More great crime news: record low modern homicide rates reported by BJS!

Because everyone on all sides of the political spectrum agree "death is different" in important ways, and because there are various reasons to expect homicide data to be among the most accurate crime statistics, I always view homicide rates as the most notable and important of all crime metrics.  Consequently, I am especially excited to report via this new press release from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that the United States' "homicide rate fell to 4.8 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2010, its lowest level in four decades."  Here are some data details from the press release:

Much of the decline was in the nation’s largest cities, those with a population of one million or more, where the homicide rate dropped dramatically from 35.5 homicides per 100,000 residents in 1991 to a low of 11.9 per 100,000 in 2008.

The sharp increase in homicides from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, and much of the subsequent decline, is attributable to gun violence by teens (age 14 to 17) and young adults (age 18 to 24).  Despite the recent decline, the number of gun homicides committed by teens and young adults in 2008 remained similar to the counts of the mid-1980s.

Most murders were intraracial.  From 1980 through 2008, 84 percent of white homicide victims were murdered by whites and 93 percent of black victims were murdered by blacks.  During this same period, blacks were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders.  Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide.

The number of homicides known to involve adult or juvenile gang violence has quadrupled since 1980, increasing from about 220 homicides in 1980 to 960 homicides in 2008.  From 1980 to 2008, gang violence increased from one percent to six percent of all homicides. During this same period, gun involvement in gang-related homicides increased from 73 percent to 92 percent.

Among the report’s other findings:...

In 2008, two of every five female murder victims were killed by an intimate. Among female murder victims for whom the victim/offender relationships were known, 45.3 percent were killed by an intimate whereas only 4.9 percent of male homicide victims were killed by an intimate....

Most homicide victims under age 5 were killed by a parent. In 2008, 59% of young child homicide victims were killed by a parent, 10% were killed by some other family member and 30% were murdered by a friend or acquaintance....

Most of these findings are based on the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), which collects yearly supplementary data regarding homicides committed in the United States. From 1980 to 2008, contributing agencies provided supplementary data for 508,568 of the estimated 565,636 murders.  The FBI’s annual report, Crime in the United States, provides additional summary data for 2009 and 2010.

The full report with all this data and lots more is titled Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008, and can be found at this link.