Homicides in D.C. have hit a historic low, while the percentage of single-parent households remains steady.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

As the year draws to a close, the Washington Post reports that the District of Columbia is heading for a historic low number of homicides: fewer than 100 for 2012. That's down from the highs of about 450 per year at the start of the 1990s (while the population is about the same size).

Not mentioned in the story: the breakdown of the family. That's surprising, because it was a big part of the story 20 years ago, when D.C. was the murder capital of the country during a national crime wave. I think single mothers—especially those who were raising their kids back in the 1990s—deserve an apology from the conventional-wisdom purveyors of that time.

Using the numbers from the Washington Post feature and Census data, I constructed homicide and single mother rates for 1990, 2000, and 2011, for Washington, D.C. Both trends have been pretty linear, so it's reasonable to illustrate them with just a few points:

Sources: Homicide rates calculated from number of homicides reported by the Washington Post and population totals from the U.S. Census Bureau, along with single-mother rates, for 1990 and 2000-2011.