From The Guardian:

Murders up 10.8% in biggest percentage increase since 1971, FBI data shows Rising violence in 2015 driven by increase in murders of black men and gun crime, as experts brace for political ‘hysteria’ amid 2016 election Lois Beckett and Aliza Aufrichtig Monday 26 September 2016 09.49 EDT Murders in the US rose 10.8% last year, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971, according to data released Monday by the FBI. The rising violence was driven by an increase in the murders of black men, and by an increase in the number of gun murders. At least 900 more black men were killed in 2015 than in 2014, according to FBI data. There were roughly 1,500 additional firearm murders in 2015. No other type of weapon saw a comparable increase. The number of knife murders dropped slightly. … The increase, which follows a two-decade downward trend, put the number of murders back at 15,696, about the same number as in 2009. The national murder rate is still about half what it was in 1991, at the peak of the violent crime wave of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even as murders rose, the country’s overall crime rates did not increase as substantially. There was a 3.9% increase in the estimated number of violent crimes, but a 2.6% decrease in the estimated number of property crimes. There is no consensus yet on what factors might be driving a sharp increase in murders alone, but crime has become a politically charged election issue, and the uptick will probably figure in Monday’s presidential debate. Crime trend experts said they expected politicians to overplay the significance of the new numbers and to react with “hysteria”. “You lost 50lb. You gained back a couple. You’re not fat,” said Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at your behavior, because the trend is not good.” In St Louis, which already had one of the highest murder rates in the US, murders increased again last year.

Last year, 143 of the city’s murder victims were black men and boys killed with guns, according to data from the police department. …. Advocates for criminal justice reform said they worried the one-year uptick would fuel calls for a return to damaging, tough-on-crime policies. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and both violent crime and mass incarceration disproportionately affect black Americans.

The human cost of an overreaction to the murder increase could be “a lot bigger” than the toll of the rising violence itself, said John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor who studies criminal sentencing and incarceration. He said he expected the increase to prompt calls for more arrests and more prison time. The wealthier white Americans whose votes help determine crime policy “don’t tend to be those who feel the costs”, Pfaff said. Last year’s national murder increase was not a uniform trend, but a sum of contradictory changes in cities across the country. Early analyses of the 2015 murder increase suggested much of it might be driven by murder spikes in just 10 large cities, including Baltimore, Washington DC, Chicago, Houston and Milwaukee.

Some of America’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, saw their murder numbers remain near historic lows in 2015. Early data from large cities this year suggests that 2015’s uptick in murders may not be a single-year increase. A report from the Brennan Center, analyzing murders in 30 large cities this year, projected an additional 13.1% increase in the murder rates for those cities in 2016, with most of that increase being driven by just three cities: Chicago, Baltimore and Houston. Together, the national large city increases in 2015 and 2016 were projected to drive a 31.5% increase in the murder rate compared with 2014. “There is no evidence of a national murder wave, yet increases in these select cities are indeed a serious problem,” the Brennan Center report concluded. Chicago alone has seen a close to 50% increase in shootings and murders this year. The FBI director, James Comey, has repeatedly drawn a connection between increasing violence and “a change in how the police are doing their work” due to the continuing nationwide protests over police killings of black citizens. “In today’s YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime?” he asked in 2015, describing “a chill wind that has blown through law enforcement over the last year”. In May, he suggested the increasing violence could be related to “marginal pullbacks by lots and lots of police officers”, and said that police leaders across the country had seen a change in how their officers do their jobs. Barack Obama’s administration has repeatedly rejected any connection between protests over police violence and increasing murders. But a justice department-funded report on the 2015 murder increase concluded that there might be some connection between public anger over police killings and an increase in community violence. Criminologists caution that crime and violence are highly local, and driven by a tangle of so many different factors that it is nearly impossible to say exactly what causes a given increase or decrease. Crime statistics are also easy to over-dramatize. Murder numbers in a small town, for instance, can be dramatically distorted by a single incident with multiple casualties. A town that typically sees a murder a year will see a 100% increase in murders if it ends the year with two.

Trump has blamed Obama and his administration for a “rollback of criminal enforcement” that has made the country less safe. This criticism is not supported by the FBI’s murder data. Murders have declined through most of Obama’s two terms, with a serious uptick only in his second-to-last year in office.

Between 2008, the year before Obama took office, and 2014, murders dropped, with 2,000 fewer Americans murdered in 2014 than in the last year of George W Bush’s administration. Crime experts also cautioned that a single-year uptick was not a trend.

1,500 more dead bodies = gaining back a couple of pounds.It’s almost as if something happened in a suburb of St. Louis in August 2014 that set off the current rise in murder …Remember when Stephen Jay Gould was always denouncing “reification?” Notice how “violent crime” has become reified into this overwhelming force that keeps affecting blacks.The murder spike may have started as early as August 2014 in a few places, according to Carl Bialik’s groundbreaking study in FiveThirtyEight a year ago. More definitively, its continuing in 2016 with the liberal Brennan Center projecting a 31.5% increase in the murder rate for 2016 over 2014 in the 30 largest cities.The murder wave generally isn’t happening in towns with small towns with one murder in 2014, it’s largely happening in big black cities with BLM protests like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. For example, with the Freddie Gray BLM riots happening in Baltimore in early 2015, the number of homicides in Baltimore increased from 211 in 2014 to 344 in 2015.Following the rise to prominence, with Administration, media, and NGO sponsorship, of the Black Lives Matter movement after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson in August 2014.But we’re now 26 months out from Ferguson and it looks like a 2 year trend.

Okay, here’s a prediction I’ll make: I bet homicides will be up in Charlotte in the year following the BLM riot versus the year preceding.

Even Heather Mac Donald, a conservative crime analyst who saluted Trump’s “law and order” focus, said in July that it was inaccurate to blame federal crime policy for murder increases. In general, the president and the federal government have very little power to determine the country’s response to crime and violence.

The country has 18,000 local law enforcement agencies of different kinds, including more than 12,000 local police departments, which are largely independent from federal control. Most power to determine crime policy is in the hands of state legislators, and local mayors, police chiefs and prosecutors. Trump and Clinton have outlined competing visions of violence prevention, with Trump touting a tough-on-crime approach, and Clinton focusing on the need to reform police treatment of black Americans and reduce gun violence through tougher gun control laws. These contrasting views have symbolic importance, but neither Trump nor Clinton would have much direct influence, as president, over how cities and states address violence. The justice department can use federal funding as a carrot or stick for local departments to adopt different policies, but this is a fairly limited tool for pushing top-down changes.

The feds have a lot of power through the courts and through NGOs like the ACLU to undercut local cops, as is happening in Chicago.It seem to be pretty effective at pushing more dead bodies: 1500.