An Historical Overview of Homicide Rates, United States, 1900–2013
88 CHAPT ER 3
Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203
touched off another escalation of bloodshed. By the start of the 1990s, murder rates once again were close to their highest levels for the century. But as that decade progressed, the fad of smoking crack, selling drugs, and toting guns waned; the economy improved; the proportion of the male population between 18 and 24 years old dwindled; and conse- quently, the murder rate tumbled (see Fox and Zawitz, 2002; and Karmen, 2006). The death toll has continued to drift downward throughout the twenty-first century, even during the hard times of the Great Recession that set in after the subprime mortgage meltdown, stock market crash, and corporate bailouts of 2008, as Figure 3.4 shows.
Returning to the UCR database, the impressive improvement in public safety became strikingly evident in 2013, when the body count declined to about 14,200, about 10,500 fewer victims than in 1991, when the death toll had reached an all-time record of close to 24,700. Taking popula- tion growth into account, the U.S. murder rate in 2013 stood at 4.5 killings per 100,000 inhabitants, an overall “crash” of about 50 percent since 1991 (Cooper and Smith, 2011). The U.S. murder rate hadn’t been as low as 4.5 since 1958.