grounds.
But now I’d like to veer off the original question a bit and address how we can best reduce the murder/manslaughter rates.
Just as murders are not spread out evenly across the country, neither are they evenly distributed amongst the violent criminal population. Like many other things in life, murder follows the Pareto Principle, AKA the 80/20 Rule:
What this means in the context of gang murder is that (very approximately) 80% of the country’s murders are committed by (very approximately) 20% of the population. But this distribution is repeatable! 80% of the murders of that gang subset (or 64% of total murders) are committed by only 20% of that subset of criminals, or a mere 4% of the people. Reiterate again, and 51% of the entire country’s murders are committed by only 0.8% of the population. That’s the most violent, recidivistic 2.6 million people in a country of 328 million (using 2019 population statistics).
For reference, that is just slightly less than the total population of Chicago.
If District Attorneys actually enforced the “violent felon in possession of a firearm” statutes that are already part of Federal law, carrying mandatory minimums of 5 years or more in prison, we’d see a dramatic reduction in the overall US homicide rate, without negatively affecting peaceable citizens at all.
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