Murder rates have jumped in 25 of the nation’s largest cities starting in 2015, says a report in The New York Times.

The analysis showed seven major cities drove up the murder rates, only two of which were south of the Mason Dixon line.

Those seven cities are the Washington D.C. and one of its regional cities, Baltimore, Maryland, plus President Barack Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago, Ill., Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and the two southern cities are Nashville in Tennessee and Houston in Texas.

Three of the seven cities also experienced wide ranging unrest from ‘Black Lives Matter’-styled protests.

Unsurprisingly, Chicago led the pack with 488 murders in 2015 — and it jumped to 500 in first eight months of 2016. In fact, there has been so much bloodshed in Chicago that 2016 has become its most dangerous year in decades.

In 2015, Chicago’s 488 murders topped New York City’s 352 — even though New York has almost three times as many residents as Chicago.

The city of Baltimore has also experienced a spike in murders compared to prior years. It new rate of 55 murders per 100,000 residents has surpassed 1993’s rate of 48 per 100,000.

Some of the spike in murders for Baltimore can be pegged to the 315,000 doses of stolen drugs,when rioters sacked 27 separate pharmacies during the city’s Black Lives Matter riots. Since the riots and the drug thefts gangs have been fighting back and forth to control the massive influx of cheap drugs.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.